This article first appeared on University World News
There is a comforting fable about research in Africa. It begins with a noble problem and ends with a grant. On the way, there are workshops, outcomes, a glossy report, and a group photograph of project partners looking suitably visionary in matching lanyards.
The story is tidy because the budget is tidy. But the tidy story hides an untidy reality: the scarcity of domestic research funding has produced a quiet regime of dependency in which knowledge is rented, answers are imported, and capacity is defined as the ability to comply.
We tend to describe the problem as a shortage: not enough grants, not enough labs, not enough scholarships. That is true, but also misleading. The deeper issue is that limited local grants change the very form of knowledge production.
When the financial oxygen in a system arrives mainly from outside, the system learns to breathe to someone else’s rhythm. Research questions realign with donor priorities. Timelines conform to fiscal years in other countries. Methods are selected for auditability.
What is rewarded is not curiosity, but deliverability. It is a subtle shift, polite in tone, yet devastating in effect: we move from research as a public good to research as a project, from institutions that generate knowledge to institutions that host it.
The funding cycle
Under these conditions, the university becomes a staging ground. Scholars do not lead; they implement. Laboratories become venues for methodological tourism – teams flying in to ‘do’ randomised control trials on farmers who will be re-interviewed next season by a different project with a different logo.
Data are captured, shipped, and stored on servers that are easier to reach by submarine cable than by bus. Authorship is negotiated like real estate; local names appear in the middle of the byline, comfortable but peripheral.
Intellectual property recognises the source of funding more reliably than the site of discovery. Everyone is polite. Everyone is complicit.
Time does its own work in this arrangement. Grants are short; problems are long. Climate adaptation, antibiotic resistance, language preservation – none of these respects a 24-month call cycle.
Yet, our teams are assembled and disassembled on precisely that rhythm. We purchase equipment in a hurry and then discover that maintenance was a line item that did not survive the budget review.
We hire bright young assistants whose contracts lapse with the project; they leave, taking their tacit knowledge with them. A history of ‘almosts’ accumulates: the prototype that almost became a product, the dataset that almost became a national asset, the lab that almost became a centre of excellence.
The stop-start cadence is not a bug; it is a consequence of funding designed to reassure financiers that nothing will last long enough to surprise them.
It is tempting to respond with more optimism than analysis. We speak of ‘leveraging partnerships’ and ‘aligning with strategic priorities’.
We host launch events for programmes whose exit strategies are more elaborate than their entry strategies. Meanwhile, the real arithmetic is taking place elsewhere. Without core funding, principal investigators become full-time grant chasers.
The research office expands, as it must, into a compliance factory. The ratio of admin to insight grows. A curriculum vitae that lists many projects begins to look suspiciously like a bag packed for perpetual travel. The system rewards movement. It also rewards the appearance of relevance over its practice.
Politics
I have not yet mentioned politics. Perhaps because it is a background hum, always present, rarely decisive in a single moment and, therefore, everywhere.
When universities cannot count on multi-year public funding, they are pushed into patronage with a smile.
Favoured units find patrons; unfavoured ones learn to be grateful for small mercies. Leadership turns over with the minister, and long-term agendas are re-branded as fresh starts.
The simplest acts of research – procurement, travel, paying a research assistant – acquire rites of passage that would impress a medieval guild. Under these conditions, donors are not a problem. They are a symptom of governance failure.
But the cure, taken long enough, becomes a new illness: a dependence so routine that it feels like design.
How to own our future
What, then, would it mean to fund research if we wanted to own our future rather than rent it?
First, predictability is more important than generosity. A modest, multi-year domestic fund that arrives on schedule will build more capacity than a spectacular call that dissolves after a change of cabinet.
When institutions can plan, they can hire. When they can hire, they can mentor. When they can mentor, they can reproduce themselves. Time, here, is a currency with compound interest. The opposite is also true.
Second, we have to decide what counts as research worth paying for. The category must be wider than the projects we can easily count. It must include the slow work on which fast breakthroughs depend: instrument maintenance, field sites that persist long enough for phenomena to appear, data curation that outlives a student’s graduation, replication that tests whether a result is robust enough to guide policy. We celebrate novelty and neglect reliability. It is a curious way to build a house.
Third, we need to change the relationship between international money and local leadership. The usual defence is that “he who pays the piper calls the tune”. But even pipers accept joint commissions.
Solving Africa’s problems
Programmes involving African problems should require African institutions to lead them. This is not chauvinism; it is risk management. Leadership distributes accountability where the consequences of failure actually land. It also encourages the design of methods and metrics that reflect context rather than the aesthetics of distant reviewers.
If all this sounds like a demand for sovereignty, it is. Not the ornamental kind, which confers the right to host conferences about sovereignty, but the practical kind, which funds the mundane.
We cannot continue to rent microscopes and call it capacity. We cannot store our data in clouds we cannot reach during an outage and call it sovereignty. We cannot celebrate ‘local solutions’ whose licences are held in Delaware and call it development.
A detour through artificial intelligence (AI) clarifies the stakes. AI promises to accelerate research where compute, data, and talent are co-located.
If the compute sits abroad and the data are governed elsewhere, African universities will find themselves casting well-written prompts into a world that owns the answers.
If, however, we invest in regional compute cooperatives and data commons anchored in African problems – soil health, disease variants, multilingual corpora – then the most interesting questions will increasingly be answerable here.
Researchers go where the questions are hard and solvable. It is our job to make that location increasingly domestic.
Industry partnerships
‘Industry partnerships’ is another slogan that requires translation. When done well, they are not a philanthropic adjunct to a university’s real work, but part of it.
Public problem-solving, electric grids that survive heatwaves, logistics that feed cities, clinics that manage data, sits on the boundary between research and practice.
Boundary organisations deserve funding precisely because they prevent capture: they are designed to say no, to insist on methods and on publication, to be as comfortable in a peer review as in a boardroom. Without such brokers, industry money becomes advertising and the university becomes a showroom.
There is also the question of how we know whether we are improving. We adore indicators and are punished by them. Counting publications is a neat trick that reveals more about publishing markets than about knowledge creation.
Counting grants reveals more about generosity than about judgment. Perhaps we could try measures that respect temporal depth: doctoral completion rates in labs, the survival of teams across funding cycles, the median time to repair essential instruments, the percentage of datasets that are documented, archived and reused.
These are the boring numbers that make science possible. They are not likely to go viral. That is their charm.
A university’s internal economy
All of this will fail if we ignore the internal economy of the university. If promotions reward papers alone, then course redesign and lab stewardship become acts of charity.
If budgets reward the unit that attracts the largest donor rather than the one that builds reproducible knowledge, it is only rational to optimise for donors.
If maintenance budgets are the first to be cut, what we are cutting is tomorrow’s experiment. We can change these incentives. They are not laws of nature; they are decisions disguised as routines.
The world does not colonise our research. It offers to fund it when we will not, and then behaves predictably with the leverage we hand over.
If we want different outcomes, we need different inputs. The good news is that building a competent research system does not require miracles. It requires the courage to fund the dull things for a long time. It requires leaders who protect predictable processes from theatrical interference. It requires partnerships that are contracts, not slogans.
A final image may help. We often imagine research as a lightbulb: brilliance switched on by a clever idea and a well-timed grant. But the better metaphor is irrigation. You do not grow fields by sponsoring thunderstorms. You build canals. You maintain them when no one is watching.
You accept that the harvest is a function of regularity, not spectacle. We have been living under a weather pattern we do not control, grateful for rain when it arrives and surprised when the ground cracks. It is time to build the canals.
If we do, something unobtrusive will begin to change. Methods will accumulate in laboratories rather than in CVs. Questions will be asked that make sense in Kisumu and Kitwe without footnotes to Boston.
Students will join teams that exist long enough for them to become mentors. Donors will still be welcome, and they will still be useful. But they will no longer be architects of our agenda. We will have exchanged the economy of borrowed answers for the practice of sustained inquiry.
And, in that slow practice, where time is allowed to compound, a continent’s knowledge will stop leaking and start pooling – quietly at first, then with a force that looks, from a distance, like inevitability.