Research Information:FOCUS ON AFRICA
and number of universities across the continent. Interest in collaboration from universities in other parts of the world has also boomed, leading to more partnerships and investment in continental, regional and national organisations. There are challenges: universal primary education and an expanding middle class have led to a surge in undergraduate numbers. Higher- education capacity is feeling the strain.
Transforming access
One change in recent decades is access to published research. From the early days of online journals, access initiatives like INASP, Research4Life and EIFL have been working with scholarly publishers and helping researchers in
INASP in a nutshell
INASP has been supporting researchers in countries across Africa since 1992. INASP negotiates – and trains library consortia to negotiate – for free or low-cost access to scholarly journals and other resources. INASP also supports local publishing in a range of ways. The African Journals Online platform was founded by INASP in 1998 but has been independently run from South Africa since 2005 and now hosts over 500 African journals. The AuthorAID community includes 4,300 researchers from across Africa. INASP’s evidence- informed policy making team leads the VakaYiko consortium, which is training and supporting policymakers in their use of research materials, with a particular focus on Ghana, Zimbabwe and South Africa.
The Publishers for Development conference brought together publishers, librarians and researchers
low- and middle-income countries to access the same materials as researchers elsewhere. Today, libraries across sub-Saharan Africa, have access to up to 50,000 online journals and 20,000 e-books through INASP’s partnerships with national library consortia or digital library programmes. They also have 45,000 titles via Research4Life and other schemes and an increasing quantity of open-access resources. Joel Sam, director of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research-Institute for Scientific and Technological Information in Ghana, told delegates at the recent Publishers for Development conference: ‘Access to current and up-to-date information for research scientists used to be an issue in Ghana. However, since the mid-2000s, these issues have receded as a result of partnerships with international-development agencies such as INASP. With more electronic resources being available and accessible to research scientists and lecturers, they have improved their teaching, learning and research.’
Alongside the provision of access has come training in how to manage digital access within the library, how to support users to search and find what they need and how to communicate to their researchers what resources are available to them.
There is also work to strengthen communication of research. INASP is involved in strengthening African
publishing as well as supporting
researchers to develop their research writing skills through our AuthorAID project (see box: Mentoring support aids mental health research).
Global pursuit, local challenges Research is a global pursuit and researchers share many common challenges. However, there are also many differences: the economic situation, political stability and the existence or otherwise of a strong research culture. There is also pressure for research to contribute to local social and economic needs.
There are technical issues too. Bandwidth into developing countries has increased significantly but poorly configured networks means this doesn’t always reach the desktop. Another issue
Another issue is intermittent electricity supply and network outage
is intermittent electricity supply and network outage, which can be a frequent occurrence. Such things are well known and can perhaps be anticipated. More hidden – but more dangerous – are inherent biases in the system.
These include established metrics. A look at the journals included in something like the Journal Citation Report (JCR) might conclude that there are relatively few journals in Africa. A look at the numbers of titles on the AJOL platform – over 500 today – would refute that. The problem can be self-perpetuating; inclusion in things like the JCR and the recognition of quality that it brings comes from citations in journals that are already
Elizabeth Michael Msoka studies gender issues
in Tanzania. She lists her main challenges: l Inadequate support and cooperation from respondents: some respondents perceive the idea of being interviewed as disastrous so sometimes they request to be paid in order to participate in the interview;
l Openness and transparency of respondents: some respondents, particularly women, are reluctant to respond to all or some of the questions. I think this problem is attributed to social cultural practices in some communities in my country where by a woman is not allowed to provide family information unless she get a permission from her husband;
18 Research Information AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2015
l Funds for conducting research: only small amounts of funding is allocated by government and other institutions for research therefore very little research is conducted in my country compared to other countries; and
l Lack of access to up-to-date literature. This is partly due to poor internet access. ‘My plan for the future is to continue teaching gender-related courses, as well as conducting research in the areas of gender and small business development. I believe that addressing gender issues and promoting female entrepreneurship in a poor country like Tanzania is crucial in the fight against poverty.’
Hannah Oduro Obeng is a research scientist and nutritionist at the CSIR-Food Research Institute, Accra, Ghana, researching maternal and infant nutrition. ‘My research basically focuses on maternal and child nutrition, micronutrient fortification of staple foods and food product development. I also conduct nutrition and impact assessment studies. ‘With this line of research I hope to be able to impact positively on maternal and child undernutrition in Ghana using food products that are developed to be enriched with micronutrients. I believe using locally available food sources rich in these micronutrients will go a long way to curb
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