By Soniia David
Recently, the concept of decolonisation has been used in a variety of contexts. There have been calls to decolonise academia and knowledge creation, toppling of statues of British imperialists and, lastly, calls to decolonise the aid sector and global health system in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. While decolonisation has been used as a metaphor for progressive change in many areas, it specifically means challenging and removing the power structure imbalances left by colonial legacies rooted in white, Eurocentric concepts of superiority. Relatively little attention has been paid to how colonisation and the post-colonial experience affects research for Development.
Research for development (R4D) is defined as research that seeks to find solutions to poverty and bring about social, economic and political development in the Global South. Distinct from academic, theoretical or basic research, R4D applies a problem and solution-oriented approach to generate new insights and innovations (e.g., new technologies, processes, ways of organising) to reduce poverty and translate those research results into policy and practice. With its focus on problem-solving, R4D is carried out in a wide range of critical sectors, including health; agriculture; water, sanitation and hygiene; natural resource management; and nutrition. It often takes a multidisciplinary approach, involving technical and social Researchers.
Research for development should not be confused with research and development (R&D), which is more closely associated with science and technology, although R4D and R&D are usually grouped together in official statistics. Focusing mainly on the agriculture and health sectors in Africa, this article discusses who determines the R4D agenda, who carries out R4D, who publishes the findings, and what can be done to strengthen ownership of knowledge production, dissemination and management by organisations in the Global South.
Who determines the R4D agenda and who funds research?
During the colonial period, which extended into the second half of the twentieth century, research agendas and priorities in colonised territories were determined by colonial powers through the establishment of research institutions and bodies. For example, the British colonial government set up the East African Agriculture and Forestry Research Organisation (1951), the Tea Research Institute of East Africa (1951), the West African Cocoa Research Institute (1944), and the West African Rice Research Institute (1954). Research priorities were designed to meet the needs of the colonial power and research funding came from the colonies. Following decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s, development research was taken up by national research organisations. Today, the main R4D actors are national and international research organisations, NGOs and, to a lesser extent, private sector actors.
The late 1980s and onwards was characterised by the emergence and growth of regional and subregional organisations, a development designed to foster greater control over the research agenda by institutions in the Global South. In the health sector, the West African Health Organisation (WAHO) was created in 1987 as a specialised institution of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and has a mandate to promote and coordinate health research in the West African subregion. Similarly, three sub-regional organisations in Africa — the Centre for Coordination of Agricultural Research and Development for Southern Africa (CCARDESA), the West and Central African Council for Agricultural Research and Development (CORAF/WECARD), and the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa (ASARECA) — together with the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) promote and support regional research and drive supranational agricultural research agendas in priority areas. Notably, these subregional and regional research organisations are highly dependent on funding from Western donors.
So, who sets the R4D agenda?
Across sectors, the R4D agenda tends to be driven by Western donors and investors and led by experts from the Global North in service of their own interests. The CGIAR Science Council, which consists of 15 representatives of CGIAR’s funders and 5 representatives of developing country representatives, is a clear example of the dominant role funders play in setting the R4D agenda. Western dominance in R4D is captured in the mission statement of organisations like the UK-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI), an independent global think tank: “We lead [emphasis added] thinking and agendas to deliver transformational change and bring back a global sense of resilient, just and equitable prosperity” (https://odi.org/en/about/).
Whose research is it anyway?
A largely externally driven and funded R4D agenda creates multiple distortions in the research environment in LMICs. A high dependence on external sources of funding tends to promote “safari or parachute research,” whereby foreign researchers who know little or nothing about the local context fly in to conduct a study and fly out with the data. Many LMICs do not require foreign researchers to obtain research authorisation, making it difficult to ensure that externally initiated research aligns with national research priorities, is conducted in collaboration with local researchers and that results are disseminated locally. Even where researchers from the Global North based in the Global South collaborate with local researchers, such ventures are often not truly collaborative due to the power asymmetry that stems from the organisation that controls the funding deciding the research priorities. In many countries, a dual research stream exists consisting of donor-funded projects led by international institutions (research organisations, NGOs, private sector actors) and activities and projects led by national research organisations, with the two streams often not well integrated or coordinated.
Travel restrictions caused by disease outbreaks or conflicts have given rise to a new phenomenon whereby researchers in the Global North “collaborate” with local researchers to carry out “their” research remotely (Sibai et al., 2019). In these situations where research is initiated from outside, control over the research topic, design, data analysis and publication remain largely in the hands of foreign researchers, with minimal input provided by local researchers.
The issue of the target audience is important but often not consciously acknowledged by researchers. Abimbola (2019) argues that the target audience of researchers (what he calls the “gaze,” commonly referred to as the lens) and the position or standpoint from which they write (what he calls the “pose,” also known as the perspective) shapes the content, emphasis, style and framing of the research topic in important ways. A foreign gaze and pose, therefore, refers to research designed, conducted and published with a foreign audience in mind. Abimbola describes three situations that show how gaze and pose influence the way research is conducted in the Global South:
- Foreign experts who write about local issues fail to acknowledge that other foreign experts are their main audience.
- Foreign experts who write for an audience of local experts fail to acknowledge the limitations of their own knowledge about local realities.
- Local experts who write for a foreign audience fail to acknowledge how this audience influences what they study and write.
Pondering the question, “what if the foreign gaze is corrupting?” in the context of global health research, Abimbola (2019) concludes that “the foreign gaze is inevitable. In a globalising world, our destinies are interlinked, and the origins of and solutions to delivery problems in global health can be local or foreign” (p. 4). He calls for more and open conversation on the place of the foreign gaze and local knowledge in research in the Global South. This discussion shows that the issue of research ownership goes beyond authorship and calls for researchers to explore ways of publishing and sharing results to represent different perspectives and target different audiences.
Who publishes?
There has been much discussion about imbalances between researchers in the Global North and South in the authorship of peer reviewed publications. According to a study by Mbaye et al. (2019), African authors are highly under-represented as first and last authors in studies conducted on HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, salmonellosis, Ebola and Buruli ulcer in Africa. A recent review of health research in Africa found that where any coauthors were from the USA, Canada or Europe, the overall representation of African authors dropped, particularly in the prime first and last author positions (Hedt-Gauthier et al., 2019). With regard to journal editors, who are the gatekeepers of what is published, Bhaumik and Jagnoor (2019) found that 60% of editors of 27 global health journals were men and 70% were based in high-income countries. As researchers from LMICs often have less research experience and capacity compared to their colleagues in high-income countries, and less access to research funds and the latest academic literature, their opportunity to publish, particularly in prestigious international journals, is often limited. Another issue that limits the voice of LMIC researchers is their under-representation at global conferences, which are important platforms for knowledge sharing, networking, decision-making and professional growth. A recent paper (Velin et al., 2021) documented this phenomenon, attributing it to prohibitive travel costs, problems obtaining visas and lower acceptance rates for research presentations from the Global South.
What can be done to redress global inequalities in R4D?
Reflecting the colonial legacy, R4D continues to be dominated by Western interests and institutions, which set research agendas, control funding and decide what is published. Inevitably, the research environment remains tilted in favour of researchers from high-income countries. While broad structural transformations will be needed to redress asymmetrical power relations between the Global North and South and reconfigure the role of external researchers as allies, the following actions can make a difference:
- Governments in the Global South should create their own vision, strategies and priorities for national development and invest in research across all sectors that support their development goals. Rwanda and Ethiopia stand out as role models in this area. Without a clear vision for overall national development and evidence-based strategies in place to achieve that vision, governments and national research institutions will remain easily swayed by the research agendas of financially endowed external actors.
- Governments in the Global South should adopt new and innovative ways to fund R4D using domestically available resources. For example, this might take the form of levies on agricultural production and export commodities.
- An R4D culture should be developed in LMICs by including it in secondary and post-secondary education curricula and promoting student mentoring in this area.
- Governments in the Global South should develop the capacity of young local researchers; all donor-funded research projects should include research internships.
- Organisers and funders of international research conferences should develop guidelines aimed at increasing diversity (i.e., include more researchers from LMICs and more women researchers) and inclusion (i.e., ensure the voices of said researchers are heard). The experience of hosting virtual conferences during the COVID-19 pandemic has shown this to be one way of achieving these aims.
- The research publishing system based in the Global North which is dominated by large for-profit publishers should carry out reforms to ensure research findings are openly and widely accessible.
Finally, the international development community should avoid using the term “decolonisation” to refer to changes that need to be made in the R4D field. This latest buzzword has been met with mixed feelings and outright opposition by some because it trivialises the very serious transformative work that must be led and carried out by researchers and policymakers from the Global South. As Iyer (2020) argues, let us not “colonise the decolonisation process.”
References
- Abimbola, S. (2019). The foreign gaze: authorship in academic global health. BMJ Global Health, 4(5), e002068. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2019-002068.
- Benin, S., McBride, L., & Mogues, T. (2016). Why do African countries underinvest in agricultural R&D? In J. Lynam, N. Beintema, J. Roseboom, & O. Badiane (Eds.), Agricultural research in Africa: Investing in future harvests (pp. 109–138). International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). http://doi.org/10.2499/9780896292123.
- Bhaumik S., & Jagnoor, J. (2019). Diversity in the editorial boards of global health journals. BMJ Global Health, 4(5), e001909. http://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2019-001909.
- Hedt-Gauthier, B., Jeufack, H.M., Neufeld, N., Alem, A., Sauer, S., Odhiambo, J., Boum, Y., Shuchman, M., & Volmink, J. (2019). Stuck in the middle: a systematic review of authorship in collaborative health research in Africa, 2014–2016. BMJ Global Health, 4(5), e001853. http://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2019-001853.
- Iyer, P. (2020). Do not colonize decolonization. The Peace Chronicle (Summer 2020). https://www.peacejusticestudies.org/chronicle/do-not-colonize-decolonization/.
- Mbaye, R., Gebeyehu, R., Hossmann, S., Mbarga, N., Bih-Neh, E., Eteki, L., Thelma, O-A., Oyerinde, A., Kiti, G., Mburu, Y., Haberer, J., Siedner, M., Okeke, I., & Boum, Y. (2019). Who is telling the story? A systematic review of authorship for infectious disease research conducted in Africa, 1980–2016. BMJ Global Health, 4(5), e001855. http://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2019-001855.
- Mukiibi, J., & Youdiowei, A. (2006). Agricultural research delivery in Africa: an assessment of the requirements for efficient, effective, and productive agricultural research systems in Africa. Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa.
- Roseboom, J., & Flaherty, K. (2016). The evolution of agricultural research in Africa: Key trends in institutional developments. In J. Lynam, N. Beintema, J. Roseboom, & O. Badiane (Eds.), Agricultural research in Africa: Investing in future harvests (pp. 31–58). International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). http://doi.org/10.2499/9780896292123.
- Sibai, A.M., Rizk, A., Coutts, A.P., Monzer, G., Daoud, A., Sullivan, R., Roberts, B., Meho, L.I., Fouad, F.M., & DeJong, J. (2019). North–South inequities in research collaboration in humanitarian and conflict contexts. Lancet, 394(10209), 1597–1600. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(19)32482-1.
- Stads, G-J., Pratt, A., Omot, N., & Thi Pham, N. (2020). Agricultural research in Southeast Asia: A cross-country analysis of resource allocation, performance, and impact on productivity. International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); and Asia–Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions. https://doi.org/10.2499/p15738coll2.134063.
- Velin, L., Lartigue, J-W., Johnson, S.A., Zorigtbaatar, A., Kanmounye, U.S., Truche, P., & Joseph, M.N. (2021). Conference equity in global health: a systematic review of factors impacting LMIC representation at global health conferences. BMJ Global Health, 6(1), e003455. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2020-003455.
About the author
Soniia (Sonii) David is a U.S.-based Liberian rural sociologist with extensive experience in agricultural research for development. At Includovate, her work focuses on conducting gender analyses, particularly in agricultural value chains; conducting mixed methods research; writing research reports and mentoring junior researchers. Before joining Includovate, Sonii held senior positions with several international organisations, including the FAO, Helen Keller International and 3 CGIAR centres. Her research areas included intrahousehold decision-making, women’s economic empowerment, reforming rural advisory services, seed systems, and measuring the adoption and impact of agricultural technologies. Sonii holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States.
Includovate is a feminist research incubator that “walks the talk”. Includovate is an Australian social enterprise consisting of a consulting firm and research incubator that designs solutions for gender equality and social inclusion. Its mission is to incubate transformative and inclusive solutions for measuring, studying, and changing discriminatory norms that lead to poverty, inequality, and injustice. To know more about us at Includovate, follow our social media: @includovate, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram.
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