Global challenges, local knowledge - Focus on Africa - Research Information

"In recent months, environmental scientists and policymakers in Kenya have been sharing expertise on climate change in light of the recent Kenya Climate Change Bill. These discussions, organised by the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACT) with funding from the INASP-led VakaYiko programme, highlight how local research can affect local policy in Africa. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has said that ‘climate change poses challenges for the least-developed countries and vulnerable communities, given their limited ability to cope. People who are socially, economically, culturally, politically, institutionally, or otherwise marginalised are especially vulnerable to climate change.’ As the international responses to climate change continues to be debated in global summits, the Kenyan roundtables,  and work in the country to enable policymakers to shadow researchers, reveal a search for evidence to inform a country’s response. Such evidence comes from local scientists, as well as those elsewhere in the world. Searches in the African Journals Online (AJOL) platform – a collection of over 500 African journals on diverse topics – reveal hundreds of articles on climate science and the environment published by African scientists in the past year alone. It’s not just climate change. Across the continent there is plenty of research affecting local people: into issues such as agriculture, AIDS, youth unemployment and Ebola. There is also a move, supported by INASP and others, to connect research with local policymakers ... 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 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 ..."