Rethinking higher education: What Open Access can mean for Africa. | Bokamoso Leadership Forum

"The significance of open access for Africa cannot be overstated. Recent available data reveals that only about 27,000 articles are published from the continent per annum—an equivalent to the Kingdom of Norway. Similarly, Africa’s research output has declined by over 30 percent from its peak in the late 80s to less than 1 percent of total global research at the start of this decade. To put it plainly, research output from Africa is negligible. There is a confluence of factors behind such a marked decrease in research output, not least being the low wages paid to professors, the increasingly large number of students per classroom in public universities, and the general neglect of the tertiary sector by policy makers. As a result, while Africa might be “rising,” a failure to improve research, promote and encourage publishing at its institutions of higher learning could place a ceiling to its level of development. Poorly paid professors, when not engaged in other income generating activities are overwhelmed by the large sizes of their lecture halls, making it difficult to provide mentorship or encourage students to think beyond the classroom. Since 1970, student populations in institutions of higher learning have grown from about 200,000 to over four million in 2007 – a growth rate of over 8 percent per year, and twice the global average. This trend is likely to continue given Africa’s demographic pattern. With marginal support from national governments, external financing accounts for over 70 percent of research funding. These donors inevitably determine what knowledge is generated in Africa and (most importantly) where it is published or disseminated. Further, because of the nature of academic publishing, African researchers fortunate enough to secure funding for their programs would rather publish in international journals as they have better reputations and generally higher impact factors. The resulting effect is a virtual brain drain. African professors, struggling for earnings, have little time to conduct research, and the little research that is done gets sent overseas for publishing where—because of prohibitive access costs—it remains, enhancing foreign scholarly communities. Local research output remains low and African students remain uninformed. It does not have to be this way...  I have founded Hadithi—an online open access research library for African students. At Hadithi, we curate and aggregate open access research from institutional repositories worldwide..."