African Scientists on the Rise
by Alan Anderson
In Africa, Investments in Leadership Transform Lives and Careers
As more African nations emerge from post-colonial turmoil, most of their leaders have agreed on the importance of strengthening their own science, technology and innovation capacity. As in other societies around the world, such capacity is rooted in the knowledge embodied in universities and their students, faculty and graduates who use and disseminate this knowledge to develop food security and innovate ways of increasing food production, as well as energy resources, public health skills, and economic growth.
For many years, the universities of Africa have struggled to maintain, let alone increase, their ability to provide quality education and training in science and technology-related areas. Among the many challenges are the scarcity of public funding for graduate study, the shortages of incoming doctorate-level faculty, the small number of scholars in any given field, and pervasive lack of even basic laboratories and lab equipment.
For over a decade, Carnegie Corporation of New York has been involved in working to strengthen a number of African universities in selected sub-Saharan countries. However, the Corporation also believes in the capacity of individuals, given support, training and opportunity, to help bring about not only institutional change but also contribute to national development. For example, in 2007, the Corporation joined with the Science Initiative Group based at the Institute for Advanced Study to explore these challenges. The Science Initiative Group, an international team of scientific leaders and supporters dedicated to fostering science in developing countries, proposed the creation of the Regional Initiative for Science and Education (RISE) to support capacity building through regional networks of universities.1 The emphasis in this initiative, though focused on university collaborations, is on the end product: furthering the ability of talented men and women to advance in the science and technology fields by helping postgraduate students and faculty to gain increased access to colleagues, mentors, instrumentation and the team-level research habits on which modern scholarship is based. In addition, RISE has emphasized participation by African women who have long been underrepresented in the sciences.
A few of the people who have benefitted from the work of RISE are profiled in this article but so are two other individuals: Lillian Tibatemwa, a leading role model for women in academia and Bridget Omafuvbe, a professor of microbiology, both of whom received funding from Carnegie Corporation to attend leadership programs that strengthened their ability to network with colleagues and set their own course for their careers.
From the sampling of experiences in these pages, it is clear that even small programs, if carefully targeted, have the potential to transform both lives and careers. But even more, each individual who has the advantage of participating in science, technology and leadership training also has the potential to act as a mentor to their colleagues and to provide incentives for others to make their own contributions to science, technology, and innovation capacity in Africa—and that may be the most impactful benefit of all.
1 The regional networks created by RISE are: AMSEN: African Materials Science and Engineering Network; AFNNET: African Natural Products Network; SABINA: Southern African Biochemistry and Informatics for Natural Products; SSAWRN: Sub-Saharan Africa Water Resources Network; WIO-RISE: Western Indian Ocean Regional Initiative
Alan H. Anderson, Research and Editorial Consultant for the Science Initiative Group (SIG) of the Institute for Advanced Study, has worked for SIG since its inception. He also works for other organizations, including the National Academy of Sciences, where he has written reports on science policy, science education, science and the law, and other topics. He has worked in science and medical journalism for over 25 years, serving as a reporter, writer, and foreign correspondent at Time magazine, Saturday Review, Psychology Today, and other publications; edited several newspapers; and written or edited five books on scientific topics. He holds a BA in English from Yale University and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University.
