Presidents, academy heads and policymakers chart ambitious way forward to bolster funding outlook 

African science leaders and politicians gathering in Ghana last week called for new partnerships with the G20 bloc of emerging nations and urged the global community to co-finance a new African Science and Innovation Fund. 

Delegates—which included some past and current presidents—attending the African Research Initiative for Scientific Excellence (ARISE) High-Level Meeting, used the 3-4 July meeting in Ghana’s capital, Accra, organised by the African Academy of Sciences, to discuss ways to bolster resources for science and innovation on the continent. 

The delegates called on African Union member states to raise their R&D investments to 1 per cent of GDP by 2030 and to ringfence at least 30 per cent of their national science budgets for early career researchers. 

They also called on the G20, which is chaired by an African country for the first time this year, to invest in African science through blended finance instruments and concessional technology-transfer facilities. 

‘A new model’ 

The gathered academy presidents, politicians, scientists and development partners also backed the long-planned launch of an African Science and Innovation Fund pooling resources from governments, philanthropists, development partners and the private sector. Such a fund has been an element of African Union science policies for the past two decades; however it has not materialised to date. 

The meeting heard that ARISE, an early career research funding programme run by the African Academy of Sciences since late 2020, with funding from the European Union and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, is a model for how the fund might work. 

Read full article on Research Professional News 

Original article written by Sibusiso Biyela and published in Research Professional News.