Education Research Productivity in Africa: What do we know?

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Funding education research in Africa: How equitable and inclusive are the approaches?

Proposal

The educational challenges facing Africa have attracted increased attention from stakeholders including researchers, policymakers, funders and practitioners. While access has improved, millions of children leave school without acquiring functional literacy or numeracy. There are inequitable learning outcomes, with poverty, gender, disability consistently linked to educational disadvantage.
Addressing these challenges requires evidence generated from Africa that considers the socio-cultural contexts to inform educational policy and practice. Although African researchers’ understanding of local systems and challenges means that they are well-placed to help ensure that evidence informs local investment, policy, and practice, they often remain an untapped resource within local knowledge ecosystems. To contribute to the visibility and use of education research evidence from Africa, the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) centre at the University of Cambridge in partnership with Education Sub Saharan Africa (ESSA) developed the Education Research Database. It has over 5000 peer-reviewed journal publications focusing on sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) with at least one of the authors based in the region. This paper draws on analyses of publications on the database published between 2010 and 2021. It aims to shed light on issues around the volume of publications over the period under consideration, themes that researchers are addressing, level of education receiving most/least attention, as well as quality (impact factor used as a proxy for quality) of the papers. Additionally, it explores how researchers are funding their work, who they are collaborating with and how equitable is knowledge production in terms of gender. The findings suggest a significant increase in the research output from SSA in the period under consideration, but female researchers are heavily underrepresented. Also, researchers are collaborating less with those from SSA, and getting less funding for their work (most researchers using personal funding). The paper recommends practical ways that stakeholders, especially funders can better serve the needs of African education researchers. This will ensure equitable research production that provides relevant evidence to educational outcomes for children in the region.

This paper also presents perspectives on research productivity and funding from an Africa based education researcher. Conducting education research is an exciting activity that calls for working with children, teachers, parents, communities, decision makers, and partners. Armed with a relevant PhD, a young education researcher quickly immerses him or herself into a myriad of research designs that hopefully would generate the much needed evidence. Little does one know what lays ahead. While living their dream (conducting education research) is motivating and fulfilling, meeting requirements for job promotion and/or delivery of agreed performance targets is a common driver in most HEI. Conducting research in Africa also comes with many challenges. The researcher also faces inadequate mentorship, funding and other critical skills such as scientific writing, and competition with peers from both the south and the north. The paper explores the implications of some of these challenges and how they drive African researchers to be ‘data collector’.

Authors

• Nompumelelo L Mohohlwane, Department of Basic Education

• Samuel Asare, Education Sub-Saharan Africa