Rethinking Global Science Engagement: Africa's Opportunities in the Collaboration Era

The need for a new approach to science, technology, and innovation (STI) collaboration between developing and developed countries has never been greater: STI collaborations often exclude scholars in the poorest countries. A widening STI gap separates the rich and poor globally. Collaborations that solve STI challenges straddling geographic, disciplinary, and institutional divides offer hope. The rise of silo-smashing, multi-disciplinary research is changing the structure of and financing models for contemporary science. Universities, companies, and governments are realizing the higher return on investment that collaborative science can render. In response to these trends, the Global Knowledge Initiative devised a new model for collaborative innovation. With it, researchers and non-researchers alike can forge, optimize, and sustain knowledge partnerships between the people and institutions of higher education and research. This three-phase model promises greater impact through partnership and is manifest in pilot projects across East and Southern Africa, Asia, and the US. First, we help people locate critical resources required for scientific research, teaching, and innovation to address developing country-based challenges. These efforts entail context analysis at three levels. Specifically, we map the “genome” of a given challenge at the national, sectoral, and institutional levels. The result is a detailed “challenge map”, derived in part from a new methodology to track critical STI resources (i.e., resources that may be human, institutional, technological, collaboration-based or knowledge-based). Second, we enable partners to collaborate through competitions, trainings, and capacity building initiatives such that a clear process for collaborative innovation is learned and mastered. Researchers from 22 countries have participated in these trainings. Finally, we connect resource seekers together with the global network of problem solvers to bring solutions to scale. The insights this new model reveals are several, among them: (1) decomposing challenges to delineate the contributions required of various actors is an essential step toward tackling multi-disciplinary challenges; (2) without clarifying the policy, cultural, and market contexts in which proposed “STI solutions” are intended, researchers' efforts are relegated to the lab, and (3) marrying process expertise with content expertise is essential for multi-disciplinary teams to implement durable solutions to development challenges.