It is useful to take a deep dive into what we know about the effects on science and research of the ‘structural adjustment’ programs associated with the Bretton Woods institutions in the 1980s.
While this is a long time ago, the effects reverberate today while also informing us about how the future might play out and what policy space might, in principle, be available to us.
The broad brush story is obviously that structural adjustment was bad for science and research. That is to say, science and technology programs were damaged by it. Some had been painstakingly built-up against the odds after independence. Others were proposed for the future but had not yet been executed.(1)
In 1980, there appear to have been competing plans for economic strategy on the African continent that would have significant implications for science (although, as often the case, science and research was probably not always at the forefront of most accounts).
One of the most-extensively documented of these proposals, the Lagos Plan of Action was formulated in 1980 by the Nigerian economist, Prof. Adebayo Adedeji, and his team. It was widely accepted by the member states of what was then the Organization for African Unity (OAU).
The core concept was continent-wide economic integration and industrial development with ‘permanent financing’ of relevant science and technology institutions at a level of 1% of GDP (p. 52) with a view to ‘activating’ that process of change over ‘the next decades’ (p. 44).
The plan called for all the OAU member states to establish national centres for science and technology capable of designing, implementing and evaluating science policies, such as creating new R&D institutions, developing human resources (particularly the recruitment of women into science), creating an ‘indigenous’ business consulting sector, and reducing dependence on imported technology.
Technical fields receiving emphasis included solar energy, wind-power, geothermal energy, production engineering, industrial design, chemical engineering and metallurgy, building materials, pharmaceutical and fertilisers, transport, communications and agricultural equipment.
Mobilization of the ‘considerable amount of adaptive technology and technical creativity…in way-side smithies and other mechanical workshops’ as well as ‘artisan enterprises’ and ‘indigenous technology’ was also sought through a series of intriguing measures aimed at training existing personnel.
The carefully planned institutionalization of the learning-by-doing process is recommended for serious attention. Institutions which are “engineering equivalents” of teaching hospitals should be established…at the sub-regional level.
Lagos Plan (1980), p. 54
The plan was, by any reasonable standards, both detailed and highly-prescient, noting for example its emphasis on gender equality and environment protection as goals of industrialization.
Of course, we will never find out if it could have succeeded. This is because it was stopped by Western officials.
The authors of the Lagos Plan sought additional finance through a package of measures that included levies on large firms, ‘new regional science and technology funds’, and establishment of a ‘Third World Bank for Science and Technology’.
They rightly demanded ‘adequate African representation at decision-making level’ in international funding agencies.
But many of these concepts must have been intolerable to powerful donors who presumably scuppered the plan the moment the draft got distributed.*
The significance of these historical data lie with our current predicament in which another debt crisis brews, citing knowledgeable commentators. What might we expect in terms of the scientific enterprise?
Science and research are often bystanders in the broader currents of economic and political events although, rarely, they become major actors, e.g., the covid crisis. In the African cases we are talking about, I would say science and research have been bystanders. The study by Enos (1995) on the effect of the previous crisis on science and research in four African countries proves foundational.
The African countries he studied entered the 1980s spending 1 % of GDP on science and technology. Following structural adjustment, which included privatization and cuts to state budgets, domestic expenditures on science fell from this level across the public and private sector (the latter had been a minor contributor even before the adjustment).
However, foreign donations for such purposes actually increased, as compared to the previous decades (although, perhaps, they did not restore expenditures to the levels seen in the 1970s).
We can see the impacts of this process, among them reduction in headcount particularly in the private sector as well as falling salaries for those still employed.
Above all, autonomous action by African scientists was no longer possible. It was replaced by foreign control of science and technology bought with aid. However, this foreign control did not come with notably elevated levels of funding, nor was it strategic or necessarily beneficial to African interlocutors.
For example, there was a shift from science and research relevant to ‘industry and commerce’ to agriculture and public administration, the former targeting a small number of tropical commodity crops such as coffee as opposed to staple food crops such as bananas.
…[D]eveloping countries [must] resist the usurping of the choice of direction of R&D by banks and foreign donors. Resistance will come partly…through the creation of their own, local product/process/market research organizations, partly intellectually through awareness that foreign bodies are currently not likely, and may continue to be unlikely, to propel advances in science and technology in the directions beneficial to the developing countries.
John L. Enos, in: In pursuit of science and technology in Sub-Saharan Africa: the impact of structural adjustment programmes (1995)
Among the lost industrial programs of that era was one in solar energy that started in Niger in west Africa. We are lucky to know something about it due to relatively recent studies by Dr. Jean Gecit.†
Dr. Gecit traces the program back to the French colonial period while also revealing significant dynamism following independence. The latter is linked to the leadership of such crucial scientific figures as Prof. Abdou Moumouni Dioffo and Cheickna Traoré (Prof. Dioffo was the subject of a 2017 documentary, Solaire made in Africa, by Malam Saguirou).
Other factors were in play, including funding from western donors such as France, the UN system, as well as the Niger government.
Internationally-significant solar R&D emerged soon after independence. In the 1960s, for example, scientists in Niamey built photovoltaic solar panels which were installed across Niger to power communal televisions that were used to educate children in rural areas.
The program, which, talking anachronistically, conceptualized a linked system of information and energy, picked up pace through the 1970s and 1980s. The goal was to develop, manufacture and deploy solar energy systems at scale across the west of the continent (as a consequence of the sunny weather and, therefore, logically, a vast, autarkic supply of energy for the entire economy, if the rays could be captured).
The creation of a regional center to pool national efforts of research, development and deployment programs came to be seen as essential in the 1970s. The idea was picked up in the Lagos Plan with the idea of building a ‘pan-African solar industry’, supported through such steps as a new regional R&D program and the creation of national bureaucracies focused on developing solar energy.
Regrettably, like many prescient solar initiatives around the world, it was never pursued to the fullest extent and, as we know, oil became the dominant energy vector in the region
The sudden withdrawal of French aid appears to have been particularly significant in the context of the broader structural adjustment programs and the general destruction of African drives for industrial autonomy. Gecit attributes the collapse of funds also to shifts in domestic energy policy in France towards nuclear and away from a more diversified focus on renewables.
Less well-known and possibly connected technology initiatives proposed in the 1980s also seem prescient to note here. They would include AIHTTR, ARCEDM and CRAT, concerning, respectively, technological skills and training; and re-equipment of industry (see table at end of this section). It seems these were somehow associated with the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECE).‡
As far as I am aware, only one of these centres continues to operate, namely, CRAT, in Sénégal. AIHTTR and ARCEDM (located, respectively, in Kenya and Nigeria) no longer exist. The Kenyan institute went bankrupt in 1990. The Nigerian institute appears to have been ‘merged’ in the late 1990s with the aforementioned CRAT.
Unfortunately, this more detailed story has not been historicised. However, based on documents in the UNECE database, we can gather that the Kenyan institute was established in Nairobi on the campus of X in 1980 based on ‘technical studies’ by a Canadian consultancy firm.¶ Indian models were also sought for the new institution, e.g., IIT. The goal of the institute was ‘development of high-level technological manpower and institutional capabilities’ on behalf of the continent.
Although these institutions seem to have operated somewhat for a decade, closing in 1990, they were never successful in raising funds from the OAU despite many different formulations. Nor were they successful with the EEC (EU) as a donor, despite requests for financial backing.
CRAT is certainly not well known, the other two, the African Institution for Higher Technical Training and Research and the African Regional Centre for Engineering Design and Manufacturing (located, respectively, in Kenya and Nigeria) chalked up few achievements during operations. The Kenyan institute went bankrupt in 1990. The Nigerian institute appears to have been ‘merged’ in the late 1990s with the aforementioned CRAT.
Unfortunately, a detailed story of these institutions is not available and I am only able to talk about them in vague terms, based on piecing together a few documents in the UN Economic Commission for Africa database (which regrettably the organization now took offline, but which I examined a couple of years ago).
With a caveat concerning lack of data, we can gather at least that the Kenyan institute was established in Nairobi in 1980 based on ‘technical studies’ by a Canadian consultancy firm. Indian models were also sought for the new institution such as the IIT. The stated goal of the African institutes was ‘development of high-level technological manpower and institutional capabilities’ on behalf of the continent.
Both the Kenyan and Nigerian institutions seem to have gone beyond the proposal stage and even to have operated somewhat for a decade, possibly closing in 1990. They were never successful in raising funds from the OAU despite many different formulations. Nor were they successful with the EEC (EU) as a donor, although they did ask for funds but were rebuffed.
Remember, this was the era of structural adjustment in which donors destroyed African industrial capacity. It was not the best of times to propose new scientific institutions.
CRAT, in contrast, was not built from scratch, but had quite a complicated but distinguished institutional pre-history prior to the Lagos Plan that included prescient achievements in solar energy by prominent physicists and engineers of the independence era, notably, Prof. Abdou Moumouni Dioffo and Cheickna Traoré.
Another problem lies with communicating the idea of a semi-autonomous research association of linked institutions in a way that would inspire understanding. German officials might be familiar with such a concept that characterizes their own R&D system, but Americans and, indeed, most other nationalities. would be deeply unfamiliar with it. In most countries, taxpayer-funded research systems emphasize civil service-type government labs or discrete universities.
Africa CDC’s easy legibility to American politicians familiar with its namesake in Atlanta, and who bankroll a lot of its activities, might be suggestive of this problem. Universities, equally, tend to attract the most emphasis in policy proposals. This is, in part, because practically all government officials believe they understand universities because they studied in them. Whereas many fewer officials ever set foot inside a national lab. Enormous political efforts have to be expended by the US Department of Energy national labs to sustain themselves on the government payroll, for example.
As can be seen, we can begin to have a sophisticated discussion about what a network of labs ought to look like and how it would need to be presented to garner political interest.
Examples of public multilateral scientific institutions in Africa
| Institution | Scope | Scale | Years of operation and reason for closure (if relevant) | Achievements |
| African Regional Centre for Engineering Designand Manufacturing(ARCEDEM) | ‘engineering, design and manufacturing of industrial and agricultural machines and equipment’ | 85 ha of land | 1980-? | Design of equipment e.g. farm carts; training of 77 engineers; consultancy for a mobile palm oil plant and electric motor production |
| African Institution for Higher Technical Training and Research (AIHTTR) | ‘development of high-level technological manpower andinstitutional capabilities’ | US$ 4.7m over 2 years; US$ 11m (1988/1989) ‘at least 10 multidisciplinary centres’; 100 ha of land | 1980-1990 (bankruptcy) | Training of 57 technicians, scientists and engineers on topics such as industrial instrumentation |
| United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) UNEP is the only major UN entity with a headquarters in Africa (and, indeed, within a UN system that locates its science and research capacity overwhelmingly in western Europe). UNEP was founded in 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya. Why was it located there? What explains its durability as an institution? What might we learn from it? The background to the organisation can perhaps be sought in the ‘moment of innovative ‘planetary’ environmental thinking and institution making’ of the 1970s. But my specific questions concerning the geographical location is addressed by reference to a recent book-length study of UNEP by Prof. Maria Ivanova. Citing Ivanova, in the 1970s, various cities were considered for UNEP, notably, Geneva. However, Kenyan experience with an earlier unsuccessful bid to host another UN agency (UNCTAD) apparently proved crucial in bringing the new agency to Nairobi. Ivanova notes the efforts of the Kenyan diplomat, Joseph Odero-Jowi, in mobilising the G77 developing nations to support a Kenyan location (in opposition to the former colonial powers who wanted the organisation based in Europe). It seems that once the African location had been decided through an open vote of delegates, states that had initially opposed it, notably, the USA, changed their position and declared their intention to support the Kenyan bid. The reasons for this change of heart are, seemingly, not known; or at least, they are not revealed by archival study of the type proposed by Ivanova. However, Invanova concludes that… |
References
Mouton, 2008, Africa’s Science Decline: the Challenge of Building Scientific Institutions, in: Harvard International Review.
*Sichone, 2003, ‘The social sciences in Africa’, in: The Cambridge History of Science (vol. 7): the Modern Social Sciences (ed. Park), p. 476.
†Gecit, 2020, Les énergies nouvelles en Afrique de l’Ouest. Des recherches scientifiques aux défis industriels (1960-1987) (Sorbonne Université).
‡Anon., 1981, CENTRE REGIONAL AFRICAIN DE TECHNOLOGIE (CRAT), in: Africa Development;
Le CRAT fait de l’agriculture son ”axe prioritaire” (directeur), Le Hub rural
¶UN Economic Commission for Africa, 1981, Progress report on the African institute for higher technical training and research, Nairobi, p. 3.
Iwugo, KO. (1986). Review and updating of the 1981 WHO feasibility sudy for the establishment of the environmental management and infrastructure centre for Africa (EMICA) at the UNECA sponsored African Institute for Higher Technical Training and Research (AIHTTR) Nairobi, Kenya. United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP).
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