Ensuring equitable international research partnerships
Claire Quinn, Professor in Natural Resource Management at the School of Earth, Environment and Sustainability, is an environmental social scientist with over 25 years of experience working on interdisciplinary projects in Africa, Europe and Asia. She has written this article about international community and partnership research.
Research on Africa, rather than with Africa, has a long history and legacy, with the effects still felt today.
African researchers are consistently underrepresented in research publications on Africa, and so in the research itself. For example, in 2022 research showed that 58% of papers on African climate had no African authors; in health research published between 2014 and 2016, only 52.9% of first authors were from the African country of focus, and in 2020 one in five papers published on COVID-19 in Africa included no African-based authors.
This underrepresentation matters because it means that local contexts and priorities are missing from research that informs government policy and investment on the continent.
In many ways, my research career has benefited from this history. My relationship with Africa began as a volunteer researcher during my undergraduate degree when I spent a summer measuring trees and counting insects in the East Usambara Mountains in Tanzania. My Master’s and PhD research continued to focus on Africa, with a shift towards understanding the interactions between people and their natural environments. Now my research focuses on the challenges of building sustainable food systems on the African continent. Throughout, UK funding has allowed me to travel and conduct research in Africa in ways that have not always been available to my African colleagues.
But collaboration and partnerships have been fundamental throughout my research career. From the very beginning, the knowledge and expertise of my African colleagues have informed and enriched my research, and working and publishing together has been the default for me.
Food Systems Research Network for Africa
This collaborative approach to research has led most recently to the Food Systems Research Network for Africa (FSNet-Africa), a capacity-building and research excellence project that ran between 2020 and 2024, led by the University of Pretoria.
FSNet-Africa put early-career African researchers at the centre, surrounded by mentors from both the University of Leeds and the African continent, to build their research and leadership capacity in sustainable food systems research.
The hope was that the training and leadership skills provided, and the experience leading research projects, would position our fellows as future leaders, enabling them to contribute to and develop our thinking about how both African and global food systems can be transformed to be more equitable and sustainable.
FSNet-Africa created a model for capacity building, developed a framework for African food systems research, and, by bringing together the research undertaken by the fellows, identified collaboration, participation and transformative African foods as priorities for African food systems research. All these publications were led by African-based researchers.
The longer-term benefits to the fellows have been tangible. Many have gone on to be promoted within their universities. They have taken their experiences from FSNet-Africa and implemented them in their own teaching and supervision, for example by developing modules on ethics in research and in science communication.
Others have obtained further fellowships funded by ARUA and UNESCO, have collaborated on large-scale international projects, and have been recognised internationally as agri-food pioneers. Some have also continued to work together to lead research that explores the role of ‘transformative foods’ in African food systems, a key research gap identified from the work of FSNet-Africa.
Strategic partnership
The University of Leeds and the University of Pretoria continue to work together through our strategic partnership. Most recently, colleagues from the University of Pretoria’s Institute for Sustainable Malaria Control visited Leeds for a two-day workshop to identify opportunities for collaboration on climate-informed malaria risk and community responses.
Building networks is only the start; there also needs to be opportunity.
The shift in UK funding away from Overseas Development Assistance means that there are fewer opportunities for projects like FSNet-Africa, and less funding to support international collaborative research. In particular, the opportunities for African-led research are often few and far between. But there are glimmers of hope.
The Science Granting Councils Initiative, a cross-Africa research council collaboration, has recently announced a $12 million call for multi-African country consortia to submit research proposals aligned to the Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa. The call is funded by international donors including the Wellcome Trust and UK International Development.
This represents a significant opportunity for research on the challenges faced on the African continent, and the identification and implementation of solutions, to be led by researchers from Africa.
I know that some of the FSNet-Africa fellows are collaborating on proposals for this call, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for them. But even if they aren’t successful this time, I know that the connections that they have built, and the professional and personal relationships they have made, will continue to inspire and support them in their careers in the years to come.
I hope that in the future, the legacy will be priorities that are determined on the African continent and research that is led by inspiring and skilled African researchers, with the support of the international research community.