Science in Africa

Brenda Raud (BR): Nokuthula, thank you so much for joining the podcast and talking to us.

What do you do at the African Open Science Platform, and what has been your journey to this position so far?

Nokuthula Mchunu (NM): I started out in molecular biology and protein engineering, and then later moved into genomics, where I ended up at the Agricultural Research Council working on crop genomics. My last job was working on cannabis genomics, which was quite interesting. But going back a bit to my 15 years at university, I really started my academic career at the peak of the HIV and AIDS pandemic in South Africa in a microbiology biotech, teaching some immunology. I wanted to actually take my students back into the community to show how they would communicate, not HIV/AIDS awareness exactly, but the science-based type of thinking [behind the HIV and AIDS pandemic] and show them how they would work with their communities.

I worked a lot in agriculture with rural communities that bank seeds that are grown in their communities. This is what I continued to do at the Agricultural Research Council, working on Indigenous legume genomics with cannabis, but really focused on using genomics for seeds that are rural-based, not commercial seeds that are purchased. When I was doing this for 15 or 20 years or so, it wasn't called citizen science in my mind. It was just called community engagement or engagement with the community. But as you know, now it's been formalized within the international community as citizen science.

Nicole Quinn (NQ): As a fellow genomicist, I relate to that. I always love to meet other genomics scientists. At some point, you moved into working on open science.

Can you outline that path and what you're working on now and what you've built?

NM: It's been interesting. After the Agricultural Research Council, I moved to the NRF of South Africa, which is the largest public funder of research in the continent. In South Africa, we fund all university and public institution research—everything except clinical trials and professional degrees. It's a relatively big budget in South Africa, even compared to the Global North. Within the NRF, I sit in what we call the partnership section, where we take on international projects. Fortunately, when open science was formalized within UNESCO, in South Africa our Director General (the equivalent of the Deputy Minister or Assistant Deputy Minister to Science and Technology in Canada) was the Chair of the UNESCO Open Science Working Group. He had a vision in 2015: that Africa would need to consolidate by themselves, and he had a plan for how to approach this. So this is where it was proposed to start an African Open Science Platform within Africa. It was actually the open science initiative that was formed, open to all countries in the continent. Then South Africa won the bid by the Ministry to host it.

As a functioning agent of the Ministry, we then hosted the African Open Science Platform. Because it is quite a new formalized space, we took on most of the roles of working on open science within South Africa and within the continent. We coordinate the smaller activities that are happening within open science in the continent and also try to embed open science within the partnerships that are happening with South Africa, the continent, and globally, thereby promoting a growing project at scale by opening data and sharing. But of course, in the Global South, the biggest thing about open science is that it is a way to address equity and reach equity in access and contribution to knowledge. There are many legs to it, like reproducibility of research, there is quality, and many others. However, for the Global South, before we get to reproducibility, and before we ask about the quality of research, we still just need to be able to access and freely contribute to the body of knowledge in science. And of course, we mean both core sciences and humanities.

BR: I think this is a great segue to the question I wanted to ask you. Africa is, of course, a very large continent. It has 1.3 billion people. That's 17% of the world's population. It's so diverse and large. It has so many people doing so many different things and having so many different backgrounds. From a scientist's perspective, it is the most genetically diverse continent on Earth. In your position, trying to support African science, what are the main challenges? What are the main structural issues that you see and that, to some extent, you're trying to address? For people that don't think too much about what the challenges are for African scientists, if you were to educate them, what would you say? What information would you share with such people?

What are the main challenges in trying to support science in Africa?

NM: I think when people think of Africa, they think of the pictures they see of poverty or the lack of infrastructure. If that lack of infrastructure is true, we then need to first acknowledge the position of Africa as being a once-colonized continent, which means that people of Africa didn't have the right of self-determination of building their own infrastructure and resources. Even now, those inequities in resources and how resources are distributed within the continent and from the world still prevail, which impacts how science is conducted within the continent. However, fortunately enough, during COVID, the people of Africa showed they can produce and are producing world-class science and science research. So for me, our strength is in our diversity, which also brings its own challenges. We generally divide the continent into Southern, Eastern, Central, West, and North Africa. We know that North Africa has more in common with the Middle East and the Arab-speaking countries. Then through many years of colonization, which I won't go back to, you have what we call Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), which excludes all the Northern African countries.

Then the other challenge is language. We have countries in West Africa and Central Africa, which are predominantly French-speaking. And of course the Indigenous languages that thousands speak that prevail underneath that colonized language. And then, of course, you have the Southern and Eastern parts of Africa, which are anglophone. And then you have just two countries where people speak Portuguese, which are Angola and Mozambique; they feel more left out because it's just the two of them while there are 10 francophone countries. So this diversity in language and lack of infrastructure and previous history of colonization has set back the continent quite a bit. This is why when you look at development on the continent, you find that anglophone countries are more developed or partake more [in science]. If you look at the body of knowledge or contribution, they have more because English is a dominant language in science, which is another thing that we need to address. For us then, for open science and the African Open Science Platform, the challenge is to try to figure out, with these underlying infrastructure and resource challenges and, of course, language and diversity barriers: how do we come together as a continent and also speak about this with global partners?

Overcoming Challenges; the African Open Science Platform

NM: As an initiative, we tried to address these many challenges faced by having regional nodes that each country would figure out by themselves, and then we support them. Our biggest projects or subprojects that we do are based on science, contribution, engagement with science, and access to it. We also have the challenge of leveraging infrastructure that exists within the continent that is not fully utilized, and making it open for everybody in the continent to be able to use.

NQ: There's so much in there that I'd love to dig into. Are there any lessons or examples of progress that you've made, structural or systems, that have actually helped or that you think have hope in helping overcome the language challenge? Particularly that could expand to other areas in the world who face similar challenges?

What has helped overcome the language challenges?

NM: Fortunately, being at the NRF, we have what we call the SKA: the Square Kilometer Array Project, which is a global project of infrastructure that looks into space science. Generally, none of the African countries were engaging in space science until about 2014 before this was established. So through this shared infrastructure, the initial plan was that 12 countries within the continent would contribute to this project; if you understand space science and data sharing and generating data, you will have access to the telescope or to the satellite dishes based on how much you could afford. But South Africa did not accept that plan. Instead, each partner can have a share of time spent in the telescope so that it is equitable. Also there were programs where countries in the continent can apply to freely access the SKA or the telescopes and the dishes without partaking in any resource or form within the SKA. So this is one reason we have seen a lot of growth in science and space science and even in skills.

Then we have what we call Open Access (OA) for common language and, I think this also exists in Europe and in Canada, a national research and education network (NREN). All universities belong to these networks. Then you have regional networks that are bigger. These regional networks in the continent, previously, were configured to provide connectivity like a network within the institution, which could bring down the cost of connectivity, making it easier for institutions to do business. Over the years, they have built infrastructures that provide connectivity. The government and the NRF discussed with some of them about providing high computational power for universities to use as repositories, that connects them to access and acts as a place to deposit work that then would be archived and shared with other universities within the continent. This is a project that we started testing out in the last year, which was the project that was built during COVID.

During COVID in 2020, South Africa along with other global partners like the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Canada, the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), got together and put forward a fund that, in the continent of Africa, could fund research, science, communication, and citizen science. However, although it was a lot of money and there were a lot of great projects done by 17 countries, none of this was shared in any form except the normal way of publishing in journals. In science communication, citizen science doesn't take the form of a journal publication. So what we've done since last year is that we have provided a community space where we have bought digital object identifiers [DOIs] for all the work that they've been doing. It could be videos, it could be pamphlets, it could be anything. It could be pictures that they produce, that could be put up in one of the NREN cloud servers that could then be freely available. It could be associated as an output to whoever deposited that work because it has a DOI attached to it, which we as an initiative and with the partners, freely provide. Through that type of pilot, the NRF has now committed that all the projects that we do within the continent will start building this community space and databases that are connected but have also identified us for funders, for countries, and researchers that they can deposit work at any point in time, even if it has been published in a journal or has not been peer reviewed, but it can be freely available and archivable within the high-performance computing facilities of the NREN. The nice thing about the NRENs is that the universities are already members of them. It's an easier relationship to build than starting a different repository and another initiative on the side.

BR: Basically, you have established equal partnerships with global collaborators, really standing your ground and negotiating favorable conditions. For example, like you did with the radio telescope. Then you have provided the infrastructure to share the resources across the country, and between countries, to generate more data, and made sure that at least science that is done in-house is available for everyone in the continent. I think those are very important concepts that you bring up. From my perspective, coming from Argentina, where we have similar issues, access to international literature is really difficult, and is really expensive. It is beyond the means of many of the academic institutions in the country. Also, I think the access to equal partnerships is difficult because the money moves depending on influence. It's very difficult to say no to certain unfavorable offers because the alternative is nothing sometimes. I think it is really important to start bringing more equality in that sense because everybody has something to offer. Money is only one part of the equation. The expertise, the resources are also very important. And I think continents like the Global South have a lot to offer in that sense, as long as we really know what we're worth and work for it.

Equitable Partnerships Versus Equal Partnerships

How can researchers in the Global South advocate for themselves?

NM: As younger researchers, we thought about equal partnership, which is a different concept to what is prevailing now, which is equitable partnership. We understand that the Global South, like scientists in South America, cannot put dollar to dollar. That is just not going to work. However, we can think about economics and equitable resources to make partnerships work. This has also been South Africa's ethos. We're now saying to members of our African countries that if you have a project, you don't have to have a lot of money to make it work, but you need to put something at the table so that you have a sense of ownership, and an openness to demand a certain way of doing things or partnership. Because if you have put nothing into it, it also makes it difficult to have this relationship. In many of our projects or programs, we really work on these equitable partnership models. We are slowly starting to work with other African countries to come to the party. In South Africa, the government has taken a little bit of a shift to not only growing South Africa, as it looks like we can't grow the South African system without growing the African continent system.

In many of our programs, we have these negotiations where we want other African countries to be involved. For example, you probably know that we are in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) program of countries. Some people are not happy about that, but it's not about who has money. But we have South Africa advocating for the joining of Egypt and Ethiopia, to make sure that these global partnerships are grown. We also have an initiative, again, funded through global partners like IDRC, Sida, the NRF, UKRI, and a few other global funders called the Science Granting Council Initiative (SGCI). NRF is a science-granting council. In most African countries, these do not exist. Money often comes through the ministries directly to the researchers, and this makes funding very vulnerable to changes in government and politics. We are an agency. We also answer to a politician. But it buffers the system from the change in government. So SGCI encourages countries in the continent to form formal science-granting councils.

For any country in the continent, it is free to join [the SGCI]. However, there are certain conditions that the country has to undertake; by Act of Parliament [the Science Technology and Innovation (ST&I) Act] the country has to form a science-granting agency in later years. This is why, for example, we now have to say National Research Foundation or NRF South Africa [rather than just “NRF”], because two years ago NRF Kenya was formed, which is the National Research Fund of Kenya. There are several science granting councils. You have Fonds National de la Recherche et de l'Innovation pour le Développement (FONRID, or the National Fund for Research and Innovation for Development], which is an institution based in and vital to Burkina Faso, a country in West Africa. You've got Fonds pour la Science, la Technologie et l'Innovation, which is the Fund for Science, Technology, and Innovation in the Ivory Coast [established in 2018, this organization supports research and development by funding scientific projects and programs aimed at socio-economic and cultural development within the country]. We are starting to see, after working together, that it's actually helping to strengthen the science system in the continent. Once you do that, you strengthen the scientists, then they can contribute a little bit more. Then the issue becomes access and which wall they are facing. Is it the paying wall, or their payroll on the other side?

NQ: That sounds like really positive progress. I want to go back to the discussion about equitable contributions and the satellite or telescope example, because I was thinking, and this might be a very naive statement to make, but if countries can't necessarily contribute the funds, there are other things; I'm sure access to clear skies and lots of open space in African countries is what people studying space really want. Am I right that there are other ways and resources that can be offered that can help countries contribute to science?

Other than money or funding, what resources or ways can countries contribute to science, to help the greater scientific community?

NQ: The Square Kilometre Array, which will be the biggest telescope in the world once it's finished, is used by a consortium of countries, including Canada and the US; everybody, even South America. But the SKA is somewhere in the Northern Cape where nobody lives. It is totally dark. It doesn't have light interference. It is the right space to have the telescope. However, although I am not an astronomer, they tell me sometimes to build the bigger picture, you need other satellites. They might be smaller in other countries, but you can build the more complete pictures by having different pictures taken in different parts of space. So it is then important to have other countries joining the space science initiative because they can build other telescopes. The South African MeerKAT, as it's called now, has 64 dishes [MeerKAT is a world-class radio telescope used to study the universe by detecting faint radio waves from distant cosmic sources; it is a core component of the larger international SKA project]. There is also a large one in Australia. But I know there are plans to build another one or two dishes along the continent to make sure that they capture more.

This can only be done through this partnership. Also, what we've seen is that we need more astronomers. In South Africa, we cannot all be astronomers. So the more you provide space for people to use the telescope, the more you train astronomers across the continent and across the globe. In South Africa, before the SKA, we virtually had almost no astronomers. But once we had the SKA, we increased that capacity. Those astronomers who are using our telescope or may have come to South Africa as a student, actually train and then go back [to their own country]. I've been speaking to the managing director of the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), which is in charge of SKA; they say that most of the space programs in African countries are started by people who were part of the SKA at some point in time. This would not have happened if South Africa had not openly made it known that it would accept other African countries to be part of this program.

Strong Infrastructure Builds Strong Scientific Initiatives

NQ: As soon as you get that interest, you start to build infrastructure. Following infrastructure, you get the expertise, you get the training, and hopefully a trickle effect to get some momentum behind these things. I'm hoping there are examples beyond. I'm also not an astronomer, but in every field of science and immunology and other elements of biology where you may be tapping into genetic diversity or ecological diversity, where you can use these variable resources or unique resources that can only be in specific countries to start to build that momentum. But you did mention something that made me think about the issue of brain drain, because you said that people will come and then they'll go elsewhere. I'm sure that's something that every country faces. Canada faces a brain drain, really. I can only imagine what happens elsewhere. Are there any comments you'd like to make on that and anything that you've seen that helps avoid people leaving once they've had the training?

How can scientific institutions help stem the “brain drain”?

NM: In South Africa, in general, it's relatively easy to stay here and not really want to leave. But I've known many people in different countries and different situations that leave their country to work somewhere else. However, I think Africa is progressing in science, it's a growing continent, and I think you are getting more and more people staying within the science space. In the genomics space for example, If you look back at COVID, the amount of work that was done in South Africa in genomics, genomics platforms, and sequencing platforms was tremendous. Through that, South Africa has attracted great minds outside of the continent, never mind in the continent. I think once you strengthen the system within the country and within the continent, you stem the brain drain. You cannot ask people to stay without strengthening that system because they must see a functioning system. I'm not saying South Africa doesn't have this fault, but if you look at this infrastructure and the strengthening of the system that was built through the HIV and AIDS pandemic, our genomics platforms and sequencing work had already attracted a lot of people that want to work in science.

The pandemics kept these scientific skills in the country for quite some time. When COVID came, it was easy for us to just redirect all that viral genomic work into COVID. Again, we were able to do this because we maintain the skills, the infrastructure, and the support system. It's important for African countries to strengthen their systems also, to stem the brain drain out of their countries. I think it's also now difficult with the heavily connected globe as a counter effect that everybody moves everywhere and everyone wants to go everywhere. It is also somewhat of a positive thing for the African continent in that there's also a lot of pushback on immigration by Global North countries, where it's now becoming more difficult to move. For example, although I don't want to pick on Canada, the recent policy limiting international student movement to Canada is going to benefit the African continent. In contrast, which is worrying for our partners at universities in Latin America, due to policies like those in Argentina they've lost almost 50% of their funding, which means most of them will likely leave the system and the system will get crippled. So there are a lot of things outside of the control of the researchers.

Unstable Political Environments Affect Access to Science

How can scientists ensure research continuation amid government volatility?

BR: That is a major issue. The volatility of different governments in places like Argentina. Because there's not a lot to start with, it really makes a huge impact on what resources scientists end up getting. Right now, there's a large movement of people outside of Argentina because the current government doesn't support science. When you have a system that is not strong, where you don't give enough strength to the institutions to really protect their own, then you are at the mercy of each different government that comes along. It's important to build some resilience to the system so people can adapt, at least in the short term. Of course, in the long term, you need the support of the government, but [you need that resilience] to try to soften the blows when you have an unfavorable political environment impairment.

That's very problematic. But I think that it is very common, at least in Latin America, that you never know. It depends on the current government. I mean, that's everywhere. Sometimes when resources are already so low, you're very close to rock bottom. So then you reach rock bottom a lot faster. That's a problem because as a scientist, you need to think of your lab, and your projects can take years. As a PhD student, you need to be able to guarantee at least three or four years of salary. If you want to build something that lasts, something that matters, you need several years. You need a decade to build a research line that really makes a difference in the world. If you don't know whether that money you have is going to continue, you honestly, truly don't know what's going to happen in five years. Then it's really hard to build and to invest into your life, your time, your effort, and your career on something from the start.

NM: Yeah. This is why I keep going back to how the NRF and South Africa's approach is trying to strengthen the region as much as it can as a whole and have some partial independence of science from the government. When you have these science agencies that are outside of government. Because in South Africa, as we’ve all seen, the government has changed so many times. But the NRF helps stabilize universities because it hel