Agricultural research and higher education in Africa: trends, challenges and ways of moving forward

Agricultural R&D is critical to increasing smallholder productivity and generating agricultural growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), but governments continue to underinvest in agriculture, more specifically in agricultural research and development (R&D). After a decade of stagnation during the 1990s investments and human resource capacity in SSA’s public agricultural R&D increased by more than 20 percent during 2001–08. Most of this growth, however, occurred in a handful of countries and was largely the result of increased government commitments to enlarge very low salaries and to rehabilitate neglected infrastructure, often after years of underinvestment. Furthermore, close to half of the SSA countries, for which timeseries data were available during this period, experienced declines in their spending levels. Many countries, particularly those in francophone West and Central Africa, are threatened by extremely fragile funding systems, are highly dependent on donor funding, and face large fluctuations in funding levels from one year to the next. Despite positive developments in agricultural R&D staffing levels in most countries, a large number of them continue to face important capacity challenges. In some countries, especially in francophone West Africa, long-term public-sector recruitment restrictions have skewed the average age of scientists to the higher end of the spectrum and left agencies vulnerable as their senior staff approach retirement without a clear line of succession. Countries that have been able to lift long-term recruitment bans have often had to contend with influxes of young, inexperienced, BSc-qualified scientists in need of appropriate training but lacking middle-level mentors to guide them. Attracting and retaining qualified research staff is a major challenge. Moreover, in-country postgraduate training opportunities are limited in many countries. The organizational architecture for SSA research is in place, but it has become highly complex, and many of the potential linkages and institutional arrangements remain underdeveloped. Building on the outputs and deliberations during the ASTI/IFPRIFARA conference in Accra in December 2011, a number of directions were identified that are needed to address the many challenges agricultural R&D faces in SSA in terms on sustainable investments by governments and donors, development of the necessary scientific talent, creation of linkages between a diverse group of national stakeholders, and the development appropriate interfaces across global and regional agricultural research systems.