Innovative approaches for unlocking R&D funding in Africa

Holding vast resources and potential, Africa stands at a pivotal moment in its development. Collaborative efforts between African scientists and global peers have led to significant progress in various sectors, driving scientific innovation tailored to Africa's needs and sustainable development. One crucial area that requires attention, however, is Africa's research and development (R&D) environment.

Data from the World Bank indicates that African countries spend an average of only 0.45% of their GDP on R&D, falling well below the global average of 1.7%. Correspondingly, Africa's share of global patents remains disproportionately low, implying insufficient innovation and technological advancements originating from the continent.

This underinvestment hinders the transformation of Africa's intellectual capital into tangible products, technologies and services that could boost economic growth, livelihoods and well-being. While international funders and philanthropic organizations support Africa-led research and innovation, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the necessity for more domestic funding sources, especially evident in the manufacturing of, and access to, vaccines during the pandemic.

Africa needs to find innovative ways of unlocking government and industry funding. One such example is Grand Challenges, which is a family of initiatives fostering innovation to solve key global health and development problems. This model has been successfully used in Brazil, India and Canada, among other countries.

In Africa, the Science for Africa Foundation’s Grand Challenges Africa Initiative has quickly become an example of an effective tool to unlock government funding to address widespread development challenges. With its focus on facilitating inclusive multi-stakeholder collaboration within Africa’s research and innovation ecosystem, the Grand Challenges Africa model is enabling a highly coordinated, well-funded and innovative R&D ecosystem by ‘connecting the dots’ to link innovators to funding, technical resources and other factors that sustain a robust R&D ecosystem.

Grand Challenges Africa also promotes Africa-led scientific innovations to help African nations achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In Africa, the Grand Challenges family includes Botswana, Ethiopia, Senegal and South Africa, with Rwanda and Malawi having joined most recently in May and August 2023.

These seven Grand Challenges country initiatives have adopted this model to invest in science and innovation, particularly because of the attraction of providing complementary support from partners to innovations that address high-priority national development needs from pan-African and global funders. These needs are determined through landscaping exercises with the direct engagement of communities and subject experts. Grand Challenges Africa's complementary funds provide an incentive to African governments to increase R&D funding by complementing investments to national innovators, money often leveraged by additional funders, such as the Science for Africa Foundation (SFA). This year, for example, the Rwandan government provided $1 million to match the SFA Foundation and other partner funding for Grand Challenges Rwanda to support country-based priorities.

As African governments are often the biggest consumers of innovation, to address the needs of their citizens they need to fund R&D, particularly for STEM as it provides a pipeline for innovations and an enabling environment for innovations to thrive. Funding is often accompanied by the adjustment of regulations to create a conducive environment for the uptake of innovation and for the participation of young people whose ideas and innovations can promote employment creation.

Most of the Grand Challenges Africa funding has gone to young innovators who are tackling, among others, malnutrition and reducing neonatal mortality. One example is the young Ugandan pharmacist and founder of Neopenda's NeoGuard, a medical device that monitors clinical vital signs for critically ill newborn babies, which has already been adopted in Kenya.

The country-level Grand Challenges approach has proven to be an effective tool in facilitating the adoption of innovation by governments. Africa has the potential to excel in scientific excellence when countries such as Malawi and Rwanda drive and support innovations finding solutions to their citizens’ specific challenges. In doing so, Grand Challenges Rwanda provides an effective platform to unlock Africa’s potential to become a hub of innovation and scientific excellence by investing in local R&D, fostering collaboration across sectors and increasing R&D support from governments, international funders and the private sector. This, in turn, leads to the building of an environment where African scientists and innovators thrive, generating solutions that have a lasting impact on the continent's development. A Grand Challenges PALOPS for Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, Saotome and Guinea Bissau is also in the pipeline.

Contributions from the private sector to R&D are lagging, however. While innovation generated by Grand Challenges Africa initiatives fuels enterprise economic growth through its contributions to discovery, development and delivery of innovation on the continent, the sector's R&D funding in Africa has been minimal. Efforts are being made by the Grand Challenges country-specific initiatives in Africa to motivate the private sector to invest more in R&D. The roles of the private sector can include acting as information brokers between innovators and industry through incentives, such as those introduced for industry to invest in R&D in South Africa.

Private sector companies are more likely to invest resources in Africa if they know governments and other funders are committed to building a sturdy R&D infrastructure on the continent. Likewise, an African government is more likely to reach its stated target for R&D investment (1% of GDP) if it knows that private sector partners are on board to help usher discoveries through the development and delivery stages. Fostering and sustaining this synergistic relationship is at the heart of Grand Challenges models, as the participation of the private sector, along with that of African governments and international funders, is necessary to fully realize the potential to create practical solutions to societal challenges, accelerate progress towards meeting the SDGs and increase entrepreneurship and employment opportunities in Africa. The private sector is also critical in innovation to ensure ideas move from laboratory to market, through commercialization or public-scaling pathways.

Only through collective, high-quality efforts will widescale, transformative change and progress take root across Africa. Success can be measured by the introduction of and accessibility to ground-breaking products and services that effectively address development challenges, foster economic growth, create employment opportunities, enhance the continent’s global competitiveness and prioritize the continent's most vulnerable populations.

The Grand Challenges model exemplifies the potential of the continent to create and implement innovative solutions for Africa’s highest-priority problems, because the research foci are driven by the national development agendas. It is essential for all stakeholders and governments across Africa to respond to the urgency to invest in research and innovation in Africa and to meet the goals of the African Union Agenda 2063. These pan-African initiatives highlight the role of science, technology and industry in Africa’s socio-economic development and by extension the UN SDGs.

Let us seize this opportunity to unlock Africa's potential and create a future where African innovations shine on the global stage, transforming lives and inspiring future generations.