Global Africa
The Global Africa program takes place against a backdrop where the African continent accounts for 13% of the world’s population, but contributes less than 3% of scientific publications. Today, while the elite of African researchers publish in international journals, the vast majority remain dependent on national contexts marked by local journals and often unattractive university presses.
The crisis in higher education in Africa has left the academic community without viable publishing resources or the capacity to produce, promote and disseminate the results of its researchers on a continental and international level, a prerequisite for bringing African voices to bear in global debates.
In most countries, the trade-off between research, teaching and consultancy activities is to the detriment of the former. The result is multiple and cumulative failings: whole swathes of the political, socio-economic, cultural and environmental transformations underway remain unintelligible, because they are not thought of from the continent’s perspective.
There is little renewal of teaching, due to a lack of research. Public policies are not sufficiently based on reliable data, with the result that the continent is mainly understood through the outside world and, more generally, its voices remain largely unheard in international debates.
To this picture we must add a disciplinary compartmentalization of research, produced essentially in English or French, and very strongly male-dominated. All these factors raise the question of its social legitimacy and its lack of integration into society, i.e. its ability to identify and address the essential needs of societies and institutions.
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Global Africa, the interdisciplinary, multilingual Open Access magazine.
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