Isabella, the Africa Charter is an initiative created by the leading higher education and research institutions in Africa. Please tell us about PARC’s role in facilitating and advocating for the Charter.
The journey of PARC’s involvement in the Africa Charter initiative really begins with a collaborative effort between us at PARC and colleagues at the Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the Albert Luthuli Research Chair at the University of South Africa (Unisa), coming together to reflect on the importance of thinking beyond the equitable partnerships debate. We felt that the debate is tinkering in the margins and not addressing the more fundamental issue of power imbalance that is shaping the research relationships between actors in Africa and those in the global North. So, it started as an intellectual effort and we developed a new conceptual frame for thinking about the power imbalance in research collaborations and, more broadly, in knowledge production and then captured this in a paper. We then jointly with our colleagues at UCT and Unisa engaged the broader set of higher education bodies in the African continent on the intellectual basis that we’d developed, building on the critical input from these bodies and elaborating and refining the arguments and the ambitions. And we then jointly with these bodies articulated the Charter.
The Africa Charter advocates for transformative research collaborations with African scholars. What would what truly transformative collaborations look like?
The first thing is to take seriously the word “transformative”. These days, everything is ‘transformational’ – it’s become, in many ways, an empty word. But what the Charter means here is a mode of research collaboration that, if it were to be established widely, would serve to advance some systemic shifts, a rebalancing of positionings of Africa in the global North, in particular at the system level. That’s why we use the word transformative.
What would a transformative mode of collaborations look like? In abstract terms, it would be a mode of collaborations that actively tries to redress each of the multiple layers of power imbalance that currently pervade scientific knowledge production in, with, for, and by the continent of Africa. Usually, when we talk about equity in research collaborations, the emphasis is on power imbalances that arise at the level of concrete project arrangements, like the division of labor, control over decision-making, control over what happens to samples and data, who gets to be an author on joint papers or other outputs and so on. That’s critically important, but there needs to be an effort to go beyond that and to redress the more underlying layers of power imbalance.
What are these underlying layers of power imbalance that would be redressed by transformative mode of collaborations?
Let’s begin with, right at the core, the dominance of Eurocentric ways of knowing and the assumption that they are universally valid and the exclusion of all other ways of knowing. Collaborations need to try and decenter the canon and give space to existing new ways of knowing.
A second layer that needs to be redressed is the use of languages and it’s very closely linked to the first: Really trying to center relevant African languages in the conception of research – the questions that you’re trying to answer, the problems that you’re trying to address – and not use English or French, for example.
The third layer of power imbalance, which is again very closely linked to the first two, is about decentering the theories and the concepts and the categories that we work with and try to find ways to generate such conceptualizations from the ground and draw on existing theorizing from Africa or from the South, because there is critical southern theorizing which is relevant, too.
The fourth layer of power imbalance is this issue of the development frame. Researchers trying to develop a collaborative project are constrained by the funding streams that are available and many funding streams are framed with reference to development and the SDGs. Redressing the development frame-related power-imbalances would mean actively trying reverse or return the gaze – to really say, let’s not just focus on problems in Africa, let’s focus on problems in the North or the world, broadly, and let African scholars based on their interpretations study those problems.
And then the last thing, which lies more within the realm of funding agencies, is to find ways to allocate the resourcing in ways that support institutional capacities on the part of the African partner.
What is the impact that transformative collaborations would have on global scholarship?
Ultimately, what you would gradually see is a shift in the kinds of knowledge that are part of the canon. You would see a shift in the experts on particular issues, you would see more African scholars actually being experts in particular fields and that would enrich our global scholarship. As academics, we’re all trying to seek new perspectives on the issues facing us and the richer our effort, the more we draw on all the archives of the world, the more able we will be to solve our issues. So ultimately the benefit is for all of us.
"As academics, we’re all trying to seek new perspectives on the issues facing us and the richer our effort, the more we draw on all the archives of the world, the more able we will be to solve our issues. So ultimately the benefit is for all of us."
What concrete measures can the signatories implement to help achieve this goal of transformative research collaborations?
Maybe it’s helpful to think about it in two domains: One is, what can signatories do in terms of their own institutional policies and practice. And then, there is the question what can institutions collectively do to advocate for change in systems, structures or criteria that apply in a more overarching way to the higher education or research sector.
If you want to focus on the first domain, it begins with engaging those that work within institutions, scholars but also the research support staff and the students, to foster critical engagement so that it becomes part of the consciousness. And then, let’s look at our internal policy and practice: What do we as an institution incentivize and enable and what do we not? Building on these processes of critical engagement, let’s find ways to bring that reflection into the training and the capacity strengthening of students, so that the theory and practice of transformative partnerships can become part of their thinking as they’re setting out to become researchers.
Let’s also look at our collaborations, either the ones that are ongoing or the ones that we finished, and reflect on them against the Charter framework. Where are we already working in ways that speak to some of the principles but where are we not? Where are we perpetuating those same power imbalances that are part of the problem? How could we begin to address those? It really is a process that needs to bring everyone in to reflect openly and critically and then to distill the good practices.
Can you describe the impact and repercussions that the pervading inequalities and imbalances across the global research ecosystem have had for African scholarship?
Much of the scholarship that is going on in the African space has been extraverted in the sense that it has been oriented to agendas constructed elsewhere, on problematics identified elsewhere, using theoretical frameworks developed elsewhere. What that has meant is that African scholars have had very little opportunity to become internationally recognized experts in a particular field.
Often, the power imbalance means the Principal Investigator is in the North, or if you look at the division of labor, it’s the PI that does the more valuable work, with Africa-based collaborators remaining “glorified data collectors”, as a colleague of mine has termed it. And similarly, African institutions as recognized places of the production of knowledge that’s relevant for the world, that hasn’t really happened.
At a higher level, the positioning of institutions and scholars has also meant that Africa hasn’t been able to influence the setting of global agendas, because the processes that lead to the setting of these agendas usually involve drawing expert committees, hosted by particularly high-profile universities. This marginalization from knowledge production has meant a lack of ability of African constituencies to influence agendas that end up affecting what Africa can or cannot do.
In what way would you say do epistemic systems differ in Africa and the global North?
It would take a long time to answer this question, but I hope I can give you a sense of what is at play. What counts is the principle that you need to begin to give room to knowledge systems as they exist, for example as part of indigenous knowledge systems, of which there are many – not just in Africa. There needs to be room and space given to those ways of interpreting the world. Indigenous knowledge systems is one, but there are also what authors have termed “community-based knowledge systems”. “Community” here can be defined in different ways, it doesn’t have to be tied to a geographical location. There needs to be a real engagement with those interpretations of how the world works and, as part of that, seeing in what ways do they differ from the canon. Do they complement it, enrich it, contradict it? The answers will depend on where you look because the heterogeneity is there.
Since the Charter was launched in 2023, it has been endorsed by more than 100 signatories. What is your vision for the future of the Charter – what is the best possible outcome that you would hope for?
I would say, a further expansion in institutions that sign up to the Charter and take it seriously and then widespread processes of real debate and engagement with the issues, reflection on existing collaborative practices, identification of good practice models, where they exist and then progressively actually using those. So that with time, you would see an ever greater volume of collaborative research projects across disciplinary fields, trying to put the principles of the Charter into practice. And equally, an ever greater number of institutions and I include funders, publishers as well as universities and research institutions actually making strategic adjustments to their internal policy architecture so that they properly incentivize and enable such a transformative mode of partnership working. And lastly, an enriched discourse around the issues that the Charter raises so that we’ll have a refined, elaborated version of it in two, three, four, five years’ time and perhaps even specific versions of it for particular fields – that’s what I would like to see. What it would amount to ultimately is a culture shift in the whole research and science space.
