The Africa Charter

Africa’s present position in the global science system is deeply unfavourable.  The continent contributes just a tiny fraction of scientific publications (1.6% in 2018) and researchers (0.7% in 2018) globally. Its scholars and institutions are, with a handful of exceptions, poorly positioned in worldwide rankings. This situation is neither accidental nor harmless: it reflects multiple layers of power imbalances in the production of scientific knowledge that have arisen from colonial histories; and its has negative repercussions for Africa’s economic and political prospects, as well as for the richness global scholarship.

International collaborations with the global North dominate Africa’s scientific effort and, more often than not, help to reproduce the power imbalances.

Because collaborations with the global North dominate Africa’s research effort, changing the way such collaborations are configured has the potential to effect a rebalancing of the system overall – to ensure that African scholars, institutions and knowledges from the continent take their rightful place in the global scientific effort. In other words, these collaboration have the potential to be transformative.

The Charter provides a framework for advancing such transformative research collaborations.

The Africa Charter builds on a long history of African intellectual thought and on more recent perspectives on how to foster more equitable global South-North research partnerships. However, the present moment  – with a more acute awareness of the need to undo unjust legacies of colonialism and the urgency of finding better, including radically different, solutions to our collective global crises – is the right time for a much more fundamental and systemic change in research relations between Africa and global North. It is change whose time has come.

With good uptake of the charter’s principles among global north and south universities, we would see African researchers, institutions and their communities following their own lines of inquiry, creating new and innovative research projects, and creating new knowledges to serve the continent and the world.

Such work would underpin a flourishing research ecosystem and the building of renown, globally valued scholarship and expertise in the continent. Such expertise would shape not only national and continental but international agendas, as well as support domestic flourishing. And such a research landscape would be supported by greater investment from within Africa as well as adjusted policies of global funders.

African institutions will gain greater autonomy, capacity and freedom to pursue their priority research agendas, and to produce recognised knowledge — on Africa’s terms and including an African gaze toward the North — about how the world works and ought to work.  All institutions, whether in Africa,  global North or beyond, will gain an opportunity to join forces to shape a future scientific effort that is more just and urgently needed to address the multiple crises humanity and the planet face.

Please read the draft charter on our website and register your interest, we will then send you a formal declaration of endorsement to sign.  

As University of Bristol Vice Chancellor Professor Evelyn Welch said: “We need to not just hold this Charter either on our websites or in our hearts, but actually in practice.”