By Bridget Boakye and Pedro Padalgay
In the face of geopolitical fragmentation, tightening aid budgets, and global systemic shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic, African leaders can no longer ignore the need to invest in science.
As global partnerships weaken and funding dries up, African governments face a stark choice: remain dependent on external knowledge or build their own scientific ecosystems to drive development.
Here is the opportunity. African countries can boost basic scientific impact not by spending more, but by spending smarter. The key is not just how much is invested in science but how it is invested, where, and whether it aligns with national development priorities and long-term resilience goals.
A Shrinking Global Support System
African countries are witnessing the collapse of long-standing avenues of collaborative research and funding. This is demonstrated by US threats to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), alongside the dismantling of USAID, and declining support for global health programmes.
In the UK, the government has ended its Global Challenges Research Fund and Newton Fund, two of the most significant enablers of UK–Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICS) research partnerships, following cuts to the UK’s development assistance budget.
Meanwhile, countries like China, India, and Gulf states like the UAE and Saudi Arabia are dramatically increasing investments in science, technology, and innovation, often oriented toward strategic national competitiveness rather than global development.
This leaves African science ecosystems increasingly exposed and under-resourced, just as the need for local innovation and resilience becomes more urgent.
Basic Science Must Become an Economic Strategy
Basic science is the foundational pillar of resilience, innovation, and growth. It equips countries not only to respond to crises and adapt global knowledge to local needs, but it seeds new industries, creates high-quality jobs, strengthens public services, and attracts the private capital needed to sustain growth and innovation.
Africa is home to 18 per cent of the global population but produces a tiny proportion of global scientific publications and accounts for less than 1 per cent of global R&D investment. This underinvestment is also seen in underutilised talent, stalled innovation pipelines, and the inability of national systems to translate knowledge into jobs or products.
Basic Science Investment in Today’s Context
Much of the focus on building science capacity in LMICs has centred on achieving headline targets such as reaching a specific percentage of R&D expenditure relative to GDP or increasing the number of researchers per capita. However, there is much that can be done to strengthen scientific ecosystems beyond funding, including improving research infrastructure, career pathways, institutional coordination, and data systems.
A new Report from the Tony Blair Institute, Building Scientific Sovereignty: Data-Driven Strategies for Strengthening Research Capacity in LMICs, shows that countries with modest science budgets can still achieve outsized returns if they invest strategically.
The most effective approaches include focusing on flagship research institutions with stable, multi-year core funding; supporting talent mobility and circulation, particularly through structured diaspora engagement; avoiding an over-reliance on tax incentives, which often fail to stimulate private-sector research in low-capacity settings; and strengthening governance, regulation, and inter-ministerial coordination to align science investments with national goals.
Emerging technologies such as AI, remote sensing, and digital research infrastructure can further accelerate this by reducing the cost of experimentation, enabling real-time data analysis, and expanding access to global knowledge networks.
Fixing the University–Jobs Pipeline
One of the most tangible gaps in Africa’s science ecosystem is the broken link between universities and industry.
Africa has no shortage of talent or ideas. Thousands of science and engineering graduates leave universities each year, some even launch prototypes in incubators but most never reach the market. Many incubators are donor-funded and short-lived, with few links to long-term financing or industrial adoption. Unlike Europe or Asia, large corporations rarely invest in R&D, leaving prototypes without a landing pad. Scaling innovation requires not just seed funding, but infrastructure, regulatory approval, and access to industrial supply chains.
Governments often support incubators as politically appealing initiatives and while these hubs are growing in number, they are rarely embedded in wider science and industrial strategies. Without sustained funding, policy alignment, and stronger ties between universities and firms, ideas struggle to scale. This disconnect reduces the practical impact of research, limits job creation, and weakens returns on public investment in science.
To address this gap, governments can draw on existing examples in Africa. In South Africa, the National Research Foundation and Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) show how long-term, high-prestige academic roles attract talent and anchor institutional depths.
The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) demonstrates how postgraduate accelerator programmes across Rwanda, Ghana, and South Africa can train a new generation of scientists and broaden regional networks and mobility.
Senegal’s Institut Pasteur de Dakar highlights the value of applied infrastructure, pairing excellence with production and diagnostic facilities to support both pandemic response and regional innovation.
Enabling regulations, such as those emerging in Rwanda, Nigeria, Kenya, and Malawi’s innovation city frameworks, show how policy can turn physical hubs into engines of national scientific and industrial growth.
Seizing the Moment for African Basic Science
If the foundations are built now, with strategic investments, strategic incentives, and strategic coordination, basic science will become the engine of economic growth, an exemplar of public investments producing impact, and actively participate in shaping the world’s scientific future.
Bridget Boakye – Senior Policy Advisor, Science and Technology, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
Pedro Pagalday – Country Director, Malawi, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
