Abstract
The emergence of vibrant research communities of computer scientists in Kenya and Uganda has occurred in the context of neoliberal privatization, commercialization, and transnational capital flows from donors and corporations. We explore how this funding environment configures research culture and research practices, which are conceptualized as two main components of a research community. Data come from a three-year longitudinal study utilizing interview, ethnographic and survey data collected in Nairobi and Kampala. We document how administrators shape research culture by building academic programs and training growing numbers of PhDs, and analyze how this is linked to complicated interactions between political economy, the epistemic nature of computer science and sociocultural factors like entrepreneurial leadership of key actors and distinctive cultures of innovation. In a donor-driven funding environment, research practice involves scientists constructing their own localized research priorities by adopting distinctive professional identities and creatively structuring projects. The neoliberal political economic context thus clearly influenced research communities, but did not debilitate computing research capacity nor leave researchers without any agency to carry out research programs. The cases illustrate how sites of knowledge production in Africa can gain some measure of research autonomy, some degree of global competency in a central arena of scientific and technological activity, and some expression of their regional cultural priorities and aspirations. Furthermore, the cases suggest that social analysts must balance structure with culture, place and agency in their approaches to understanding how funding and political economy shape scientific knowledge.
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Notes
The African Union’s share of the world’s total research output in the period 2005–2010 was only 1.8% (NPCA 2014). South Africa is an exception and does have many strong and established research communities.
We use the real names of respondents where we have permission to do so. Many respondents specifically requested that we use their names in order to make more people aware of their work. Some quotations were anonymized to protect respondents from any possible harm.
There are three universities in Nairobi with PhD programs and four universities with Master’s programs in computer science.
The City Momentum Index (CMI) Study ranked Nairobi 11th out of 120 cities surveyed in 2016 for innovation, livability and capacity to reinvent itself. http://allafrica.com/stories/201601251288.html.
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Acknowledgments
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1257145. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
The authors wish to sincerely thank all of the computing researchers and administrators in East Africa who generously gave their time to participate in this study.
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Harsh, M., Bal, R., Wetmore, J. et al. The Rise of Computing Research in East Africa: The Relationship Between Funding, Capacity and Research Community in a Nascent Field. Minerva 56, 35–58 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-017-9341-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-017-9341-1