SN 4 EP 5: Reclaiming African Scholarship Through Open Science and Data Sovereignty with Dr. Julius Sindi (APHRC)

In this episode, we tackle the “painful paradox” of African scholarship: researchers acting as “architects” of data only to be locked out of their own results by global paywalls. Host Joy Owango joins Dr. Julius Sindi (APHRC) to discuss dismantling the “vicious cycle” of academic exclusion and the urgent need for a sovereign, African-governed African Research Commons.

Here are the key things to look out for:

The “Painful Paradox” of Data Access: Dr. Sindi describes the systemic exclusion where African researchers often lose access to the very data they collected or literature they wrote once they leave well-resourced international organizations, as these resources are often locked behind paywalls.

The AI “Black Spot”: A critical warning that if African data remains invisible and undiscoverable, global AI models will continue to be trained without African context, leading to biased global decisions made about the continent.

Visibility and Sovereignty through Infrastructure: The conversation highlights specific APHRC-led platforms like Africa Research Connect and the African Journal Platform, which aim to make millions of African scholars and local journals discoverable and citable.

Transitioning from Subcontractors to Leaders: A call for African institutions to move away from being mere data collectors for the Global North and instead collaborate to build an African Research Commons—a sovereign, African-governed ecosystem for knowledge production.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Joy Owango

Welcome to Mazungumzo African scholarly conversations, where we are joined by an expansive list of African policy makers, science communication and scholarly communication specialists, innovators and tertiary institution leads who contribute to this realm of scholarly and science communication. I’m your host. Joy Owango, the Executive Director of the training center in communication, TCC Africa, a capacity building trust based at the University of Nairobi, Chiromo campus. Today, I’m honored to be joined by Doctor Julius kirini Sindi, program manager and senior researcher at the African population and Health Research Center who is deeply connected to strengthening African scholarship and making it more visible globally. Dr Sindi serves at the APHRC and it is one of the continents leading research  institutions, where he contributes to advancing higher education systems and open access initiatives across Africa. With a strong background in research and academic leadership, Dr Sindi has been at the forefront of efforts to ensure that African knowledge production is not only robust, but also accessible to policy makers, practitioners and the public. Notably, APHRC has developed a pioneering Open Access database that curates African research output, offering a vital platform for increasing the visibility, accessibility and impact of scholarship produced on the continent through this and related initiatives. Dr Sindi is helping to shape how open access and evidence in informed scholarship can drive equitable development and innovation across Africa. Dr Julius, it’s a pleasure to have you at mazungumzo Welcome.

Dr Julius Sindi

Thank you so much joy. And it is a pleasure also to speak with you. We haven’t done connection in previous discussions, and I’m really excited to be to be this conversation.

Joy Owango

I mean, it’s like we are kindred spirits. I like the way you’re saying that you’re in your help in supporting research capacity initiatives and efforts at APHRC and that is actually the core of what we do as a center. So this is going to be a really fun conversation with you, because I’m sure there’s quite a lot of commonality that you’re going to get from this conversation. But before we get into it. Doctor Sindi, could you share with us your journey into research and higher education leadership, what motivated you to focusing on strengthening African scholarship and capacity building?

Dr Julius Sindi

Yeah, I think I want first of all to say what I’ve been doing at APHRC in the last three to four years, I would say that we have been trying to engineer the research ecosystem in Africa, and we are also trying to re engineer the research culture in institutions in Africa and Also the researchers. But my journey into open science began with a really painful paradox, I would say, actually painful paradox. Early my career, I’ve worked with many international organizations who are completely, very well resourced institutions where data, literature, tools are lately available. But the moment I moved on, when you move out of any of those organizations, out of those positions, access to the very data that you have exactly and you can collect, and just finishes, and I found myself locked out of data sets I have contributed to, or even unable to access even the literature I wrote because now majority of that I cannot afford because they are under paywall journals. That held the evidence I have always been trying to build upon. So this experience has taught me that African researchers, especially Africa based researchers, and masters and the PhD students are systematically excluded. They have little to no access to high quality data or even peer reviewed literature all the academic journals that shape global discourse and this excludes. This exclusion is as a provide profound consequences, you find that policymakers across Africa are often making decisions blindly because they cannot access the high quality data and even peer reviewed evidence that could inform their work, and most of it is usually locked behind the. Paywall, so I have always intended. I’ve actually also discussed with many program officers at funding agencies, where I’ve also had an opportunity to work with, some of them who genuinely want to work with African researchers, but they tell me the same thing, that African researchers are not visible. They are not discoverable. And because of because they publish in local journals, and those are not indexed internationally, and are not equally and they are not online. So as a result, 90% of the funding, which is usually allocated to come to Africa by a lot of the donor community, they flow into those global North institutions, and researchers then come to Africa youth to collect data, or even subcontractors, and then they often publish these peer reviewed articles, and we are not even included as others of these papers, despite being the architects, the collectors of this data, the researchers who did the work. So this has created a very vicious cycle that ensures we remain disadvantaged. That realization become even my convention, that if we want Africa, need to build African scholarship to drive, then we must build infrastructure, platforms, policies, skills and even and even IT assets visible, they too also makes them accessible and valuable. That is what has driven me, actually, for the last few years in this sector.

Joy Owango

No, as I said, this is going to be a fun conversation, because I’m equally passionate about research capacity. So just like you, I also had the same experience. So 18 years ago, 18 or 19 years ago, I was doing my Masters, and I can assure you, there was no institute that had access to open Research Databases, except the international ones. So I and the only way I could have access to it is because I knew a colleague who was a senior researcher there, and I had to make a case to have access to that library. And of course, the library closed at five, and at five o’clock you have no access to resources because you have to leave the research center. So I remember vividly, and I kid you not, Dr Sindi, sitting down with a security guard so that I could have access to the Wi Fi and access to the library, the library, so that I could do my work. I did that for months, and I had to get clearance from security. Because how do you explain somebody sitting there after five with the security guards working, because that is the only place you could have access to resources. So this is so dear to me because, I’ve gone through it. But then also it’s the vicious cycle. You keep on saying that you have well resourced research institutions. You have well resourced programs, even within universities, they are well resourced research programs that have all these resources, and then there are others that don’t have and you’re in the same ecosystem, so you’re left wondering, how do you make this equitable? And it’s one of the reasons why we set up even TCC Africa, because we’re like, hold on, not everybody has this opportunity, so let’s make it blanket. We will make sure that this training is scholarly communication is done at a blanket level. We’ll be advocating for open access, open science. We need to make sure equal. We make sure that there’s equitable access to resources, and then there’s also capacity strengthening to make people understand how to use these tools and get actively involved in the conversations of policy, so that we have better systems set in place. And when you’re talking about infrastructure, yes, when everybody says, Africa does not have infrastructure capacity support, I was like, How hard did you dig in to figure this out? Because I always tell people, have you said only the NRENs? Have you figured out to see what the NRENs are doing their role is to support our infrastructure systems, build their capacities further so that they can support the higher education systems and the research systems better. I mean, it’s better than it was 18 years ago, even, certainly 15 years ago, even 10 years ago, but we are not dead in the water. We have foundational systems that can actually aid in increasing the visibility. So I’m enjoying this conversation, and that was. Question number one. So it leads me to question number two.

Dr Julius Sindi

Thank you so much. I was really enjoying it, because it is really down into my heart. And particularly, just as you have said, if you actually look at a lot of the literature which comes from Africa, including the patents, majority of them comes of South Africa. And because from Africa, they isolated the systems in place.

Joy Owango

They also said that. But then they have, they have a there’s a historical bias, depending on how you look at it, of course. But then when you also look at North Africa, Egypt is also trailing ahead, and then followed by Nigeria, because of the numbers. And then you have Kenya following Morocco. But then what happens in between? You know, it’s the assumption is that nothing is happening in between, and there’s so much, there’s so much. And what I’m so happy about, is that if the higher education sector is waking up. They are no longer seeing higher education as a social good, but a no a contribution to knowledge economy. So nowadays, I know to invest in it. People are demanding for access to information, and that means we need to have better systems. And I remember the time, just like they were saying, Dr Sindi, when people,  when stakeholders and even policy actors were saying, we need to have research cultures, right now, we are seeing that change. We are seeing hospitals coming up with a research culture, something that was not heard of. So it is slowly changing, these winds of change. And I’m really proud and honored that we are part of that change. Dr Sindi, you’re part of that change. We are part of that. So the question is, now, how do we make it sustainable so that it is institutionalized, and the narrative is, how do we leapfrog by increasing our research output. And as I said, this leads me to my second question. APHRC you’ve been involved in initiatives that support higher education systems. Can you tell us more about a APHRC role in shaping research and capacity building across the continent?

Julius Kirimi Sindi

There’s a lot which African population and Health Research Center is serving as both as research powers and a system Change Catalyst. And on one hand, we generate a lot of rigorous policy relevant evidence across mental health, education, urbanization, population dynamics, food system, data science and health systems and many other areas or the other. We are actively redesigning the knowledge ecosystem so that evidence can travel across institutions, sectors, borders, and so that African researchers can lead and not follow. Therefore, I will say APHRC does three things equally very well. First, we build capacities at scale through training and mentorship programs, like a project we have, which has been having running for Qatar, the Qatar program. We also have a virtual academy now, which is really good. We have around 40, modules. There 40 different areas of you can study. We have what another program called the Integrated Network for society impact and research and evidence called Inspire. These programs anchor the skills in reproducible research methods, data governance and open research workflows, ensuring that the next generation of scholars are equipped to design for the openness for the second part is that we operationalize open science through data infrastructure, like the data for African societies and systems archives called dasa, we also have another one called data without borders initiative, and these platforms standardize, safeguard and also share data are responsibly, providing that openness and ethical protection are co exist. The third aspect is where we are trying to fix what we call now the last mile, that is the problem of visibility and discoverability. With yet that we are doing with platform that the African journal platform, which I will maybe talk a little bit, get an opportunity to tell you what more, but it is actually a collection of African journals, irrespective of their quality at the moment, to ensure that they are visible and available. Then we have also another platform, which I’ll maybe talk a little bit, called the Africa research Connect, which profiles African institutions and researchers and these and these make African research outputs and. Journals and also researchers themselves. They are discoverable. They are visible. You can cite them, and also you can see their work and actually do some little bit of analysis of some of the literature coming from Africa to get what we call policy implication. So this result is that we are both research which is now usable, and it’s also going to be more and more embedded into policies, practice programming and also ensuring that even the activities being implemented on the ground follow some research output. And that means we improve the standards of not only our government, we improve the standard of our researchers and also institutions. Over to you,

Joy Owango 

With what you’re saying, it is very clear that we as Africans need to be now, it has always been more of a rhetoric where we say we need to be in charge of our narrative, but now we need to be in charge of our narrative with action. And what you’re taking me through is the initiatives that  APHRC has taken in increasing the visibility of African output streamlining systems such that researcher to policymaker that stream that workflow or there’s a streamlined process of access to information from researcher to policymaker is easily accessible. It is also available and it is open. You see, these are things that we if you are waiting for somebody to do it for you, it would never happen. It has to take somebody from the continent to make this uncomfortable decisions, sometimes not rely on funding and say this has to be done, and let’s build on those ecosystems. And that is such good news, because, as I said, when we have conversations about infrastructure and capacity building, the question is, did you find out to see who, what is being done on the ground? It might look small, but it is making a big impact.

Dr Julius Sindi

Actually joy, one of the reason, one of the reason we tried we are doing some of these things, because at one point or another, I did some work on funding mechanisms, and then even at APHRC, for the last two or so, three years, we have also been working with some of the funders who come to us and complain and say, We want to work in a certain area, but we can’t get researchers and institution in Africa who can do that. So our question was, you can’t get them? We can’t get them. So our purpose was, Is it true? And actually, when we asked, when we got even areas they wanted to work in and we also did our own research. It was, true, very difficult to get an African researcher in Nano, mono, contraceptive area develop some products, contraceptive tribe, good luck trying to be that on the on the internet. You don’t get together. So if it took us two, three months to get some of these people, and it was a lot of networking and all that. So we realized it is true. It is there’s a structural barrier. Somebody has to do about it. So we are actually still at the beginning. We are the beginning part of it. And we said, what do we have to make people discoverable and accessible? How do we do that? We have to create systems. We have to create platform. They are costly, but if APHRC has been saying that this is something they have to do, because they actually we work across all the continent we’re in that five African countries. My project, which I was working in, was allowed, actually in 54 African countries. So we could be the only ones who have the capacity, and even the rich, to be able to do that. And then if we can get also supporters to work with us to do this, then it’s possible even to make it easy for the even the first one to do that. And let me now give you even where it even becomes even worse. Remember, in future, majority of decisions aren’t going to be made by AI or somebody consulting AI. AI requires a lot of data. It has required a lot of data to be trained. Most of the Africa, data is not accessible, is not is not discoverable. So that means, even though the saying is that the AI are being trained with all the world and Data. That’s not true. They have income data. They’ll still be to be missing. Is the darkness? Is not available. So unless we make it available, so that even these models can be trained with African data, then individuals and countries and international organizations. I’m going to be using AI to make decisions about Africa without the African context, because it’s not African data. So it is.  Some people say, even when we have data, let’s keep it on our side. No, the argument is all these data. They are using the word data. Try and go into any model of AI and tell it to draw for you the map of Africa. And you’ll see where they will put countries, and you’ll see where they put cities they’ll put even, So that tells you they don’t have African data. No, we have to have this data for our own use, for our own to train our own models, but also the world also to train models. Because whether we like it or not, the world make a lot of decision for us about, so they better use the correct information.

Joy Owango

Actually, you are so right, the world has been making, when I say the world, other continents cut from Africa have been making decisions for us about us based on the information they have, and it’s always incomplete information, and that has to change, and it means we, as Africans, as you’re saying, we need to take that leap. That blind faith. Start making our work accessible. Start investing in our own infrastructures, no matter how small it has to start somewhere and then build on that. And that is also pretty much like one of our open infrastructure programs coming up with African originated persistent identifiers, nobody would have thought about it. And the more we are getting into that technology, the more we are realizing it goes beyond subject specification for assigning identifiers, it is for supporting workflows. We are getting even personas as far as wide as publishers facilities, saying this will work for us. And yes, nobody had ever thought about that from an African context, and thinking of creating technologies with a global south lens, because that’s where we are, because we receive information and we share information with that lens. So now it makes it even those who want to work with us more conscientious. They’re like, this is how things are done on this side of the world. Just like though we are conscientious, when you’re going to the global north, they say, Oh, this is how things are done. So this is how you learn. It had to begin somewhere. And as you said, with the rise of AI, those the iniquity is just going to just widen because we are in a black spot. So we have to make that decision to make our data accessible. We use our infrastructures, and use and also use that to build collaborations in order to make our work visible. And that goes to number three, you spoken on a recent podcast about advancing open access as a way to strengthen African scholarship. From your perspective, why is open access so critical for the continent, and what are some of the successes and barriers you’ve observed so far, just feeding to this question with the experiences that you’ve had with APHRC and the infrastructure, the infrastructure developments that you have created, and also the data programs.

Dr Julius Sindi

I think there’s a lot to say about this, but, let’s start by saying that open access is foundational. That is foundational because of three reasons. One, as you have started talking about, is equity researchers, practitioners and policy makers should not need foreign institution logging, no or grant funding to get to access articles. So all need African evidence, which is collected. Collected, as I said, I collected data when I was working with some CJ centers. That data is in the CJ centers, a lot of data, and I have absolutely no access to that data when knowledge is locked behind pay all or logins, and your door access because you don’t have logins, we are effectively excluded from our own intellectual heritage.

Joy Owango

That is actually very systemic, because it has repercussion. It has generational repercussion.

Dr Julius Sindi

The second one is impact. That is open output. Generally cited more, they are also used more because they can default, more likely to shape policy and even practice and implementation of the ground. So visibility will drive influence, and influence will drive change we want to see in Africa, our policy makers, including politicians. When you ever talk to them, they say, We don’t know what you what the universities and research institutions do in the ivory towers. That’s why, when you look at even the funding which is given to the African research institutions and university is getting lower and smaller and smaller because the politicians are the policy makers say those people just do their work and write about their things which they’re interested and those things we are not interested in them. So we talk about, if you have to have impact that that data must be available in a form which is usable, accessible, even for the people who are not researchers. The last one is talk about sovereignty.  When they have open infrastructure owned or governed by African institutions in Africa, they should keep the our value, that is our data, our metrics, our narratives, our credit on the continent, this is about agency and the ability to set our own research agenda. There’s a saying which says, until the lions learn how to tell the story. The story we always hear is the story of the hunter. So here is a case where we are lions being hunted, and we are able to escape, because you find lions in the wild, but we cannot able to tell our story. No. So the examples APHRC has done advances on open access on multiple fronts. The first one, I started talking about the Africa research Connect. This is a platform which we have built, which is for Africa as a public good. It has more than 6 million researchers. It has more than over 200,000 institutions, and over 4 million literature at the moment, which is available. So it links researchers, institutions and output, reducing the fragmentation by making institutions, researchers project literature funding mechanism discoverable, a very persistent identifiers and interoperable metadata. And this is where we need to now work very closely with you, with your initiative in PID, the next one we have done, also, we have done the African journal platform. This is after looking for the Jan African journals in scopas and finding out only 7% available there. Web of Science, only 7% available. Google, only 30% available. When we went to the local organizations in Africa, mainly in South Africa, and John Sabine, we asked them, can you be able to keep to put also many of these African journals which are available out there on your stable and on your platform, they say they don’t have resources. So it’s not because we now wanted to deprecate but he said, If there’s not it’s not possible, then we’ll have to create one. To strengthen the visibility and operations of the African journals. We have to improve the indexing, whether whatever, whatever quality we may say, Let’s index them and put those quality indicators on them. Let’s also assist them on the problem of editorial practice workflow. Let’s also ensure that they understand what are the standards and how to comply with the international standard the long term and also long term preservation, so that high quality African journals are not penalized by infrastructure deficiencies and removing the problem of good African journals being called predatory journals. After that, we have also created something else, now that is about visibility, but you have created a platform called DASA. It’s data for African science, societies and systems archive and also the data without borders, which enables secure, standardized and ethical governance of data sharing, they incorporate consent framework, identification and the tiered access app, proving that openness and protection can actually exist, then we have no other system. We have other initiatives, like Qatar, which you have talked about, which train PhDs, post graduates, and we also have virtual academy, where now African can access a lot of training for free. For now, we have been inspired. Network, which brings our African institution together to think on how they can share their skills, pipeline and their data. And we also train scholars to design for openness from the start and the data management using the fair principles where pre prints open access publishing and reproducing, reproducibility of analysis, success, I can say is that we have moved from an ad hoc sharing to a systematic stewardship projects now can plan for openness at the inception, because they have the data, they have the platform, they have standards, and they know what they need to do from the beginning. They can do data management plans. They can do standardized meta data. And also they can also include some curation budgets as they do their project. We also have data reuse arising, where Multi country comparative now work and is available can be done because there is data student VCs, student can now get a lot of data, including even from the Africa research connect, and also ensure that policy briefs now can draw from shared data set rather than from, duplicative data collection. And also visibility metrics are improving, because the more we with, the more these data sets and the more of these literature is available out there. We find that Africa data center journals are now being indexed, cited and integrated in the global discoverable services. And also the fact that we are training African journals on what it means to be called a good general that’s where we start. Of course, we are barriers, and the barriers we still we have article processing charges, which is still there because we still need to publish in some of these international journal that that still becomes a reality we can’t ignore because a lot of our universities actually insist your must for you to be even graduate, or even for you to be promoted. So that cannot be ignored. So we have to figure a way of how do we discuss with these institutions so that we can remove or induce that barrier? Then there’s those transformation of agreement, because a lot of the transformation agreement often are not done with Africans on the table. Africa is excluded.

Joy Owango

They’re not particularly friendly.

Dr Julius Sindi

They’re not. And then we are advocating for Diamond Open Access models and funders mandates that covers the full open life cycle, and not just the publications. Because if you only have publications, but not the rest of it, then it becomes a problem. And then we also have a problem of infrastructure sustainability. They cost a lot of money, creating a system, cost a lot of money, hosting it, ensuring that the security issues, sometimes you have to put them on them on the cloud, which is very expensive. So open repositories require continuous funding for storage, curation, governance, security, and we are experimenting with the consortium model and the public paragraphic partnerships. And we hope that some of these initiatives will solve some of these problems. We also have a big, big problem, and this is where I actually feel really sad is what we call policy fragmentation, where data protection regimes vary across countries. We have invested every in compliance across models, models and the consent languages that are anticipating reuse while protecting participants. But now the question is, what? What are these policies should we use? Should we use an African policy? Should we use the European policies, the American, Canadian, What is it? How do we sit on this table? So ensure so although we want to get this our headphones is simple. We want an open as possible. And what is what needs to be protected should be closed as necessary? So that are the things that context where governance and respect commute, where we respect community consent practice, local institution, also some of local institutions to keep their data gold alignment, and even call the ship norms that owner data originate originators. Because I don’t know whether you are aware, there is a paper which was written, very good paper, actually written about Kenya, about these universal income, where some organization is doing extremely well here in in Kenya, and they have, they initiated what we call universal where they send money. Instead of going to do project, they send money into those, into those to household. And after now analyzing, analyzing that data from Western and nyanza, they found that the fact that there is such little money sent to those households, there is actually 45 decrease of maternal and, in fact, mortality in those households where that is given that has a lot of policy implication. But you know, the problem is, although that that work was done in Kenya, that data was collected in Kenya, that data has been read, that paper has been published by our researchers in Oxford and somewhere in the US. So the question I come to ask is that, why would they will not work with us so that we can give local perspectives, and also we can also give local credence, because if you go to the Kenyan parliament and they say, This is what some people might look at it as, who ordered that paper, and then they say, well, it was ordered by somebody from UK and somebody from The US. That is not ours.

Joy Owango

And where was it collected at home.

Dr Julius Sindi

So, those are the barriers, and those are some of the things we need to solve. So anyway, over to you, but those are our experiences at the moment, at our initiatives.

Joy Owango

So at APHRC, you work closely with universities, and governments. How does this cross sector collaboration help to strengthen higher education systems and what lessons can be drawn for scaling similar partnerships across the continent?

Dr Julius Sindi

So one of the way we work is that we realize APHRC is one organizations in all of Africa. Africa is very huge, and we have run one organization, APHRC, but we have amazing, great universities. They have amazing institutions like yours, which may not be as visible sometimes so our work and our egos has been. We do not want to go to every country and create an APHRC, but if we want to go to every country, work with governments, work with the local institutions and build their capacity for better research, accessing of fund. Because whatever it means Africa, a lot of the research is funded by external funds, so there’s nothing we can do about it. Africa can only spend, in general, 0.45 percentage of our fund, of our GDP, on research. So generally, there is actually RRD, not even research in RRD in general. So that tells you there’s a lot of the research be done in Africa will still be funded by institutions, foundations, donors, whatever it is from outside. So the first thing we do with many of these institution is that we find, if there is an experience, we have it better proposed writing, we also work with them to improve their capacity. So we don’t see other institutions as competitors. But for us, we see them as fellow workers in the in an ecosystem. Because if we don’t do that, remember what I don’t I say, 90% of the resources, which are allocated by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in the last time, by us ID or by fcdo, is actually given to institutions out there. And they come then to work to Africa. So if we see one another as competitors, we are losing the plot. It’s because 90% of the money doesn’t come to Africa. So if there’s any way can improve the capacity in terms of proposal development, in terms conducting good research, in terms of Grants Management, those are areas we have problems with. We have problems with somebody is given money, but they assume it is their money. They buy land, whatever they do. That’s not why they are funded and they are not refunded. Again, all institution get money and they use it for their own recurrent expenditures. When a researcher wants to get that money is not available only if they want to do a procurement. The procurement system is like putting a tool. So what then happens is that a researcher even can get money and finish a research time which. Was allocated before, before very important procurement, like computers oriented or equipment at that. So we have to work with these institutions to understand what is the problem. In fact, anytime we work with many of these institutions and researchers in Africa in general, they actually are saying there’s no money, but you tell them there’s a lot of money out there, but they say we have written all these project proposals we don’t win, so we have to tell them why they don’t win, not because we are expert. We also write many proposals that we don’t win, but we have to tell them what it means to win, how to ensure to increase our chances of winning, but even after winning, how do we shepherd that money? How do we Shepherd those resources? How do we deliver quality? How do we deliver value for the investors who invest in us? How can we even communicate? And that’s why we come in, even after we have done very good work, we have invested and we have done very good. We have got very good result. And do we do even have a capacity to communicate that result to not only the donors themselves, the investors or even our policy makers to understand what we say, or even the general public who need to utilize that type of information? So there is a lot of areas which needs to be done to ensure that we work with these institutions for those institutions to be better. And when all institutions in Africa are better, then we are better. I keep on telling last week, I was in masinde muliro University of Science and Technology. And I kept on telling them they think that moi University, or they think that our university makerere university is their competitor. And I told them, no, they are not your competitor. Your competitor is Harvard University. Your competitor is your Northwest, your university. Your competitor is University of Cape Town. Your competitor is London School of Economics, London School of Tropical Medicine. So if you have to put your game, you have to make sure that your game is at par with Avant on. I might be because the funding mechanism they are getting, they are getting from the same sources. Like now, after the change of government in the US and the change of the international time at the moment, that means that the money, which was coming easily from the government in the US to many of these institutions, will no longer be available. So they’re going to go to the same foundation. They’re going to go to Gates Foundation, they’re going to go to fund Foundation, they’re going to go to the federal foundation. They’re going to go to you, the packer, so they will be competing for the same amount of money, and they will have a case. And the case is, we show result, we deliver value for your for your investment. That’s what we also need to do in Africa. Everything we need to do to ask ourselves, what is our value proposition? Do we keep on saying that t our investors?

Joy Owango

What is the return on investment? I like that. So now, finally, I’m so sad that this has to end, but this has been such a lovely conversation. Looking ahead, if you could influence one major transformation in how African institutions produce, share and govern knowledge in the next decade, what would it be and why?

Dr Julius Sindi

But it’s also difficult, but I’ll give an attempt. If I could influence one transformation, it would this, establishment of an African research Commons, and they go and African governed infrastructure for knowledge production and sharing, and this is at the moment, is so important. The work you are doing at TCC is so important. So the first thing I will do is ensure that I have a persistent identifiers for all researchers, institutions and output, including great literature for research organization registry, identifiers for institutions and dois for output so that African scholarship is discoverable. And the second thing I’ll do in that part of the common is a ventilated, interoperable repositories that share metadata and enable cross border discovery and reuse, governed by African institution and aligned with African data protection framework, I also ensure that we have open access journals that is supported by consortium funding models, so that others do not have to pay for publishing and leaders do not have to pay for access. We also and then it is also sustainable, but then it is sustainable. We need to figure a way of to make sure it’s sustainable. We also need to ensure that we have a standardized and ethical data sharing protocol that respects communities consent, protects participants and enables responsible use and then operationalize through platforms like the ones we are building, like this Africa, research, connect data without borders and many others, need to ensure that we have continental alignment on what Open Science policies are, that is funder mandates. That means we need to ensure that they are funded institutional policies and national strategies that make openness the default and not an exception. Because Cal education is not a default, is an exception. Why this matter is because an African research common would ensure that a student in Kisumu can find and reuse data sets from Nairobi or from Mombasa, that an editor in Accra can run a journal at a global standard without changing others that Are policy maker in Lusaka can access timely and that a program officer in Washington, DC or Seattle, Brussels, can discover and fund African researchers directly. The initiatives will also have this, as we have discussed, like the Africa research connect and the journal, the African journal, platform, dasa, or whatever it is, are not separate project. They should have the same architecture of the common ones. Openness is how we align excellence with equity. It ensures that African scholarship is not just produced, it is seen. It is also trusted, so that people can trust what we produce, and, can be used by us, by our policy makers, by researchers, by the international community. And we also want to ensure that we are no longer invisible and no longer subcontractors, but leaders in global knowledge ecosystem, so that we stop being said that we produce only 2% all the world knowledge generation every year. Because if you look at the moment, we only produce 2% when you look at the patterns, it’s actually 0.04%. So we need to ensure this is done, and that is all the way we can do it, but it just starts from somewhere, and you and I and the institutions we work with are trying their best, and other African institutions also should come on board.

Joy Owango

Thank you so much. That is a nice way to end this podcast. I really, really enjoyed it. We are so aligned. And I think what is making us so passionate is because this is home. We’re not going anywhere. We it is our job to make this better so that the future generation can have easier access to resources. I don’t want my grandson sitting outside a library with a security guard so that he can, yes, you can have access to resources. I do not want a top researcher relying on login details from their partners in the global north in order to access resources. And I definitely do not want our partners in the Global North trying to figure out how they can get resources and researchers coming from Africa. And it is on us to do this. It is really on us to make this change. We are the change. We literally are the change. No one is coming to save us. We have to do it ourselves. We literally have to hurt ourselves and show that it works. Then you can work with us on our terms. This has been really nice. I enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much, and have a good day. Bye, Dr Sindi.

Dr Julius Sindi

Thank you so much joy. Thank you for having me. I appreciate bye.

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