After 20 years since its first coordinated efforts, the African Union’s Development Agency – New Partnerships for Africa’s Development (AUDA-NEPAD) and its partners organised a regional engagement on the future of research and innovation indicators, across African states. The measurement of Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) in Africa is part of several decisions taken at the highest-level during African Union statutory meetings of ministers and Heads of State and Government, since 2005. The goal was to better inform the continent and the rest of the world on STI performance, and reflecting progress towards achieving the STI Strategy for Africa (STISA-2024), a contribution to the overall 50-year continental vision, “Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want”.
Increasingly, continental organisations and policy actors recognise that STI measurement and data are vital tools to support evidence-based policy formulation on the continent, and, to better inform progress towards the societal challenges of inclusion and sustainable development foregrounded in the new STISA 2034.
The African Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (ASTII) Regional Consultative Meeting, held at AUDA-NEPAD Headquarters and Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Pretoria, brought together leading experts to chart the future of STI measurement and data collection in Africa, under the theme “The Future of STI Measurement in Africa”.
The HSRC’s Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (CeSTII), represented by Dr Glenda Kruss, made a significant contribution to the discussions, reflecting experimental research to design new measures, indicators and frameworks.
Dr Kruss steered expert dialogues on integrating Africa’s informal sector into STI metrics, drawing on seven years of research by the CeSTII team. The informal sector’s economic significance, and the challenges of capturing its innovative activities in official data, are widely recognised by the African STI community. However, most countries adopt the OECD methodologies for R&D and innovation surveys, which are not fit for the purpose. CeSTII has experimented with adapting these to create new research designs, methodologies and instruments, in order to capture data on innovation, and, to provide contextualized policy-oriented analysis. For example, Dr Kruss shared a new indicator framework for assessing informal enterprises’ capabilities to formalise, informed by an empirically derived understanding of the complex, cyclical business evolution pathways of informal enterprises. The indicator framework is useful for assessing degrees of readiness to formalise, and for designing interventions targeted to informal enterprises’ business evolution capabilities.
Participants raised a problem experienced widely in relation to capacity building for STI measurement, particularly in relation to digitalisation of STI data systems. Individuals are trained, but when they leave, the organisation loses capacity. To fill this gap, and as part of research on the Science Granting Council Initiative, CeSTII designed a set of toolkits and templates, on data governance, on designing digitalisation roadmaps, on curating data, on conducting R&D surveys and on analysing data as evidence for STI policy. The toolkits were well received and there is strong interest to work further with the HSRC.
The meeting also featured contributions from AUDA-NEPAD, ASTII, African Observatory in Science, Technology and Innovation (AOSTI), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Worls Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the African Development Bank and partner funding agencies, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa. Experts from countries as varied as Egypt, Congo and Namibia shared STI measurement practices.
South African research on new STI measures and indicators under CeSTII’s leadership, is advanced, and well aligned to inform the plans for ASTII’s Phase 5 goals (2026-2030), which aim to enhance data quality for SDGs 9 (Industry, Innovation) and 17 (Partnerships). Reflecting the HSRC’s strategic focus on impact, CeSTII has translated research into cutting edge formats for wider use by policy actors, government officials, data users, and also, by informal and micro-enterprises seeking to grow their businesses through innovation.
For more details, contact: Dr Glenda Kruss, Divisional Executive (Acting), Research, Development, Science and Innovation (RDSI).