Countries from the region are the top recipients of funding from the Grand Challenges Africa — a $120 million programme meant to address health and development setbacks on the continent.

Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Sudan and the Comoros Islands collectively received $64.8 million or 54 per cent of the total funding, the African Academy of Sciences reported at a recent conference in Ghana.

Out of the 380 projects on the continent, 240 were from the region. Kenya was the top recipient, taking up $26.1 million with 116 projects.

Grand Challenges is run by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, USAid and Grand Challenges Canada.

The region also performed well on programmes supported by Bill and Melinda Gates, the African Union and the UK Department for International Development called Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa (AESA).

AESA runs a programme called Developing Excellence in Leadership, Training and Science (Deltas) — a $100 million funding initiative set up in 2015 for senior scientists in Africa to drive their own agenda.

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While the financial assistance that the scientists and researchers received from some of these programmes is directed to general matters on biomedical research, a number of them directed it to malaria.
However, there are concerns that the funding that has gone into East Africa translates into very little policy, as governments continue to ignore their scientists.

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Dr Tom Kariuki, the director of the African Academy of Sciences, which mentors more than 1,300 scientists across the continent, said that researchers are gradually being taught to involve policymakers from the beginning of their research rather than at the end.

Though the AU asks each nation to spend one per cent of its GDP on research, Kenya had one of Africa’s highest research expenditures at 0.8 per cent of GDP in 2010, followed by Ethiopia (0.61 per cent) and Uganda (0.5 per cent), notes Unesco.

Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania also participated in Africa’s Science and Technology Consolidated Plan of Action (CPA, 2005–2014) and have embraced its successor, the Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa (STISA-2024).

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Implementation of the CPA suffered from a failure to set up the African Science and Technology Fund to ensure sustainable funding, still several centres of excellence in biosciences were established, including a research hub for East Africa in Kenya and two complementary networks, Bio-Innovate and the African Biosafety Network of Expertise.

Tanzania, Cameroon, Ghana, Senegal and South Africa set up an institute of mathematical sciences. The others were Cameroon, Ghana, Senegal and South Africa.