The InterAcademy Partnership (IAP) has released a report making the case for strengthening the science-policy interface in Africa and the critical contribution of African national academies at continental, regional and national level.

The IAP, a global network of over 140 national academies of science, engineering and medicine, suggests that feeding scientific expertise into the United Nations’ (UN’s) and the African Union’s (AU’s) policy frameworks would provide a platform for African national academies to accelerate the implementation of the various ambitions.

The ‘Harnessing Science, Engineering and Medicine to Address Africa’s Challenges’ report, the culmination of a three-year project funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York, was released at a two-day workshop in July, hosted by the Academy of Science of South Africa to interrogate South Africa’s progress towards ensuring clean and accessible water under the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.

The project was framed around the UN’s 17 SDGs and the AU’s Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa (STISA-2024), as both frameworks encapsulate Africa’s key policy challenges and African academies cold play an important role in supporting these policies.

The project aimed to explore how the African science community, and science academies in particular, can leverage science to serve society and contribute to Africa’s socioeconomic and environmental development.

“In implementing these important policy frameworks, African countries face significant challenges. National and continental academies of science are important sources of knowledge and advice for investment in, and the application of, science. We anticipate this report will help the academies fulfil their role and, at the same time, help policymakers better understand how the scientific community can help,” says IAP project co-chairperson and University of Pretoria professor Robin Crewe.

The realisation of these frameworks requires access to, and the application of, the best available evidence from global and African science communities.

“Supporting this vital effort, the project piloted different ways of building science policy leadership among early-career African researchers, building a cadre of policy-literate scientists who can help pave the way for more rigorous, evidence-informed decision-making in Africa; and of drawing on members of the African science diaspora to engage with their national academies to help science serve society,” Crewe comments.

The report sets out concrete, actionable recommendations for the UN, the AU and its agencies, merit-based academies and the wider science community.

An overarching outcome of the report is the need for academies and policymakers to engage openly and inclusively to provide evidence-informed policy advice, formulation, implementation and review.

“Independent expert advice is a vital part of evidence-informed policymaking at global and continental level, and at national level, where policies are typically formulated, implemented and reviewed: strengthening the evidence-policy interface at all these levels is imperative for achieving the objectives articulated in the SDGs and the STISA-2024,” the report notes.

The report suggests that the role of science in informing robust policymaking is not widely recognised by African policymakers, and there remains a strong advocacy role for national science academies to champion science on the continent.

In addition, African governments should be investing more in scientific research and, ideally, aim for the investmet to equate to 1% of gross domestic product, while supporting science education at school level and raising awareness among the public and academy fellowships.

Within the three-year project, the IAP explored the following aims: mobilising African leaders in science, engineering and medicine to develop and implement new approaches to addressing shared challenges; strengthening merit-based academies in Africa as effective civil society organisations and respected sources of evidence-informed advice to their societies; and building stronger, sustained links and partnerships between African and global expertise and the policymakers and donor organisations working to address Africa’s challenges.