South African university’s comments follow vice-chancellor’s controversial meeting with Russian consul general

Stellenbosch University has called the establishment of new research links with Russia “impossible” due to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and the resulting geopolitical tensions.

The comment, on 19 February, came after the South African university drew criticism when it emerged that vice-chancellor Wim de Villiers (pictured) had hosted Aleksei Malenko, Russia’s consul general in Cape Town, the week before.

The consulate tweeted on 17 February: “Today Russian consul general in Cape Town Mr A Malenko held a meeting with rector and vice-chancellor of Stellenbosch University W de Villiers. The parties discussed [the] prospective of future cooperation in different spheres.”

Responses on the social media platform to the tweet ranged from support for the meeting to disgust. Leon Schreiber, an MP for South Africa’s main opposition party the Democratic Alliance, wrote: “This is what leadership bereft of all principle looks like.”

The university published a statement on its website saying that the meeting with the consul general was “purely academic in nature” and that De Villiers had “clearly framed the meeting within the understanding of the current geopolitical environment that makes collaboration impossible”. It added that the university “stands firmly against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”.

No new partnerships

In a statement to Research Professional News, a university spokesperson clarified that the comment referred to the initiation of new partnerships. A partnership with the HSE National Research University in Moscow, agreed “a number of years ago”, is still in place, they said.

“While we cannot prescribe the individual actions of our lecturers and students, there have been no reports regarding academic collaboration resuming between Stellenbosch University and Russian academics since 2021,” the spokesperson said.

“The university will not, and has not, pursued any further partnerships, as made clear by the vice-chancellor,” they added.

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Africa’s turn will come in 2025 as global gatherings aim to improve access and equity

The International Aids Society has announced that it will start to rotate of its global conferences geographically to help people from different regions around the world to attend.

The 14 February announcement comes after the society’s 2022 conference in Canada saw several people who planned to attend—especially from the African continent—unable to secure visas.

The announcement includes the two most influential conferences organised by IAS: the International Aids Conference and the IAS Conference on HIV Science, which take place in alternating years. It will also affect the HIV Research for Prevention Conferences organised by the IAS.

This year, the IAS Conference on HIV Science will be held in Australia in July. In 2024, the International Aids Conference will be held in Germany. The IAS is inviting bids from African hosts for the IAS Conference on HIV Science in 2025 and from Latin America and the Caribbean for the International Aids Conference in 2026.

Looking ahead, the conferences will rotate between five world regions—Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and North America—and no region will be awarded a conference consecutively, the IAS says.

Previously, conferences have been held in nearby cities in consecutive years, usually in wealthy nations that delegates from poor countries struggle to travel to. For example, in 2017 and 2018 the main conferences were held in France and the Netherlands, respectively. In 2010 and 2011 they were held in Austria and Italy.

“The global rotation will help to ensure that people from around the world have an opportunity to participate in our conferences in person. It will also allow us to shine a spotlight on critical HIV issues in every region,” said IAS president Sharon Lewin in a statement.

Cities that wish to host the meetings will be judged on six criteria, including the safety of delegates, especially so-called “key populations”, which includes sex workers and men who have sex with men.

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Partnership between UK and South Africa will train dozens of master’s and PhD students

South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Edinburgh in the UK have jointly established a postgraduate training scheme targeting sustainability.

In a statement on 3 February, Wits confirmed that the scheme would enable an estimated 50 African researchers to study for a master’s in sustainability research. Of that cohort, 30 will continue to a PhD that will be supervised by both institutions. The scheme is supported by the Mastercard Foundation.

The University of Edinburgh said in a statement that the scheme was part of a broader programme it was running in Africa with the Mastercard Foundation, which features a digital education network to support African universities in developing online degrees in sustainability.

James Smith, Edinburgh’s vice-principal with responsibility for international affairs, said in a statement that the project aimed to provide cutting-edge research training for talented researchers in Africa.

“The programme will act as a catalyst to ensure that African researchers are at the forefront of addressing some of our most profound challenges,” he said.

Ruksana Osman, senior deputy vice-chancellor for academic affairs at Wits, said: “Wits is pleased to be part of this incredible programme that will go a long way towards advancing teaching and learning and knowledge creation on the continent.”

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Tracker will hold signatories of last year’s Kigali declaration to account

A tool to track whether signatories of the Kigali Declaration on Neglected Tropical Diseases are meeting their commitments to fight overlooked illnesses was launched on 30 January.

The Kigali Declaration Commitment Tracker will capture, track and monitor commitments made by countries and organisations towards the declaration, published in June last year. The initiative aims to generate political will, community commitment, resources and action to fight NTDs.

The tracker’s launch, on World NTD Day, coincided with Ghana becoming the 12th NTD-endemic country to sign the declaration. “An Africa free from NTDs is possible. Let us act now, and act together,” said the country’s president, Nana Akufo-Addo, in a statement.

Two more commitments to fight NTDs were made this week. Global pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline extended its commitment to fight soil-transmitted helminthiasis, promising to donate up to 100 million doses of medicine per year from 2026 to 2030.

And Spain-based NGO Anesvad Foundation promised to spend €34 million by 2026 to reduce the burden in sub-Saharan Africa of NTDs that affect the skin, such as Buruli ulcer, cutaneous leishmaniasis and leprosy.

To date, the Kigali declaration’s 61 signatories have generated more than US$1.6 billion and more than 19bn treatment doses, including pills, to fight NTDs. The commitment tracker will hold those who have made these commitments to account, said Thoko Elphick-Pooley, executive director of public-private partnership Uniting to Combat NTDs, which manages the tracker.

“The tracker is providing a new level of transparency that will enable us to hold each other accountable and effectively mobilise new resources that are required to end the suffering caused by these diseases,” he said in a statement. 

More remains to be done, he added. The first year of the pandemic saw a 34 per cent drop in the number of people receiving mass treatments for NTDs, and the rate only recovered slightly in 2021. “There is a financing crisis for NTDs,” Elphick-Pooley said.

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Partnership aims to produce medicines made for Africa by Africans

A partnership between international pharmaceutical companies and South Africa’s research community will result in fairer, more accessible research outcomes that address the needs of local people, one of its architects has said.

Ben Durham, chief director of bio-innovation at South Africa’s Department of Science and Innovation, said the partnership, announced on 27 January, would create fresh collaborations and also boost pharmaceutical manufacturing locally.

The partners are the department, the South African Medical Research Council and the Innovative Pharmaceutical Association of South Africa, an association comprising innovative multinational pharmaceutical companies.

Writing to Research Professional News by email, Durham (pictured, left) said the agreement was intended to establish research programmes on communicable and non­-communicable diseases and improve access to precision medicines for locals. Precision medicine is when doctors use information about their patients’ genetic makeup, and other individual health data, to guide their treatment.

The international pharmaceutical companies participating in the partnership through the Innovative Pharmaceutical Association of South Africa include Merck, Pfizer, Novartis, Roche, Sanofi, GSK and AstraZeneca. They will join the other partners to establish a clinical research ‘innovation cluster’, which will combine the expertise of the private sector with that of universities. 

“Co-funding of some clinical research is also not excluded,” Durham said.

Innovation and access

Africa’s genetic diversity means a better understanding of mutations in populations can have “significant” effects on treatment, he said. “South Africa is in the process of building a strong precision medicine programme and already some innovative pharmaceutical companies are co-funding some of the research activities.”

But doing the right science is only one piece of the puzzle, he added. “It is also essential to ensure that the new treatments being developed are affordable and have a more widespread use case. By developing these treatments together, access to medicines is built into the research programme.”

The agreement is a broad and general document that provides a basis for more specific partnerships to be developed, said Durham. But, he added, it will create a formal process where individual innovative pharmaceutical companies can offer universities with pharmaceutical degrees and drug discovery more activities and support.

“One of the first activities under this memorandum of understanding is to establish a joint steering committee that will also develop the annual work plan. One of the first projects is around regulatory support and strengthening. This will ensure that the scrutiny for the safety and appropriateness of medicines is improved, and the capabilities of the regulators are continually developed as new drugs come to the market,” Durham said.

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Study centre launched and memorandum of understanding signed, with more details due after February meeting

South Africa and Turkey have signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at deepening their cooperation in science, technology and innovation.

South Africa’s Department of Science and Innovation said on 13 January that the agreement reflected the importance both countries attached to science, technology and innovation as a catalyst for their respective economies and a way to improve living standards.

The partnership will promote inter-institutional cooperation, joint research, exchange of policy information and exchange of scientists, researchers, technical experts and scholars, the DSI said in a statement.

A meeting will take place in February to discuss how to operationalise the agreement, Khaya Sishuba, the DSI’s director of bilateral relations for Europe and the Gulf states, told Research Professional News. “There will be a multiplicity of joint activities under the partnership, so the amount of money that will flow into the cooperation is not yet known,” he said.

According to the DSI, Turkey and South Africa have maintained strategic bilateral political, economic and cultural relations since 1991.

Turkish studies centre

Earlier this month, the University of Pretoria launched the Maarif Centre for Turkish Studies with the aid of the Turkish Maarif Foundation and the Turkish embassy in South Africa, in a further move to deepen relations between the two countries.

The centre, which is situated at the university’s Future Africa campus, aims to boost higher education opportunities and promote academic and policy interaction and cultural relations between the two countries.

At the launch, Birol Akgün, president of the Turkish Maarif Foundation, said the centre would play an integral role in transforming the world through African research excellence.

Turkey’s foreign affairs minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said he believed South Africa and Turkey had an important role to play in what he described as an “age of conflict”.

“By learning from each other through this research centre, we can change the world for the better, together,” the minister said.

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Partnership will investigate viral genetics, undetected spread and vaccine effectiveness

Scientists from the National Biomedical Research Institute in the Democratic Republic of the Congo will participate in a US$2.8 million partnership to study mpox (a viral disease formerly known as monkeypox) with the University of Manitoba in Canada.

The research project, jointly led by Jason Kindrachuk, who holds a research chair in molecular pathogenesis of emerging viruses at UM, and Placide Mbala, head of the epidemiology department and pathogen sequencing lab at the National Biomedical Research Institute in DRC, will aim to prevent interest in the disease waning now that cases are decreasing after its unprecedented spread around the world last year infected more than 70,000 confirmed cases. 

“We can’t let scientific interest fade now that cases are decreasing across most of the globe, said Kindrachuk in a 10 January statement. He also called for a better understanding of how differences in the viral genomes affect disease severity.

The study will look into the reason why mpox spread from endemic regions in Africa last year, whether it was due to genetic mutations in the virus, for example. It will also look for antibodies in populations to gauge any undetected spread of the disease, and study the efficacy of the Imvamune mpox vaccine provided to Canadians last year.

“Covid-19 has created momentum for virus research,” Kindrachuk said. “We need to harness some of that for mpox, not only for our own country but, importantly, for those who live in areas of Africa where the virus is endemic and continues to have an impact year after year. This study is a step in that direction.”

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Charitable health funder sees investments drop six per cent but vows to spend £16 billion

Wellcome has said it remains committed to spending £16 billion on science over the next decade, despite the value of its investments dropping six per cent between 2021 and 2022.

Julia Gillard, chair of the big-spending health research funder, said Wellcome would be willing to eat into its endowment to stick to its commitment to raise its levels of research funding.

The UK-based charity is a bulwark for UK health research, with current spending levels similar to both the Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Health and Care Research.

The latest annual report for the UK-based charity, published on 10 January, shows the charity spent a record £1.4bn in 2021-22, up 11 per cent from the previous year.

But global financial headwinds meant that Wellcome’s assets fell by six per cent after inflation, the weakest returns since the financial crisis.

Wellcome’s assets were worth £37.8bn in September 2022, down from £38.2bn in September 2021.

Doubling down

“Our investment team have had to work hard this year to protect the endowment,” said Gillard, but she added that Wellcome’s “exceptional” long-term financial performance meant “we can stick to our high level of spending commitments and keep supporting science to solve urgent health challenges”.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Gillard said Wellcome would increase investment in research “even if it means that we are spending down some of the currently held endowment”.

The commitment comes just as the charity starts to ramp up its spending in earnest. In January 2022, Wellcome announced that from 2023, it would be spending £16bn over 10 years, up from around £5bn over the last five years, due to the strong performance of its investments.

Future plans

The increase in investment levels came in the wake of a new strategy that focuses Wellcome’s funding on three key areas—infectious diseases, mental health, and climate and health—in addition to supporting basic research.

Over the past year, Wellcome launched new funding schemes in line with its strategy, and Gillard said the charity funded “a broader range of disciplines and with more money behind curiosity-driven science than ever before”.

She added that Wellcome will be “announcing new awards for discovery research” and is “developing plans for advocacy campaigns that complement our funding by pushing for actions that will have a positive impact on research and, most importantly, on people’s health”.

Gillard also said the funder is “taking an increasingly global approach”. In 2022, more than 30 per cent of Wellcome funding went to non-UK organisations compared with 20 per cent in 2021.

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Group will advise US government on strengthening links with people of African descent

United States president Joe Biden signed an executive order this week to create a council to strengthen dialogue between US officials and members of the African diaspora in the country.

Biden signed the order establishing the President’s Advisory Council on African Diaspora Engagement in the United States on 13 December, as the US-Africa Leadership Summit began.

Within 180 days the US Secretary of State will appoint no less than 12 members reflecting the diversity of the African Diaspora in the US to serve on the council. The council “shall provide information, analysis, and recommendations” on ways to advance equity in diaspora communities, expand exchange educational programmes between Africa and the US and initiatives to strengthen cultural, social, political and economic ties, among other priorities.

“The African Diaspora in the US is a source of strength, and encompasses African Americans—including descendants of enslaved Africans—and nearly two million African immigrants who have close familial, social and economic connections to the African continent,” Biden’s order reads.

The White House said the US has invested over $385 million in education and youth leadership programming in the first two years of the Biden administration. “We intend to invest more than $690 million over the next two years, for a total of nearly US$1.1 billion,” it said.

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Hartebeesthoek ground station will help Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre talk to its lunar rover

South Africa’s national space agency Sansa will provide communication support for the United Arab Emirates first mission to the moon.

The Emirates Lunar Mission’s Rashid Rover blasted off from Earth on 11 December aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, United States.

After the launch Sansa signed an agreement with the UAE’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre that will see Sansa’s Hartebeesthoek Ground Station provide direct communications between the centre and the rover after it lands on the Moon’s surface.

Sansa committed to commissioning two antennas, a 12-metre S-band antenna and a 26-meter parabolic antenna, to track and communicate with the spacecraft.

‘No room for error’

The lunar spacecraft is expected to travel for five months to the moon. During that time a UAE engineering team will visit South Africa to prepare for the mission.

Tiaan Strydom, acting Sansa commercial services executive, said the organisation will be thorough in its support. “Lunar missions are complex, amassed with daunting challenges and have little to no room for error.”

The mission, added Strydom, is a good build-up for South Africa to prepare for supporting manned moon missions, which are now a focus for many players in the space industry. 

In a tweet published on launch day, president of the Dubai Civil Aviation Authority, Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, described his nation’s moon mission as an accomplishment.

“Since we set our sights on the stars as a nation, our ambition has always been matched by our resolve. Today we took the next step in that journey,” he tweeted.

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Partnership will aim to bolster joint research and exchange of scientists in computational science

South Africa’s National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences and Italy’s Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics have agreed a partnership to advance basic and computational sciences development in South Africa.

NITheCS director Francesco Petruccione (pictured, front left) and his ICTP counterpart Atish Dabholkar (front right) signed the agreement at the World Science Forum in Cape Town last week.

"We are thrilled to be partnering with NITheCS to support the growth of theoretical physics in South Africa," said Dabholkar. 

“This collaboration will provide valuable international opportunities for South African scientists and students and those at ICTP to work together and advance their research.”

Petruccione said the agreement would benefit the development of theoretical and computational sciences in South Africa and Africa.

The partnership will also promote exchange of scientists and students between the two countries.

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International Science Partnership Fund will support work on major challenges such as climate change

The UK has launched a new International Science Partnership Fund, with an initial £119 million to support its researchers in collaborating with scientists around the world.

The government said its “top priority is to invest in the UK’s world-leading R&D sector and facilitate their collaborations with international counterparts”.

During a visit to Tokyo on 13 December, science minister George Freeman said: “This fund will help the UK deepen our global research network in Japan and beyond tackling some of humanity’s greatest challenges.”

The biggest challenges

Full details of the fund’s aims and partners will not be released until the new year, but the government said it will support work on major challenges such as global warming, fusion energy, cleaning up the oceans and making space activities safe and sustainable.

UKRI’s international champion Christopher Smith described the announcement as “a positive first step in the development of this important new international fund”.

He added: “International collaboration is integral to ensuring the UK harnesses the extraordinary potential of research and innovation to enrich and improve the lives of people living in the UK and around the world. Having a specific fund to enable international collaboration will help the UK achieve this vision.”

Research Professional News reported yesterday on expectations for the fund, although official confirmation of the details is pending.

Tim Bradshaw, chief executive of the Russell Group of research-intensive universities, welcomed the new fund.

“International collaboration and the breakthroughs that come from it are at the heart of discovery science, which is the key to solving shared global challenges, changing lives for the better, tackling climate change and revitalising our economies,” he said.

“Investment to fuel more of these kinds of partnerships makes sense however you look it and will help unlock innovations in clean energy, broadband or medicine helping to make us all better off. The UK’s strength in this area is something that should be harnessed so we welcome this investment and the vote of confidence it sends to our academics and researchers.”

But he also called for closer R&D collaboration with “our nearest neighbours” in the EU following two years of delays in UK associating to EU programmes, such as Horizon Europe, because of political disagreements on trade.

Bradshaw said: “The research and science community on both sides of the channel continues to make clear that full UK participation in Horizon Europe remains the best outcome, and we hope to see a breakthrough soon that will unlock the enormous benefits it would bring to the UK and EU.”

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Charity’s director to step down in February 2023 to become WHO chief scientist

Jeremy Farrar is stepping down as director of the Wellcome Trust after 10 years to become chief scientist at the World Health Organization.

Farrar, an infectious disease researcher, will leave Wellcome when his second five-year term at the biomedical research charity finishes at the end of February 2023.

Paul Schreier, Wellcome’s chief operating officer, will take over as interim chief executive officer on 25 February 2023 until a permanent replacement is found. The search for a permanent CEO began earlier this year.

“I leave taking with me enormous pride in what we have achieved together, and do so knowing Wellcome’s mission to improve health has never been more focused in the hands of the amazing teams that make Wellcome what it is today,” said Farrar.

Transformation

The charity’s chair, Julia Gillard, said Farrar’s “leadership and insight have seen Wellcome achieve remarkable growth, realising ambitions in science and health on a scale not previously possible”.

She added: “His vision has enabled Wellcome’s bold £16 billion strategy for the next decade, supporting scientific discovery and solutions to tackle the greatest health threats facing us all—mental health, escalating infectious disease and the health impacts of the climate crisis.”

Farrar took up the role of director at Wellcome in 2013, and his tenure has seen big changes, including an overhaul of the trust’s funding schemes, a more global approach and an increased focus on improving research culture. He also played a major role in the push for open access including the Plan S initiative and staff shake-ups.

High-profile campaigner

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Farrar campaigned for rapid investment in research on testing, treatment and vaccines, and was a participant in the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage).

“In the decade since I joined Wellcome, the world has seen incredible change,” said Farrar. “We are living through fragile and uncertain times, with huge inequities to address.

“But we have also seen breath-taking and life-changing advances in science and health, and achieved critical progress in the global collaboration that makes sure these are brought to bear for the most benefit for the maximum number of people. Wellcome has played no small part in this.”

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Stop TB Partnership director says US$1bn funding for tuberculosis R&D is nothing to celebrate

Despite global funding of tuberculosis R&D reaching a record $1 billion in 2021, it is still not enough to end the TB epidemic by 2030, according to advocacy groups.

The Tuberculosis Research Funding Trends 2005-2021 report, released on 6 December, noted that United Nations member states pledged in 2018 to scale up annual financing for TB research to $2bn. 

Those pledges, the report pointed out, were made in “recognition that currently available tools to combat TB alone will not end the epidemic, and that new vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments are essential to meeting the 2030 goal”.

However the report’s authors, the Stop TB Partnership and Treatment Action Group, said that governments have fallen far short of the $2bn target. They pointed out that 4,400 people still die every day from TB, despite it being a treatable and curable airborne infectious disease.

“Nowhere near”

“Governments have failed to step up to the plate and are nowhere near meeting their promise, with R&D funding barely reaching $1bn in 2021,” said Lucica Ditiu, director of the Stop TB Partnership.

The report said only three countries—Ireland, the Philippines and South Africa—spent at least 0.1 per cent of their overall R&D expenditure on TB in 2021.

The biggest contributor to R&D funding is the US, but it failed to meet the 0.1 per cent target. The UK, another significant contributor, also fell short.

The largest single funder was the National Institutes of Health, which invested $354 million in 2021, up from $339m in 2020. Its contribution accounted for 51 per cent of all public R&D funding for TB spent globally, and 68 per cent of the funds allocated to basic science research, the report said.

The second largest funder of TB research was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which contributed more than $100m in 2021. 

Ditiu said more needs to be done to end TB by 2030. “We know that it is possible,” she said.

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Whole health systems suffered from Ascend programme’s early termination, say scientists

The early termination in July 2021 of the UK’s Accelerating the Sustainable Control and Elimination of Neglected Tropical Diseases (Ascend) scheme was a “bitter blow” to entire health systems, especially in Africa.

This is according to a commentary published last week by more than a dozen tropical disease researchers in the journal of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

Ascend, funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, supported NTD control efforts in 23 countries in Africa and two in South Asia. When it was terminated as part of the UK’s aid spending cuts, it had disbursed less than half of its £220 million budget. 

According to the commentary authors, the sudden funding cut not only hampered efforts to tackle Ascend’s five target diseases: trachoma, schistosomiasis, onchocerciasis, lymphatic filariasis and visceral leishmaniasis. It also had system-wide effects because the Ascend scheme supported drug supply chains and community health workers that benefited health systems more broadly, they write.

Some countries managed to fill the funding gap left behind by Ascend with alternative donor funding. However, several countries saw an end to the emergency gap-filling funding in September this year. And, with both donor and domestic funding under continuing pressure, programmes might face funding challenges for some time, the authors argue.

“Achieving more with available resources is therefore necessary to achieve the elimination of NTDs,” they conclude.

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Milestone scheduled for research and innovation ministerial meeting in June 2023

Commissions of the European and African unions have agreed to move forward with the adoption of their joint innovation agenda. 

The two met on 29 November in Brussels to review progress on their February 2022 EU-AU summit. Agreeing to forge a joint innovation agenda was one the summit’s chief outcomes.

EU and AU commissioners welcomed the outcomes from consultations with more than 500 stakeholders on the draft innovation agenda that took place in Nairobi, Kenya, earlier this month.

“This will feed into the final version of the AU-EU Innovation Agenda that will be presented for adoption during the second AU-EU research and innovation ministerial meeting scheduled for June 2023,” they said in a statement.

The Innovation Agenda stakeholder event took place from 24-25 November. It featured information and training sessions about the agenda and EU-Africa science partnerships more broadly.

The joint agenda features a number of short-, medium- and long-term actions. Short-term ones include joint research agendas in health, space science and climate change.

Medium-term goals include joint masters and doctoral degrees, technology transfer in health, and cooperation to develop renewable fuels in Africa, while long-term ambitions include new joint centres of excellence.

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Science takes prominence as South African president is first head of state hosted by King

Science and technology cooperation took prominence this week when South African president Cyril Ramaphosa arrived in the UK, the first state visit hosted by King Charles III.

The UK will support South Africa’s hydrogen economy ambitions, set out in its Hydrogen Society Roadmap earlier this year. The UK government will support South African infrastructure development and provide the country with grant-funded technical assistance, prime minister Rishi Sunak announced on 22 November.

The two countries also announced a raft of new science collaboration projects in health and climate change research. And the two countries a memorandum of understanding to strengthen science cooperation.

The memorandum of understanding sets out eight broad priority areas for science, technology and innovation cooperation. These include the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope, the ocean economy, health, agricultural technology and climate change.

“Today we’re moving into a new era of our dynamic trade relationship with South Africa, with exciting collaboration on infrastructure, clean technology and renewable energy sources,” UK trade secretary Kemi Badenoch said in a 22 November statement.

A royal welcome

On 22 November, King Charles III hosted a banquet at Buckingham Palace in Ramaphosa’s honour. The South African president is the first head of state to be hosted by Charles who became king when his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, died in September.

At the banquet, Ramaphosa said: “We look forward through this visit to reinforce our cooperation in areas such as investment and trade, in education and skills development, in health and in science and innovation.”

Ramaphosa also visited the Francis Crick Institute, the largest biomedical research institute in Europe, for a briefing on science collaborations between South Africa and the UK. The two countries announced nine new collaborative research projects during the visit on 23 November.

Funding will also bolster South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases in Johannesburg and its genomic sequencing work to study antimicrobial resistance in Africa. The institute played a leading role in South Africa’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The UK’s Teesside University will work with South Africa’s Stellenbosch University to deepen their collaboration on hydrogen technology. South Africa’s higher education and science minister Blade Nzimande, who has accompanied Ramaphosa on the state visit, will visit Teesside with a delegation.

“Teesside University has been at the forefront of efforts to build up the regional hydrogen economy working with industry partners. The ambition is to broaden this cooperation with Teesside and Cardiff universities in the new year,” South Africa’s Department of Science and Innovation said in a statement. 

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Money should help develop treatment that breaks transmission cycles of elephantiasis and river blindness

Japan’s Global Health Innovative Technology Fund announced it is investing 790 million yen (US$5.3 million) into researching two neglected tropical diseases: lymphatic filariasis (elephantiasis) and onchocerciasis (river blindness).

The funds will be used to develop new drugs for the diseases, which are caused by parasitic infection. “Even in the midst of a pandemic, GHIT Fund is committed to advancing product development to contribute to global health,” said Osamu Kunii, the fund’s CEO, in a statement on 11 November.

The funding will bolster efforts to develop drugs that target the adult worms that cause lymphatic filariasis and onchocerciasis. Existing drugs mostly target the young worms, which makes it difficult to break cycles of transmission as adult worms live for a long time and continue to reproduce.

The GHIT Fund is a public-private partnership between the Japanese government, pharmaceutical companies, large philanthropic organisations and the United Nations Development Programme. Since its creation in 2013, it has funded neglected disease R&D to the tune of Y28.4bn.

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South African communications antenna will help Earthlings return to the Moon

The national space agencies of the United States and South Africa have begun construction of a communications facility that will help return human exploration to the Moon.

Representatives from the South African National Space Agency and the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration broke ground at the Matjiesfontein site located approximately 240 kilometres northeast of Cape Town on 8 November.

The site will host a Lunar Exploration Ground Sites (LEGS) antenna, part of a global array that will guide Nasa’s Artemis mission, which among other things aims to land the first woman and person of colour on the Moon.

The mission is named after Apollo’s twin sister in Greek mythology and will pave the way for a long-term lunar presence and serve as a stepping stone for efforts to send astronauts to Mars. Artemis 3, planned for 2025, will be the mission’s first crewed trip to land on the Moon.

Matjiesfontein will be home to one of three 18- to 24-metre communications LEGS antennas placed around the globe. The site was selected for both its low radio frequency interference and its good weather conditions.

“It is also in the Southern Hemisphere, where Nasa needs to situate additional satellite-tracking infrastructure. In turn, Matjiesfontein will reap spin-off benefits in the form of local economic growth,” said Phil Mjwara, director-general of South Africa’s Department of Science and Innovation.

Another antenna will be situated in White Sands Complex in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and a third in Australia, at a location that has yet to be determined.

Together they will “ensure near-continuous connectivity between astronauts on Nasa’s Artemis spacecraft and those who’ll subsequently come to work on and around the lunar surface,” said Mjwara, who also signed a letter of intent to collaborate with Nasa’s deputy associate administrator for space communications and navigation, Badri Younes, at the event this week (both pictured).

Younes said the site was perfect for the project: “We couldn’t have asked for a better spot on Earth than here in South Africa, with whom we first partnered six decades ago to land the first humans on the lunar surface.”

South Africa was home to a ground-tracking station outside Johannesburg at Hartebeesthoek that played a critical role in Nasa’s Apollo missions. “The Moon brought Nasa and South Africa together 60 years ago,” said Younes. “I’m so pleased it has done so again today.”

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‘Something pathological’ about not seeing it, Nairobi gathering hears

Racial discrimination is severely hampering African researchers’ contributions to the field of global health and holding the field back, a meeting on anti-blackness in public health heard this week.

The phenomenon is everywhere—from Africans being denied visas to attend conferences to the under-representation of Black people on journal editorial boards—Canada-based global health professor Madhu Pai (pictured, far right) told the meeting, organised by the African Population and Health Research Center, in Nairobi, Kenya, on 31 October.

“People from Africa, the most impacted continent for HIV/Aids, have the hardest time getting visas for an Aids conference,” Pai told hundreds of online and in-person attendees. 

“I’m not a Black person, but even I can tell that it’s anti-blackness. There’s no other explanation for this that I can find,” he said. “If you aren’t seeing it, there’s something pathological about that.” 

Visa apartheid

Racism in global health entered the spotlight recently when several prominent African researchers reported being denied entry visas to Colombia where the seventh Global Symposium on Health Systems Research is taking place this week.

Outrage grew when Ogwell Ouma Ahmed, the acting director of the African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, tweeted that he had been stopped by border security at Frankfurt airport in Germany from travelling onwards to the World Health Summit 2022 in Berlin, despite holding a valid visa.

The incidents that reach the public’s attention are just the tip of the iceberg, APHRC director Catherine Kyobutungi told the meeting. “Behind every high-profile visa incident we see there are tens of thousands that we don’t see. Behind every incident there is unquantifiable harm.”

Barrier blindness

Githinji Gitahi, director of Kenya-based health NGO Amref Health Africa, told the meeting that while there are good intentions to include people from the global South in health discussions, these intentions do not carry over into practice.

“This good intention has been blind to inclusivity barriers, including but not limited to cost, racism, time, income, language, visa discrimination, and so on,” he said. Work is needed on “opening the doors, the rooms, the windows of any other convening platform by ensuring that it is inclusive”.

He added that it is not straightforward for African health actors to create their own platforms to hold similar discussions.

Choosy ‘beggars’

A ‘beggars can’t be choosers’ approach is unjust in terms of global health action, said Samuel Oti (pictured, centre-left), a senior programme specialist with Canada’s International Development Research Centre. “If this was a capitalistic enterprise, maybe it’s fine. But global health and its essence is a right. If it’s a right, then the African beggar must have the same right as the American millionaire.”

Oti decried the view that African countries should improve their governance and fund more research and health themselves before telling the rest of the world (most of the funding of public health initiatives comes from outside Africa) how to spend its money.

“It’s a fair argument: we must hold our leaders accountable,” he said, but added that governance and health decolonisation are not mutually exclusive. “Why can’t we both decolonise global health and hold our leaders accountable?”

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Fogarty centre director proud that the people his initiative trains are leading Africa’s Covid-19 response

Fogarty International Center director Roger Glass is in Cape Town, South Africa. He’s only recently resumed traveling to meet people in person since the Covid-19 pandemic struck, and he’s enjoying it.

He’s here for the second meeting of the Data Science for Health Discovery and Innovation in Africa (DS-I Africa), a US$75 million initiative to advance African data science, with a focus on health. The initiative’s first meeting, a year ago, was held virtually. 

DS-I Africa was conceived before the pandemic hit, but Covid-19 has clearly illustrated the importance of what the initiative aims to do, Glass told Research Professional News on the sidelines of the meeting.

“There’s nothing that has energised the value of data science and innovation more than the Covid pandemic,” he said.

“Still, much more needs to be done,” he noted. “The ability to communicate rapidly to share strains and specimens and sequences will all be part of our new biosecurity.”

Training people

DS-I Africa funds 20 consortia around Africa, with projects ranging from data science training to developing ethical frameworks for data-sharing and, of course, data-rich research.

By training people and investing in their capacity in this way, Glass believes Fogarty played a role in Africa’s robust scientific response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“What we’re proud of is that the people we’ve funded in the past, even if they were funded for AIDS programmes or for diagnosis or epidemiology, became leading responders to Covid in their countries,” he said.

The first African lab leader to sequence a coronavirus genome, Christian Happi at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria, had a grant from H3Africa, a genomic research programme that Fogarty supports, Glass explained.

And he notes that Sikhulile Moyo, the virologist at the Botswana-Harvard AIDS Institute Partnership who first spotted the Omicron variant, is a former Fogarty Fellow.

“I think if we had another outbreak, it’ll be the people that we’ve invested in who will be on the front lines.”

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Rumoured two-year extension of aid budget cut could be bad news for R&D

The Treasury has refused to comment on rumours that cuts to foreign aid might be extended for years, in a move that could spell further pain for the UK’s beleaguered aid-funded researchers.

The UK currently spends 0.5 per cent of national income on international development, after a long-standing commitment to spend 0.7 per cent was controversially paused in 2021 under Boris Johnson. The cut fell disproportionately on R&D programmes funded through official development assistance, severely damaging many research programmes and scientists’ careers, and was meant to last only until 2024-25.

Now, according to the Telegraph, Rishi Sunak’s new government is considering extending the cut for a further two years, in order to save £4 billion a year.

This would likely affect R&D funding through official development assistance too, at a time the sector is expecting to see a new funding model for international research collaborations.

New financing model

Most flagship R&D programmes funded through official development assistance, such as the Newton Fund and Global Challenges Research Fund, are currently winding down. The government has previously promised that their replacement—“a new financing model that would combine ODA and non-ODA funds”—will be “starting at pace from 2023 to 2024”.

This timeline and financing may now be in jeopardy, although clarity on the plans is unlikely to be coming before the autumn financial statement is delivered on 17 November.

A spokesperson for the Treasury told Research Professional News: “The UK has a long history of helping others in their hour of need, and we remain one of the largest global aid donors, spending more than £11bn in aid in 2021. All spending decisions will be considered in the round by the prime minister and chancellor at the autumn statement.”

The Foreign Office did not respond to a request for comment.

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Africans scientists have fought “tooth and nail” to make their voices heard, launch hears

The Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) in South Africa this week became the first non-Scandinavian institution in the world to host a Nobel symposium.

The Nobel Foundation in Sweden started its symposia series in 1965. These gatherings, which bring scientists together to discuss cutting-edge research, have until now always been held in Scandinavia.

But on 24 October the Nobel Foundation’s executive director Vidar Helgesen launched the Nobel in Africa series at STIAS. Four symposia will be held in South Africa with funding from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, which also funds STIAS.

The four will each focus on themes that fall under a category of the Nobel prize. The physics symposium will discuss predictability in science in the age of artificial intelligence. The chemistry discussion will focus on tuberculosis and antibiotic resistance.

The economic symposium will target microdevelopment research, by which small community-level grants are used as a mechanism to uplift societies. And the last symposium, due to take place in October next year, will focus on cardiovascular medicine.

Stellenbosch rector Wim de Villiers called the launch of the series “a momentous occasion”. He said African scholars had been “hustling for years” to have their voices heard globally. Through the symposia, these “are being amplified loud and clear”, he said.

Helgesen told the launch he hoped the series would sow seeds for more Nobel prizes to be awarded to the African continent. Each symposium is being accompanied by outreach activities designed to bring science advances to the South African public across the country.

“A series like this will play a part in making that inspiration work across Africa and internationally, and therefore also laying the foundation for more Nobel prizes from South Africa and the African continent,” he said.

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Nathaniel Boso tasked with advancing research in technology entrepreneurship and youth employability

Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana launched its OR Tambo research chair in entrepreneurship on 13 October.

The aim of the chair, occupied by Nathaniel Boso, is to advance research in technology entrepreneurship and youth employability with a focus on agribusiness, financial inclusion and health.

Boso is dean of Knust’s School of Business and a visiting professor at Strathmore University in Kenya, the University of Kigali in Rwanda and the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

The OR Tambo Africa Research Chairs Initiative is establishing research chairs across Africa with funding from South Africa’s government, the Oliver and Adelaide Tambo Foundation and Canada’s International Development Research Centre.

So far, 10 chairs have been established in seven countries, the National Research Foundation said in a statement. Each chair is awarded up to US$1 million over five years and will train graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to become research leaders in sub-Saharan Africa.

The scheme is named after Oliver Tambo, a South African anti-apartheid activist and science teacher who seved as president of the African National Congress in exile between 1967 and 1991.

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Fellowships funded through new foundation will offer up to US$65,000 over two years

Applications are being sought for a new scheme to train and support African research leaders in the humanities and social sciences.

The POSSIBLE-Africa Fellowship Programme will make US$65,000 available to 15-25 candidates over 24 months starting October 2023.

Announced on 11 October, the scheme is managed by the Science for Africa Foundation (SFA Foundation), a newly established Kenya-based research funding management organisation.

The scheme’s funding comes from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. It aims to address some of Africa’s pressing needs by building up independent African research leaders who can lead research locally and internationally.

“These leaders will have the capacity to engage successfully with funders, policymakers, communities, and other stakeholders, and to serve as mentors and supervisors for the next generation of researchers in Africa,” states the call for proposals.

Research topics should include a specific African community (geographic or interest-based), the applicant’s host institution’s research strategy, as well as identifying local, national, continental and international priorities being addressed.

The programme also envisions starting a social sciences and humanities advisory board to guide POSSIBLE-Africa fellowships and other initiatives of the SFA Foundation.

A webinar for applicants will be held on 9 November 2022 with reviews and interviews taking place between 13 February 2023 and 9 June 2023. Final selection and awards are expected to be made between June 2023 and September 2023, the foundation said. 

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Initiative that promotes equitable partnerships says it cannot pay staff from 2023

A tool that aims to foster fairness and equitable partnerships in global health research is running out of funding. Unless donors are found, its support office will close next year.

“It’s a very awkward time to go dormant,” says Carel IJsselmuiden, director of the Council on Health Research for Development, the Switzerland-based organisation that developed the tool.

The Research Fairness Initiative lets research institutions benchmark the quality and equity of their partnerships against best practice. Launched in 2017, it uses information submitted by institutions as the basis of an in-depth report produced with the support of the RFI administrative office. The report highlights what institutions do well, and where they can improve. Institutions get a certificate for their commitment to equitable partnerships.

Membership subscriptions—priced on a sliding scale starting at US$100—are meant to finance the scheme long-term. However, it will need more than 200 paying members to break even, and so far only 12 institutions are on the system. The RFI had hoped additional donor support would help it improve its tool and make it more user-friendly. But then the pandemic hit. 

Competing priorities

“As soon as Covid hit, we started approaching various bilateral donors, philanthropists, and private institutions. We wrote around 100 applications and emails,” says Bipasha Bhattacharya, director of Cohred’s low- and middle-income country research system digitisation. 

But the pleas fell on deaf ears as the pandemic took precedence over other development priorities. Lately, the war in Ukraine has also diverted funding from aid budgets, IJsselmuiden says. 

IJsselmuiden says it is frustrating that a tool designed to help fairness in research—something many research organisations and funders have acknowledge as a priority—is struggling to stay afloat. “This risks leaving the global health paradigm where it is,” he says. 

Bhattacharya says that even if the administrative office closes, the RFI website will remain open. Users will be able to enrol and use it to produce provisional RFI reports, but without administrative support. There will also be no money to promote the RFI.

To stave off the cash crunch the RFI says it requires US$300,000 per year. This would pay for three staff around the world, operational costs and the IT system. The RFI is fundraising, still hoping to raise the money it needs to keep going. "Our emphasis is on looking forward," says IJsselmuiden.

A version of this article appeared in Research Europe

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Co-publishing between African nations grew thirteen-fold between 2002 and 2019

Research collaborations between African countries are growing steadily, but the continent still depends on external support and leadership, a study has found.

The study, published in the January 2023 issue of Research Policy, assesses regional factors in shaping scientific integration in Africa.

Its three authors, all Europe-based, look at the science integration progress of Africa’s Regional Economic Communities by studying co-authorship within these blocs.

African policymakers have identified RECs as important vehicles for continental science, technology and innovation integration.

However, the study authors write, few RECs appear to have taken “bold steps” to hasten their science policy coordination. The most advanced in this respect are the East African Community, the Economic Community of West African States and the Southern African Development Community.

“Our results suggest that the majority of African regional economic communities have not yet had a significant effect on scientific co-publication,” they write.

Rapid growth and bottlenecks

Research collaborations between African countries grew thirteen-fold between 2002 and 2019—twice as fast as the continent’s international collaborations overall, the study found.

Despite this, intra-African research collaborations remain in the minority compared with partnerships between Africa and other parts of the world.

The study highlights a number of bottlenecks and challenges to regional integration. For instance, RECs require more resources to develop their science, technology and innovation capacities and fulfil their proposed role in nurturing intra-African research collaboration.

“Existing policies aimed at the development of an Africa-wide research area should aim to leverage existing and emerging regional excellence networks and novel coordination models to accelerate the process of scientific integration in Africa,” the authors write.

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Researchers in limbo as millions in grants promised by UK-based funders delayed over 18 months

African researchers who have waited more than 18 months for multi-million-dollar grants will have to wait a while longer while the final touches are put to a funding platform.

The winners of the second round of the Developing Excellence in Leadership, Training and Science Africa programme were expecting to receive the money in January 2021.

Deltas Africa funds large five-year programmes designed to train African researchers as they tackle challenges related to health. The priorities of the second call ranged from antimicrobial resistance to health systems research. 

But the second-round grants were put on hold when the programme’s funders fell out with some of its Africa-based administrators, resulting in the ongoing delays.

While some winners have told Research Professional News that they prefer delayed funding to none, others say it has starved their teams and undermined their research projects.

“When we applied, our project was cutting-edge. Now we’re also-rans,” said a winning investigator who asked not to be named.

Caught in crossfire

The Deltas Africa programme is funded by the Wellcome Trust and the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Its first grant round was worth US$100 million.

Its second round was caught in a crossfire when, last year, a research management organisation set up in Africa to manage international funding collapsed due to infighting and allegations of financial mismanagement.

Nelson Torto, the director of the Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa, created under the Kenya-based African Academy of Sciences in 2015 to manage grants for International funders, was accused by the AAS governing council of having inflated salaries without following proper procedures—an allegation Torto vehemently denied. 

The AAS ordered a number of audits to investigate the situation. But by the time the second round of the Deltas Africa programme—which was managed by AESA—was supposed to pay out in January 2021 the cracks were deepening, and they came to a head in July 2021 when several funders, dissatisfied with the situation, withdrew their programmes from AESA

At the time, Wellcome vowed to keep the funds flowing for the Deltas Africa programme. Together with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, another funder that withdrew from AESA, it supported the creation of a new African grant management platform—the Science for Africa Foundation.

In September last year, speaking about the Deltas programme, a Wellcome Trust spokesperson said the trust was “aiming as far as possible to minimise disruption to scientists”. Winners said they hoped the process would not drag on. They feared delays would cause them to lose staff hired to work on the projects.

A year later, little has changed. And one winning investigator told Research Professional News that the threat of losing staff is fast becoming a reality. “Science is not a tap you can just turn on and off,” they said.

Due diligence

This month, neither Wellcome nor the SFA Foundation could give a firm date for when the grants would begin paying out. However, both said it would be later this year.

They said the delay was the result of wanting to make sure that all financial processes and the SFA Foundation’s operational capacity were up to scratch. A Wellcome spokesperson said: “Our priority has been to ensure the appropriate due diligence processes are completed before new grants can be activated.”

The total amount of funding that will be released under Deltas Africa’s second round has not been made public. In the call, grants were invited in the range of US$3-6m, covering five years.

Research Professional News asked both Wellcome and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office why they did not simply use their existing grant disbursement mechanisms to fund the second Deltas Africa round, given the disruption to the programme’s timeline.

A Wellcome spokesperson said it was “an important principle” that the funding for Deltas Africa was managed by an Africa-based organisation. “We understand that this has been a long period of uncertainty,” they said.

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Funders must be sensitive to local needs and priorities, global meeting hears

Research funders and institutions must create an enabling environment for equitable research partnerships, a United Kingdom official said this week.

Julia Kemp, deputy director of research and evidence at the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, spoke at a virtual session at a science ‘summit’ organised on the sidelines of the United Nations 77th General Assembly in New York.

Kemp said one of the most important actions was to build ecosystems that support research that meets country needs.

“One of the practical ways in which this has come into play is how we work with science granting councils [in other countries] such as the National Research Foundation in South Africa as well as an East Africa research hub,” Kemp said.

Another necessary action, said Kemp, is to customise the research funding machine to be more responsive to the needs of partners: “We need to work with funding agencies in low- and middle-income countries to understand the kind of issues and problems they face with our funding systems and processes.”

Good practice

The session was hosted by the UK Collaborative on Development Research and the Essence on Health initiative. It centred on a document outlining good practice for funding equitable research partnerships prepared jointly by the two hosts.

The document gives four practical approaches to equitable funding research: understand the ecosystems; build relationships; transform processes; and allocate resources to it.

Kemp added that there is a lot more that needs to be done and hoped that the discussion would serve as a call to action. “We need to work across our whole portfolio so that the practice is consistent and the guidance we are giving is also consistent,” she said.

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African research universities can leverage each other’s strengths to tackle challenges, says Pretoria vice-chancellor

South Africa’s University of Pretoria signed an agreement with the University of Nairobi in Kenya to foster research, teaching and capacity building on 16 September.

The two universities have been collaborating on an informal basis for some time. Both are members of the African Research Universities Network, and co-host the ARUA Centre of Excellence in Food Security with the University of Ghana, Legon.

Research Professional News talked about the agreement with UP’s vice-chancellor Tawana Kupe (pictured), who says it will take the two universities’ partnership “to the next level”.

Why the need for a formal agreement?

As African universities, we share many challenges. Working together will enable us to leverage each other’s strengths, resources and capacities for mutual benefit. It’s easier to mobilise resources for partnership activities if you have a formal agreement.

What does the agreement set out to do?

It aims to strengthen existing collaborations and facilitate new activities between the two institutions. This includes student exchange and joint degrees. Our priorities include exchanging academic staff and students along with academic materials, the establishment of joint research programmes and joint supervision of masters and doctoral degrees.

Are there certain areas of research that are earmarked for collaborations?

The research agenda will be determined by national priorities and continental and global agendas, including the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. We will revisit our areas of collaboration from time to time.

Is there funding to make these collaborations happen?

Universities make broad provisions to support international collaborations. Funding is allocated for research projects, staff and student mobility and laboratories. This partnership will be supported through such mechanisms.

What is the time frame for this agreement?

The agreement is indefinite. Parties may terminate it by giving notice.

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