Mapping the participation of African researchers and innovators in COST Actions
A report, mapping the current activities of participation by African researchers and innovators in COST Actions has been released by the COST Association and the SFIC Africa Working Group. The report, which was presented on 30 November at “The Power of Networks on the European – African collaborations in research and innovation” event, highlighted current participation data, areas of improvement and opportunities for further development.
The report highlighted how researchers from Africa take part in almost a quarter of all running COST Actions, with particular engagement in Actions related to public health or green research. In total there have been 531 individual participations in networking activities from researchers from 19 countries. Networking activities have also been carried out in 7 African countries.
Country involvement in COST
Of all the countries from the African continent involved in COST activities, the report revealed that Tunisia has the highest number of institutions engaged, followed by Morocco, Algeria and South Africa. The mapping exercise also revealed that 70 COST Actions involve African stakeholders from 11 countries: Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tunisia and Uganda.
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Conclusions of the report
As a point for further development, the report concluded that due to budget availability and budgetary rules, the COST Programme can only provide limited funding to the talents participating from certain African countries and that there is a need to search for more opportunities of provision.
Additionally, the established collaboration between European and African institutions could be built on different mechanisms, but for efficacy reasons the multilateralism and the multiplication effects of the already participating institutions and countries could be further exploited.
What is SFIC?
SFIC Africa Working Group is part of the Strategic forum for international scientific and technological cooperation that works to enhance collaborations between Europe and Africa by identifying areas for coordinated or joint initiatives with countries and regions outside of the EU. SFIC is made up of the Commission, all EU countries and several non-EU countries as observers.
COST was invited as a special guest at the SFIC Africa WG meetings held in the summer of 2021. The working group aimed to better understand COST networks and their engagement and activities in Africa.
Further reading