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Ugandan science minister aims to disrupt ‘slave model’ of funding

    

Newly sworn-in Monica Musenero says science and innovation must serve society better

Uganda’s new science minister, Monica Musenero, has announced that she is preparing to “re-structure” science, technology and innovation to better serve the country’s population and economy.

Part of the change will be to disrupt what she terms the “slave model” of research funding, which sees the intellectual labour of Ugandan scientists appropriated by foreign funders, with scant benefits for Uganda’s people or its economy.

Musenero, an epidemiologist who has played leading roles in African countries’ fight against Ebola, was named Uganda’s science minister in a cabinet reshuffle in June. She took over from Elioda Tumwesigye, whose science, technology and innovation portfolio has moved from its own ministry into the presidency.

Visiting the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology last month, the minister told onlookers that the government was “re-structuring STI in the country into an institutionalised and coordinated system”.

She said president Yoweri Museveni’s move of the science brief into his office would allow her ministry to be “a national secretariat coordinating [science, technology and innovation] through a multi-sectoral, collaborative approach”.

“The country is counting on science,” she said. “STI should be actively contributing to the development of Uganda.”

Little trickle-down

Musenero echoed that message in her address to a National Policy Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation for Development on 26 August. The virtual event was hosted by Makerere University.

She told participants that most Ugandan research operates under a “slave model", which sees the fruits of the country’s intellectual labour appropriated by foreign funding agencies with little benefit trickling down to ordinary Ugandans.

The model sees researchers given “basic sustenance” such as salaries and operational costs by the government, she said. “They then write research proposals to foreign donors, often in consortia.”

She said the expected benefit to the researcher is subsistence, publications, promotion and presentations at international conferences. Researchers are “typically unaware of or uninterested in products, which they yield to the funding agencies,” she added.

Common problem

Musenero said the ‘slave’ model was so common that “we don’t even recognise it”. She added that “almost 100 per cent” of the research institutions she’d visited in Uganda toil under this model.

Her mission as minister, she said, will be to recalibrate the system so it first and foremost produces benefits for Ugandans. “We’ve made science, technology and innovation so elite that it’s disconnected from our society,” she said.

She called on the national policy forum to think about how to radically transform the STI system to better feed the needs of society. Part of that is realising that policies aren’t what’s written in documents, but what people do, she added.

“We’ve made STI to be about official statements and we’ve made it about money,” she said. “But you can put all the money that you want in STI—If the thinking is wrong, no change will happen.”