The Rise of Computing Research in East Africa: the Relationship Between Funding, Capacity and Research Community in a Nascent Field

Minerva https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-017-9341-1 The Rise of Computing Research in East Africa: The Relationship Between Funding, Capacity and Research Community in a Nascent Field 1 1 2 Matthew Harsh • Ravtosh Bal • Jameson Wetmore • 2 3 G. Pascal Zachary • Kerry Holden Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract The emergence of vibrant research communities of computer scientists in Kenya and Uganda has occurred in the context of neoliberal privatization, commercialization, and transnational capital flows from donors and corporations. We explore how this funding environment configures research culture and research practices, which are conceptualized as two main components of a research community. Data come from a three-year longitudinal study utilizing interview, ethnographic and survey data collected in Nairobi and Kampala. We document how administrators shape research culture by building academic programs and training growing numbers of PhDs, and analyze how this is linked to complicated interac- tions between political economy, the epistemic nature of computer science and sociocultural factors like entrepreneurial leadership of key actors and distinctive cultures of innovation. In a donor-driven funding environment, research practice involves scientists constructing their own localized research priorities by adopting distinctive professional identities and creatively structuring projects. The neoliberal political economic context thus clearly influenced research communities, but did not debilitate computing research capacity nor leave researchers without any agency to carry out research programs. The cases illustrate how sites of knowledge production in Africa can gain some measure of research autonomy, some degree of global competency in a central arena of scientific and technological activity, and some expression of their regional cultural priorities and aspirations. Furthermore, the & Matthew Harsh [email protected] 1 Centre for Engineering in Society, Concordia University, 1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd., EV- 2.257, Montreal, QC H3G 1M8, Canada 2 School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University, Interdisciplinary B 278, 1120 Cady Mall, Tempe, AZ 85287-5603, USA 3 School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London, Geography Building, Room 106, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK 123 M. Harsh et al. cases suggest that social analysts must balance structure with culture, place and agency in their approaches to understanding how funding and political economy shape scientific knowledge. Keywords Computer science Á Research funding Á Research community Á Kenya Á Uganda Introduction Since the year 2000, the field of computer science has grown rapidly in Kenya and Uganda. This emergence of a novel field in sub-Saharan Africa – a region of the world that is not normally associated with robust research communities1 – has been funded almost entirely from international sources: multi- and bi-lateral development donors, philanthropic foundations, and transnational corporations. Unlike in Europe and North America, the state and national private sector provide very little funding for research in sub-Saharan Africa (NPCA 2014). At the same time, the rise of computing research in East Africa has been shaped by trends that are affecting science globally, such as the privatization and commercialization of higher education and research sectors, and the increase of contractual and project-based research (Frickel and Moore 2006). This paper examines how this dynamic research funding environment configures computer science research communities in Kenya and Uganda. In doing so, we hope to contribute to the renewed focus on the political economic and institutional contexts of knowledge production seen in recent science studies and science policy scholarship (as this special issue illustrates). By providing a case study from East Africa, we hope to deepen the understanding of the relationship between funding and science globally. We also aim to help address the general gap in the literature on social analyses of science in Africa. We use the term ‘research community’ to describe what Merz and Sormani (2016) refer to as ‘‘local configurations of novel research fields’’ (p. 2) which empirically consist of connections between researchers (and closely related actors) and institutions and organizations involved in knowledge production. The analytical strength of Merz and Sormani’s specific approach is that it balances scale and place. Institutions and organizations involved in research (computer science in East Africa in our case) connect the global and local, yet analysis is rooted in specific places (the cities of Nairobi and Kampala for us). In a complementary analytical move, our use of research community brings together other approaches to understanding the growth and development of science that balance organizational/institutional/ structural issues with agency and actor-orientation. The notion of research community thus draws on Gla¨ser (2001) concept of scientific community, which understands actors as connected through knowledge making and influenced by the formal and informal institutions involved in research, and Shrum’s (1984) notion of 1 The African Union’s share of the world’s total research output in the period 2005–2010 was only 1.8% (NPCA 2014). South Africa is an exception and does have many strong and established research communities. 123 The Rise of Computing Research in East Africa technical systems, which highlights the ‘matrix of institutions’ that surround science, including state and organizational concerns. Shrum’s (2000, 2005) later work on science in Africa explicitly balances structure with agency, drawing attention to how African researchers can gain some agency by negotiating a common identity with donors in distant geographical locations, which allows resources to be transferred and research to happen. Pickering (1992) and the application of his work by Merz and Sormani (2016) provides a framework to understand how research communities come to be and operate. Pickering sees scientific culture as a ‘‘field of resources that scientific practice operates in and on’’ (1992, p. 2). Thus if we are interested in how funding configures research communities, we must explore how funding shapes culture (the field of resources) and how it shapes practice. We construe resources broadly as the ‘things needed to get science done.’ This can be equipment/infrastructure, buildings, trained scientists, and academic programs (which bring graduate students to help carry out research). Both Pickering (1992) and Shrum (1984) also draw our attention to how epistemic qualities influence the field of resources and practices or ‘acts of making.’ The broader epistemic qualities of a field interact with a specific context to dynamically condition research cultures and practices. We begin the article by presenting a more detailed framework for understanding the relationship between funding and research communities. This resulted from an iterative interaction between our data and literature during analysis. Next, we briefly discuss our methodology and data sources which are based on the longitudinal collection of ethnographic, interview and survey data. We then present our analysis which is structured as a two-part, causal argument about the relationship between research funding and configuration of computing research community in Kampala and Nairobi. We first focus on the construction of research culture (field of resources) for the computing research communities: how actors and institutions respond to the funding environment to create infrastructure, academic programs, and trained researchers. Then we focus on the practices of researchers within the community: how funding influences scientists as they set their agendas and conduct their research. Through examining computer science in two East African capitals – Kampala, Uganda and Nairobi, Kenya – we demonstrate how the interconnected push for increased privatization and commercialization in the higher education and research sectors and donor-controlled capital are the defining political economic forces structuring the computing research communities in both cities. However, while some have argued that these forces have severely and detrimentally constrained research culture and agency of local researchers (Mamdani 2007), this is not the case for computer science in East Africa. While there are certainly structural constraints, we find that in Nairobi and Kampala, the epistemic qualities of computer science, different commercial environments and different combinations of sociocultural factors – such as creative organizational and institutional strategies, the entrepreneurial leadership of key actors, adoption of flexible professional identities and distinctive cultures of innovation – have allowed computing research cultures to be built and researchers to pursue their own agendas that express their regional aspirations and priorities. Although the resultant shape of computing research community looks different in both cities, the interaction of these 123 M. Harsh et al. epistemic and sociocultural factors with the political economy has led to an overall increased capacity across both countries. We conclude by reflecting on implications for theory and policy. Framework The growth of scientific fields in areas outside the centers of global science is an under-researched area in science and technology studies (STS). In recent years, STS scholars have called for

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