The Africa Charter for Transformative Research Collaborations is a major new framework for thinking about equity in research partnerships. The Charter is the result of a large-scale process hat involved consulting with many different research and higher education institutions in Africa as well as with international actors. The initiative was started by the Perivoli Africa Research Centre at the University of Bristol, but due to the meetings held in Africa and various other discussions, the Charter was ultimately co-created, and is now owned by, constituents in Africa.

The official launch of the Charter took place in Windhoek, Namibia, on Wednesday July 5, 2023, during the bi-annual Association of African Universities’ “Conference of Rectors, Vice Chancellors and Presidents of African Universities.” A member of the BCGE also attended the conference. Organizers were clearly surprised by the overwhelming success of the launch: seventy-six attendees signed the Charter on the spot for their institutions, adding to the organizations that had signed prior to the launch and the institutions that were involved in drafting the Charter.

By now, it is already endorsed by more than one hundred major science actors, including European university networks, learned societies, and higher education and research institutions worldwide.

Currently, collaborations with the Global North define Africa’s engagement in the global advancement of science and research. How these collaborations are configured is critical for shaping Africa’s place and location in the global scientific endeavor. The Charter promotes a more just and richer way of working together. It sets out core values that all researchers should respect and adhere to.

The Charter is an ongoing effort for the development and implementation of codes of conduct for research collaborations on the African continent.

The Need for the Africa Charter:

The need for greater equity in research partnerships between the Global South and the Global North has become increasingly acknowledged around the world. The last several decades of North-South collaboration have not been equitable, and not always reflective of African needs, ambitions or priorities. The Africa Charter for Transformative Research Collaborations is a framework for understanding the necessity of equitability in research partnerships, what equitability is for, the components that go into establishing it, and the steps to take in order to guarantee it in the long term.

The Africa Charter is based on critical scholarship and shifts the locus of consideration firmly to the Global South. It insists, that the core purpose of fostering greater equity in research collaborations must ultimately be to rebalance the system of global scientific knowledge production overall.

Such rebalancing is a matter of fostering a richer, more potent academic endeavour, that will be able to tackle the multiple crises facing humanity. It is not limited to social justice and undoing colonial legacies. It reflects a growing acknowledgment, within academia and beyond, that perpetuating unjust hierarchies rooted in colonialism is untenable – and that Western knowledge systems, which produced the multiple crises in the first place, are insufficient to solve them. Alternatives are urgently required. The goal is to ensure that scholars, institutions, and knowledges produced in Africa (and the Global South in general) take their rightful place in this effort.

Charter Principles and Aspirations

The Africa Charter recognizes that research partnerships provide not only a crucial entry point for systemic change, but also the leverage needed for that change. Their transformative potential is great. The Charter’s principles insist that, to be truly transformative, partnerships must actively redress the imbalances of power in scientific knowledge production across the multiple layers on which they come to bear.

Such imbalances arise through the dominant use of Eurocentric epistemologies, languages, concepts and theories, and the “development” framing in research. They are also the result of wide disparities in institutional capacities and asymmetries in concrete partnership arrangements. Research management structures and administrative processes can also add a further level of imbalance.

The challenges reside at all layers, and each of these layers have to be re-thought:

1. Epistemologies: Knowledge systems that are not based on Western traditions are often relegated to the periphery. Epistemic violence is a part of colonialism. We have to question assumptions of Euro-Western ways of knowing and being.

2. Language: Language and knowledge are intricately connected. Rethinking knowledge systems therefore means also questioning language, especially since language in part defines epistemology. 

3. Western theories and concepts: When Western theories and concepts are used by default and serve as the basis for understanding how the world, including Africa, works, it reaffirms an orientation toward the West. We cannot continue to take this for granted and we must critically investigate how Western theories and concepts manifest in collaborative efforts.

4. The “development” framing: TheWestern gaze mainly casts Africa as a place of deficits, being in a state of perpetual development and in need of catching up with the “advanced” Western world. We need to reframe this narrative because it leads, for example, to a disproportionate focus on health science in Africa and also to the omission of engineering and future technologies. This shift has important implications for funding.

5. Resourcing: A great deal of resources in Africa go to basic education, which means that financial support is lacking for higher education and excellent research. These resource constraints determine what kind of research can be conducted and also the impact research can have. There is a need for resources that allow for long-term sustainable research projects.

6. Practical collaboration arrangements: Partnership agreements need to address a range of practical issues that go beyond merely who is the project lead or where it will be based.

The Charter also names six aspirations for change in policy and regulatory frames. They call for adjustments in the guidelines, policy and regulatory frameworks of higher education institutions, research funders, publishers, and academic governance entities in order to ensure that a transformative mode of collaborations is systematically enabled and incentivized, with the goal of gradually establishing it as a benchmark and standard practice within the scientific community and beyond.

From a Community of Interest to a Community of Action

The overwhelming support for the Charter and the breadth of the “community of interest”, that includes its signatories, but also multiple research funders, publishers, and political actors, attests to the importance of the initiative. Their backing underscores the Charter’s relevance and timeliness as a catalyst for change.

The Charter’s primary stewards and champion institutions are now coming together to form the Steering Group for the Africa Charter. The group consists of representatives from the Association of African Universities, African Research Universities Alliance, African Academy of Sciences, Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, International Network for Higher Education in Africa, Institute for Security Studies, Future Africa at the University of Pretoria, University of Toronto, and – as the group’s core facilitating institutions – the Chief Albert Luthuli Research Chair at the University of South Africa, Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town, and Perivoli Africa Research Center at the University of Bristol.[WA10] 

To inform the practical implementation of the Charter’s principles and aspirations and to nurture a “community of action” around such change, the Steering Group will be spearheading a program that is dedicated to the critical review of policy and practices, pathfinder interventions, and joint learning for Charter signatories and other higher education stakeholders globally:

The Perivoli Africa Research Centre (PARC) at the University of Bristol, the Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town (HUMA) and the Albert Luthuli Research Chair at the University of South Africa (UNISA) will jointly drive and coordinate this effort. The Association of African Universities (AAU), will provide a central convening and engagement platform given its transnational role connecting institutions from across the entire continent and worldwide.

The ultimate vision of the Charter is to coalesce the many good initiatives that are happening and then to move beyond equitable partnerships: to target joint agenda setting, to target the respect for the varied and necessary contributions to any partnership - and to build this space together. These necessary varied contributions go right from funding – which often leads the agenda - to the context, to the field in which scientists are working, to the much bigger space than just collecting samples – and ultimately to the way in which we do the work, with respect to the methods used, the analyses, the interpretations and the acknowledgment of contributions. There cannot be equitable partnerships without all partners being involved across the partnership. The challenge is to ensure voice and agency for all, and to acknowledge the impact of the past.

The aim is to build forward, moving beyond current versions of equitable partnerships, to maximise and optimise partnerships, to increase impact also beyond partnerships themselves. The benefit of this process is for all parties and beyond.

The Berlin University Alliance officially signed the Africa Charter for Transformative Research Collaborations at the first international conference of the Berlin Center for Global Engagement: “Negotiating Scientific Cooperation in an Unequal World.” The conference took place in Berlin on November 20, 2024.

The BCGE is actively developing activities to further the implementation of the Africa Charter in the Alliance.