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| Scientific Research and Implementations Key to Africa and the Third World’s Development |
 PRINTABLE VERSION |
As indicated before, the major problem faced by Third World scientists has been the lack of adequate funding from their governments and the corporate sector. This, coupled with the issues of bio-piracy and the adulteration of their research interests by the mostly foreign funding organizations, has inadvertently made much of the developing world’s scientific research generally irrelevant to their development aspirations.
Many Third World researchers have often yearned to do research on local and indigenous crops, but this has been a problem as their funding partners’ interests have been mainly focused on studying and promoting the temperate plants, which originate from and are grown in the funding countries.
The vital issue of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), in as far as scientific inventions and innovations and indigenous knowledge are concerned, has also barely been broached. This has created problems for Third World researchers and innovators who, having been unable to patent their research findings, can barely make a good living through their normally meagre earnings.
Many have therefore preferred to emmigrate to the developed world where they get better remuneration and well-equipped research infrastructure. Those who have decided to stay on, like the Kenyan geneticist Dr. Onim (of the ‘Maseno Double Cobber’ maize variety fame), have had to contend with the low returns from their findings. Other eminent African scholars, such as Professor Patrick Ayiecho, seeing ‘no money’ in the developing world’s scientific fields, have decided to try out their hands in the murk of politics.
This has thus left the developing world’s scientific hopes cannibalized at the altar of monetary gains. A salient example is the research done at the Kenya Sugar Research Foundation to create favourable conditions for the production of sugar cane seeds. Many of the scientists involved regrettably retired from the project without any productive research findings.
The Asian Tiger economies, including such countries as Taiwan, China, South Korea, Malaysia and Singapore, put investment on scientific research and technological adoption at the core of their development agenda. These came famously to be known as the ‘Five Year Plans.’ Their insightful strategy paid off as many of them are today heavy exporters not only of food products but also of electronic technology, even managing to compete at a favourable Balance of Payment level with the highly developed countries (HDCs). The rest of the developing world, and more so Africa, can use their example as an economic blueprint for spurring growth.
Science, being a boon to socio-economic growth and development, should be given a high priority by Africa and the Third World. Only then will they be able to keep pace with economic trends the world over. Otherwise, with the current intellectual brain-drain and lack of good policies on scientific research, Intellectual Property Rights and scientific adoption and implementations, they will continue to wallow in the plague of abject poverty and rot in the quagmire of scientific and technological ineptitude and the resulting low standards of living, which has yoked their citizens to poverty and poor health for several decades now.
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Antony Felix O. Simbowo
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