Editorial: Rising Stars: Africa

Résumé

With a total population of about 1.34 billion, Africa accounts for 17.2% of the world population (https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#region).However, this population does not match research output as Africa contributes less than 1% to global research efforts in terms of scholarly publications from various disciplines of science and engineering as well as the social sciences (Duermeijer et al., 2018).No African country spends up to 0.9% of the gross domestic product (GDP) on research and development (R&D), whereas the four top countries (United States, China, Japan, and Germany) in terms of volume of R&D investment, each commits over 3% of their GDPs to R&D amounting to 613, 525, 173, and 132 billion US$, respectively.Commendably, South Africa is the only African country with annual spending of over $6 billion on R&D, followed by Morocco with $1.5 billion; all other countries in Africa commits less than $1 billion to R&D (OECD, 2022).This annual spending on R&D correlates well with research output.For instance, while 422,808 articles were published by researchers in United States in year 2018; about 13,000 publications emanated from South Africa, and less than 1,000 papers from most African countries.The top performing African countries are Algeria, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tunisia.Noteworthy, there is presently a remarkable improvement of Africa's contribution to global research output.A recent in-depth analysis using Elsevier's SciVal tool revealed a consistent positive upturn in Africa's research productivity.In fact, Africa has been adjudged as having the highest research productivity growth rate of approximately 39% in the past 5 years and this is simultaneously matched with increases in number of authors at an average growth rate of 43% (Duermeijer et al., 2018).Indeed, there are numerous talented African early career scientists who have demonstrated abilities to emerge as regional and global research leaders in their fields.Many of them have received awards, fellowships, and grants that have provided the opportunity to build independent research career and networks across institutions in Africa and shows the potentials to undertake cutting-edge scientific research that will address challenges that are peculiar to the African continent as well as contributing to solve global challenges.These recent advances are highly commendable and encouraging as continuing on this path will help Africa to build a thriving knowledge-based economy and place her as a critical hub for the new industrial revolution.To achieve this goal, the numerous challenges against productive science must be tackled.These challenges include: 1) lack of research facilities, 2) inadequate manpower and skills, 3) lack of national and regional funding mechanisms, 4) poor access to channels for dissemination of research to the global community, and 5) very weak intranational and intracontinental collaborations.To address these limitations, stakeholders comprised of institutions, national governments, and publishers must deploy resources within their means to enhance the successes recorded by African scientists and researchers.This synergy will propel the continent to solve the numerous

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