In April 2022, more than ninety African researchers, academics, educators, advocates, policymakers and funders gathered online for a conversation that was at once practical and deeply political. The question before them was not simply how to improve education research in Africa, nor even how to fund it better. It was more fundamental than that: what would it take to build an education research ecosystem that is genuinely in, for and by Africa?
The Forum for Education Research in/for/by Africa, held between 26 and 29 April 2022, was initiated and coordinated by a collaborative of funders including Imaginable Futures, Echidna Giving, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Porticus. Yet the significance of the Forum lay less in who convened it than in what it made possible. It created a rare space in which African stakeholders could articulate, in their own terms and from their own experience, the structural constraints that continue to define the education research landscape on the continent—and, crucially, the kinds of changes required to transform it.
This was not a forum designed merely to catalogue frustrations, although there were many. Nor was it a technocratic exercise in tweaking grant mechanisms or improving programme delivery. It was, instead, an effort to make visible the architecture of inequality that shapes who gets to define research agendas, who gets funded, who is recognised as an expert, whose evidence counts, and who gets to use that evidence to influence policy and practice. Through pre-Forum and mid-Forum surveys, collaborative Miro boards, and detailed session notes, participants generated a rich and sometimes uncomfortable body of reflection. Taken together, those reflections amount to more than a set of recommendations. They offer a diagnosis of the current system and a roadmap for building a different one.
The Forum also proved consequential in institutional terms. It helped lay the intellectual and political foundations for the African Education Research Funding Consortium, led by On Think Tanks, which ran from 2022 to 2026. That Consortium was, in many ways, an attempt to move beyond discussion towards a more coordinated and Africa-centred approach to supporting education research. It also facilitated the development of HERI Africa, an initiative driven by African education researchers themselves. In that sense, the Forum did not end when the sessions closed. It set in motion a process through which ideas voiced in a convening began to take organisational form.
Find out more about the African Education Research Funding Consortium and its lessons.
The forum named the problem for what it was
One of the Forum’s most important contributions was its resistance to the temptation to describe the weaknesses of African education research as isolated gaps or technical deficiencies. Participants did not portray the problem as one of individual capacity, insufficient training, or a shortage of talent. They described something far more systemic.
Across the discussions, one theme surfaced again and again: power, funding, agenda-setting and recognition remain deeply concentrated in the Global North. This imbalance shapes the entire research process, from the earliest stages of defining the questions worth asking to the final stages of analysis, publication and influence. African researchers are often drawn into projects not as equal intellectual partners but as implementers of someone else’s agenda. They facilitate access, manage logistics, collect the data, and provide the contextual knowledge without which research would be impossible. Yet control over design, analysis, authorship and ownership often remains elsewhere.
One participant described this reality with painful clarity: in many cases, African researchers are funded as the local collaborators of foreign-based researchers who already have their own priorities and therefore determine the direction of the work.
Elizabeth Nyirenda from the University of Zambia gave this structural problem a voice that was at once personal and widely recognisable: being the “hands and feet” for data collection, unable to publish the data, lacking mentorship, lacking resources, and nevertheless living under the pressure of a “publish or perish” system. Her account resonated not because it was exceptional, but because it was familiar.
That familiarity matters. The Forum revealed that these are not occasional distortions in an otherwise functional system. They are recurring features of the system’s operation. African researchers are often visible enough to be needed, but not empowered enough to lead. They are present in the system, but too often on terms defined by others.
Participants were equally insistent on another point: the issue is not that African education researchers are absent. They are present across the continent, in universities, think tanks, schools, NGOs, civil society organisations and public institutions. The problem is that the funding and recognition system does not adequately support them. As one respondent put it, African education researchers are not missing because they are not there; they are not felt because the funding landscape is not equal. Visibility, legitimacy and influence are not neutral outcomes. They are the products of repeated choices about who gets resourced, who gets trusted, and whose expertise is amplified.
To track the progress of the African Education Research Funding Consortium, we assessed the participating funders’ grants. We found that while an almost equal number of grants went to African organisations as they went to U.S. or European ones, at least 80% of the grant dollars went to U.S. and European recipients. This illustrates the systemic failure described by the Forum’s participants.
Projectised funding has become a structural constraint
If North-South inequity was one major thread running through the Forum, the nature of funding itself was another. Participants returned repeatedly to the damaging consequences of short-term, project-based, donor-driven financing.
This model does more than limit what can be achieved within a grant cycle. It shapes behaviour across the system. It encourages researchers and institutions to chase opportunities rather than build coherent programmes of work. It rewards responsiveness to donor calls rather than to local questions. Think of the proliferation of manuals and trainings to learn how to write, bid for and win calls for proposals from Northern funders. Instead, why don’t funders learn how to write and structure calls for proposals that make sense for how African research organisations work?
The way funding is allocated makes it difficult to invest in staff, systems, infrastructure, leadership and long-term relationships with policymakers and practitioners. And because project grants rarely cover the full range of indirect costs—facilities, technology, administrative support, communications capacity, institutional development—they leave organisations in a state of permanent fragility.
The result is a landscape defined by fragmentation and precarity. Instead of building long-term bodies of work rooted in national and regional concerns, many institutions are pushed into a pattern of serial adaptation to shifting donor priorities. Education reform, by contrast, is slow, political and cumulative. The research needed to support it cannot be sustainably built through a succession of narrowly framed, short-horizon interventions.
Participants also drew attention to the paternalism built into parts of the international funding system. Even when local organisations receive direct support, that support is often paired with oversight or technical assistance from actors in high-income countries who are implicitly positioned as the real experts. This arrangement is sometimes justified as support for quality or capacity. Yet in practice it can undermine local knowledge and reinforce the assumption that credibility resides somewhere else.
This was one of the Forum’s sharper insights: the question is not simply how to include African researchers more effectively within existing systems. It is whether those systems are themselves organised in ways that make African leadership structurally difficult.
Collaboration can solve fragmentation, but it can also concentrate power
The Forum was not naïve about the attractions of coordination. Participants understood well that fragmented donor activity creates duplication, competition and inefficiency. Funder coalitions and consortia can, in principle, address these problems by pooling resources, creating shared strategies and supporting longer-term collective efforts.
But the Forum also issued an important warning – first raised by one of the steering group members, Andrea Ordoñez: collaboration among funders can generate a concentrated form of new power that requires a deliberate counterweight. Without such a counterweight, consortia risk reproducing—sometimes at a larger scale—the very inequities they claim to address.
From our own work with think tanks, we know that donor coordination through large pooled funds or other such efforts that reduce the number of individual funders operating in a particular geography or sector can have detrimental effects. With many funders, researchers have more funding alternatives. They have more power to “play” the system by adapting their project proposals to individual funders’ preferences. If one declines to fund, there are still 10 others. But if all funders use a single mechanism, those options become far more limited. One “no” is final. Power now lies with the funder and the few organisations that align with them.
This concern is not abstract. Research consortia are often led from the Global North because they know best how to align to Norther funders. And with leadership comes control over funding, governance, standards and strategic direction. Even where the language of partnership is sincere, the structure may still place agenda-setting power outside the contexts most affected by the research. The result is familiar: foreign-based institutions define priorities, set the criteria for success, manage the money, and retain authority over core decisions, while African actors are invited in as collaborators without equivalent power.
Such arrangements can become another form of extraction. Local researchers and institutions are once again asked to contribute implementation, access, legitimacy and data, while control remains elsewhere. And because these structures can be more sophisticated and better resourced than individual donor projects, they may be harder to challenge precisely because they present themselves as more progressive.
This is why the Forum placed such emphasis on governance. If consortia are to be part of the solution, African researchers, practitioners and decision-makers must be directly involved in their governance and operations—not simply consulted, not merely represented symbolically, but given real authority in shaping priorities, rules and accountability.
There was also recognition that many coalitions struggle to embody internally the principles they promote externally. Diversity, equity and inclusion cannot be treated as requirements only for grantees. They must be embedded within any form of funder and research consortium: in leadership, staffing, decision-making practices and institutional culture.
A related risk lies in the creation of redundant systems. International coalitions sometimes respond to fragmentation by building entirely new platforms, networks or structures rather than identifying and strengthening those that already exist locally. This can undermine local agency, duplicate effort and erode trust. If consortia are genuinely to support the ecosystem, they must root themselves in existing national structures and support regional communities of practice with established legitimacy.
It is easy for a foreign funder and researcher to think that “there is nothing there”. But closer attention will help discover multiple individuals, groups, organisations, networks and coalitions who have been battling for years to bring about improvements or deliver the same solutions.
Ultimately, the Forum suggested that avoiding these pitfalls requires more than better design. It requires a cultural shift among Northern power holders within consortia—from leading to enabling. That is not a semantic adjustment. It is a different theory of change.
Evidence that matters must travel: funding the bridge and cultivating demand
Another major theme of the Forum was the disconnect between evidence generation and policy action. Participants spoke of a landscape in which important research exists, but too often fails to shape the decisions that matter.
Part of the problem is misalignment. It is not surprising that when research agendas are developed abroad, they are disconnected from the questions policymakers are actually grappling with. When this happens, even rigorous work may have little traction. One participant noted a mismatch between the research being conducted and prevailing development goals and policies, resulting in evidence that does not address the most pressing educational challenges.
Yet the Forum’s diagnosis went further. The difficulty is not merely that the wrong questions are being asked. It is that research does not automatically translate into policy, despite what many funders and researchers expect. Evidence has to be translated, communicated, interpreted, mediated and contested. It has to travel across institutional cultures that do not necessarily share the same incentives, timelines or language. If it is to matter politically, it must be made legible not only to researchers but also to policymakers, practitioners and the public. As participants put it, research must be demystified through communication that politicians and ordinary people can actually understand.
This has clear implications for funding. If funders focus only on generating research, they will continue to support only part of the process through which evidence might inform policy and practice. The full ecosystem matters: production, communication, translation, dissemination, brokering, public engagement and use. That means funding the bridge itself.
First, funders need to support the entire evidence value chain, including communication and dissemination. If these functions are treated as optional extras, they will remain underdeveloped. Second, they need to support intermediaries. Researchers are not always the best placed to translate evidence into accessible, politically useful forms. Journalists, communication agencies, knowledge brokers and media platforms all play important roles and should be part of funding portfolios from the beginning. Third, they need to resource continuous collaboration. Policymakers, practitioners, researchers and communities should be involved throughout the research cycle, not simply at the moment of dissemination. This matters not only for uptake but also for the shaping of the questions themselves. Fourth, funders need to provide flexible, long-term support for relationship-building with government actors. Policy engagement is rarely linear. It depends on trust, timing, iteration and the ability to respond to changing circumstances.
But the Forum was equally clear that evidence use is not only a supply problem. The “demand side” matters too. Policymakers, government officials, practitioners and local funders are not passive recipients of knowledge. They are commissioners, interpreters and users of evidence, and their institutional environments matter. Uptake is shaped by political incentives, bureaucratic processes, trust, timing and administrative culture. It can be blocked by politicised systems, weak internal processes, limited absorptive capacity, or a simple lack of trust between decision-makers and researchers.
Supporting the demand side, therefore, requires deliberate investment. Funders may need to support policymakers and practitioners directly so they can identify evidence needs, commission relevant work, or strengthen internal systems for using research. This may involve targeted capacity-building programmes, several of which have already shown promise in African contexts, as well as bridging networks that connect African scholars and think tanks with government advisers and chief economists across countries, ensuring that home-grown evidence enters high-level policy conversations.
Fifth, and perhaps most importantly, funders need to invest in the users of evidence. Strengthening policymakers’ and officials’ capacity to access, interpret, and use research is not secondary work. It is essential. But the Forum’s strongest point was that demand cannot be cultivated solely through training. It depends on trust and co-creation. Researchers and policymakers often misunderstand each other’s pressures, languages and incentives. Changing this requires engagement on both sides and from the earliest stages of the research process.
And once the knowledge ecosystem is understood more broadly, the demand side expands as well. It includes civil society organisations, practitioners, communities and local funders, all of whom need access to evidence in forms that are meaningful to them. Research systems that ignore this broader field will continue to misjudge how evidence gains traction.
What lies beneath all of this is a simple but often-neglected point: evidence is most likely to be used when it helps decision-makers solve real problems. The question is not only whether research is rigorous. It is whether it is meaningful, accessible and timely enough to shape action.
Universities matter, but they are not the whole knowledge ecosystem
One of the Forum’s most important and most subtle arguments concerned the nature of evidence itself. Participants strongly challenged the assumption—often implicit in research funding systems—that credible evidence is generated primarily, or even exclusively, within traditional academic institutions, with a certain limited set of methods and tools.
A healthy knowledge ecosystem does not depend on universities alone. It depends on a far wider array of actors: teachers, school leaders, parents, community-based organisations, NGOs, civil society groups, think tanks, government bodies, communication initiatives, and, in some cases, private-sector actors. These are not peripheral voices hovering around the edges of “real” research. They are producers, interpreters, communicators and users of knowledge in their own right.
The Forum also emphasised that communities and ordinary citizens possess forms of lived knowledge that are indispensable to understanding how policy works in practice. They know how reforms are experienced, where systems break down, what unintended effects emerge, and how public institutions are actually encountered in everyday life. Treating them merely as respondents, data sources, or passive beneficiaries distorts the research process from the start.
This argument matters because current systems continue to privilege traditional academic research, especially journal publications and internationally recognised metrics of scholarly quality. In doing so, they often sideline other forms of knowledge generation: action research, practitioner inquiry, participatory research, community-based learning and applied problem-solving. Yet these forms of knowledge are often precisely the ones most relevant to decision-making.
The Forum, therefore, pushed towards a broader and more context-sensitive understanding of research quality. If quality is defined too narrowly—through publication in top-tier international journals, adherence to a limited set of methods, or the pursuit of academic prestige—it will exclude much of what makes evidence useful in practice. Research intended to inform policy or improve systems may require different forms of rigour depending on its purpose, audience and context. Its value should also be judged by relevance, accessibility and practical usefulness.
This has direct consequences for funders. Supporting the full knowledge ecosystem means moving beyond academic researchers alone. It means extending direct financial and technical support to non-academic organisations that generate and apply knowledge—local NGOs, think tanks, teacher organisations, parent networks, community bodies and communications initiatives. It means resourcing collaborative co-design, so that academic researchers, policymakers, practitioners, industry actors and communities help define the work from the outset rather than being brought in selectively at the end. It means including non-academic actors in governance structures so they help shape agendas and quality criteria. And it means accepting a diversity of formats, methods and outputs rather than insisting that all useful evidence conform to a single academic model.
Isolation is not just inefficient; it weakens the system
Another lesson that ran through the Forum was the cost of isolation. Researchers and organisations working alone are less visible, less connected and less able to shape public debate or policy than those embedded in networks, coalitions and communities of practice.
But the Forum’s argument here was not merely about efficiency. It was about the kind of ecosystem needed for knowledge to matter. Building a stronger education research landscape in Africa requires more than awarding grants to individual projects. It requires investment in relationships, trust, shared infrastructures and long-term spaces for exchange. Participants repeatedly emphasised the need for researchers, practitioners and policymakers to come together not only at moments of dissemination, but throughout the research cycle and across the life of institutions.
This becomes even more important once one accepts that the relevant ecosystem extends beyond universities. Networks need to connect teachers, school leaders, community actors, NGOs, think tanks and public officials, not just academic researchers. If credible evidence is generated and used across a wide field, then the infrastructures that sustain that field must be equally wide.
Regional mobility emerged as an especially practical concern. A continental ecosystem cannot be built if African researchers and knowledge actors lack the means to visit institutions in other countries, observe practice, build relationships and learn horizontally from one another. The Forum, therefore, identified mobility not as a luxury but as part of the infrastructure of a stronger system.
Gender inequity is not an adjacent issue
The Forum’s treatment of women’s exclusion from research systems was one of its most powerful contributions. It did not frame gender inequity as a side issue to be addressed once the “main” structural problems had been solved. It recognised it as central to how the system functions.
The barriers facing African women researchers are layered and cumulative. At the societal level, women face expectations to prioritise marriage, caregiving and domestic responsibilities over academic and professional ambitions. These expectations are not incidental; they shape how much time, energy and legitimacy women can bring to research careers. Unpaid care burdens slow or interrupt degree completion, reduce time for writing and networking, and make mobility more difficult. Gendered stereotypes—particularly in science and technology fields—continue to cast women as less naturally suited to research.
Inside institutions, these pressures are often intensified rather than mitigated. Male-dominated professional cultures can leave women isolated and excluded from informal networks through which opportunities, collaborations and reputations circulate. Sexual harassment remains a persistent reality, often normalised by institutional cultures and made harder to report by weak or ineffective systems. Motherhood can be treated as a professional liability, with some women describing an institutional “phobia for pregnancy” that penalises family formation. Heavy teaching and administrative burdens further erode the time available for research.
Financial inequalities compound these obstacles. Women often receive less research funding than men, lead smaller labs, and carry higher levels of economic stress through training and early career stages. Project funding rarely accounts for maternity leave or childcare support, effectively forcing women into trade-offs between family life and research continuity.
The shortage of mentors and visible role models is another structural barrier. Without senior women in positions of influence, younger researchers lose access to guidance, advocacy and examples of viable career trajectories. And because many networks remain male-dominated, women are often excluded from the informal social capital that underpins visibility, collaboration and advancement.
These patterns matter not only because they are unfair, but because they shape who gets to produce knowledge and what kinds of questions are asked. A research ecosystem that systematically disadvantages women is not merely inequitable. It is epistemically impoverished.
Inclusion requires redesign, not encouragement
The Forum’s reflections on inclusion were notable for their refusal to romanticise resilience. Participants were clear that women, early-career researchers, minorities and disadvantaged groups should not be expected to overcome structural obstacles through individual perseverance alone.
Symbolic and micro-level fixes are not enough.
If inclusion is to be meaningful, systems have to change.
That means targeted funding and practical accommodations: early-career grants, return grants for scholars coming back from study abroad, opportunities for young researchers to serve as principal investigators, support for childcare, maternity leave, disability-related needs, and flexibility in programme design. It means acknowledging that equitable participation has real costs, and that refusing to fund those costs is itself a political choice.
It also means investing in mentorship and intergenerational transfer. Structured mentoring programmes—whether standalone or embedded within research grants—can help emerging researchers navigate not only academic work but also grant writing, networking, policy engagement and institutional life.
Institutions themselves must also be pushed and supported to reform. Funders can use both incentives and conditions: requiring inclusive teams, setting minimum standards, and providing organisational development support -and funding- to help institutions become more enabling environments. Diversity and inclusion cannot be relegated to a paragraph in a proposal template. They need to become part of how quality and legitimacy are understood.
The Forum also challenged prevailing approaches to evaluation. Systems that rely heavily on traditional publication metrics—especially those tied to Northern academic journals—will continue to disadvantage women and early-career African scholars. More context-sensitive criteria are needed, ones that value relevance, public contribution, collaboration, institutional strengthening and the ability to connect academic and non-academic knowledge.
Sustainability is about who gets to define the agenda
Another of the Forum’s most important lessons concerned the meaning of sustainability. Too often, sustainability is reduced to the question of whether a project can continue after a grant ends. Participants pointed towards something deeper.
In this context, sustainability is about whether African actors can genuinely define, resource and sustain their own research agendas over time. That requires more than local participation in implementation. It requires a transfer of power.
Participants did not reject North-South collaboration outright. Many acknowledged its value and its inevitability. But they were insistent that such partnerships must be redefined. They should not operate through extraction, hierarchy and dependency. They should be Africa-led, locally relevant, and structured to strengthen the African research landscape rather than to use it instrumentally.
This point becomes especially sharp when applied to consortia and coalitions. These arrangements may be formed precisely to overcome the weaknesses of fragmented donor practice. Yet unless they guard consciously against the concentration of new power, they can reproduce those weaknesses at a larger scale. Sustainability, therefore, depends not only on more money or longer grants, but on whether institutions are strengthened, priorities are locally defined, and leadership is genuinely shared.
It also depends on recognising that local agendas are not confined to universities. If sustainability is understood narrowly in institutional terms, funders may end up reproducing the same hierarchies that limit the ecosystem’s reach. Sustaining local capacity means sustaining the broader field of organisations and communities through which educational knowledge is produced and used.
This implies a different role for funders: supporting the emergence of local agendas rather than importing them; diversifying the kinds of actors they support; investing in local research funders, not only research producers; and helping build institutions capable of maturing over time. That, in turn, requires patience, humility and a willingness to loosen control.
From forum to consortium
It is worth pausing on what it means that the Forum led to the African Education Research Funding Consortium and helped facilitate the development of HERI Africa.
This matters because it demonstrates that the Forum was not simply an event at which concerns were aired and then archived. It was a moment in which a diagnosis of the system began to generate institutional responses. The Consortium represented an effort to address the fragmentation, asymmetry and short-termism that participants had described. HERI Africa, as an initiative driven by African education researchers, pointed in the direction the Forum had insisted upon from the start: towards African leadership, African-defined priorities, and stronger local ownership of the knowledge agenda.
And yet the Forum’s own lessons also apply to these very responses. The legitimacy of any consortium depends on how it behaves. If it merely aggregates donor power, reproduces narrow definitions of quality, privileges academic actors alone, or recentres control in new forms, it will not solve the problem. A credible consortium must create counterweights to its own power, include African actors directly in governance, recognise multiple forms of knowledge, avoid building redundant systems, and orient itself towards enabling rather than directing.
In this sense, the Forum did more than identify the destination. It also set the terms by which any attempt to reach it ought to be judged.
Five principles for a different funding model
From the Forum emerged five broad principles that, taken together, describe a more enabling model of support for education research in Africa.
The first principle is to support a long-term vision. This means funding people, organisations and systems rather than only short-term project outputs. It means helping local actors articulate and pursue their own agendas, broadening networks to reach a more diverse set of institutions and geographies, and investing in institutional development alongside research itself.
The second principle is to respond to local needs, agendas and initiatives. Funding should be demand-driven, shaped with local experts, and aligned with locally defined missions and priorities. It should build on what already exists rather than creating parallel structures or rewarding conformity to external priorities.
The third principle is to fund the full chain of evidence generation, communication and use. Research does not end with the production of a report. Support must extend to dissemination, translation, public engagement, brokering and uptake. Teachers, school leaders, civil society organisations and other intermediaries must be recognised as part of the ecosystem of evidence, not external to it.
This principle also requires a broader understanding of who produces evidence in the first place. Funding the value chain cannot stop at academic institutions. It must include the many non-academic actors who generate and mobilise credible knowledge in practice. Supporting the full ecosystem means accepting multiple forms of evidence, multiple forms of rigour and multiple pathways to influence.
The fourth principle is to deliberately support the inclusion of women, young people, minorities and disadvantaged groups. Equity will not emerge automatically from otherwise unchanged systems. It requires intentional strategies, financial support, institutional reform and reflection by funders themselves.
The fifth principle is to promote dynamic learning. A healthy ecosystem must remain open to experimentation, feedback, adaptation and evaluation. Funders should study and improve their own models, create active feedback loops with grantees, and monitor whether these principles are actually changing practice.
These principles matter because they move the conversation beyond critique. They offer a framework for acting differently.
A final reflection
The Forum for Education Research in, for and by Africa made something unmistakably clear. The central challenge is not an absence of talent, commitment or ideas among African education researchers. It is that the systems surrounding them too often suppress, fragment or instrumentalise that talent.
Changing this will require funders to behave differently. It will require institutions to become more inclusive and more enabling. It will require stronger bridges between research, communication and policy. It will require more trust in local expertise and a greater willingness to let local actors define what matters.
It will also require a more expansive understanding of expertise itself. If the ecosystem is to become healthier, it must stop assuming that credible and useful evidence is produced only in universities or validated only through international academic publishing. Teachers, parents, communities, civil society organisations, think tanks, school leaders and practitioners all generate forms of knowledge that matter. Their participation is not supplementary to the system. It is part of its foundation.
And it will require humility from collaborative funding initiatives. Coalitions and consortia may play a valuable role, but only if they recognise that coordination can both concentrate power and address fragmentation. Their task is not to recenter control in better-branded forms. It is to support, connect and enable.
The Forum also offered reason for optimism. It showed that there is already a rich and thoughtful community of African researchers, educators and policy actors ready to articulate a different future. It showed that the problems are well understood by those living them. And it showed that, when given the opportunity, these actors can do much more than describe what is broken. They can outline serious, practical and systemic alternatives.
That may be the Forum’s most enduring lesson. African education research does not simply need more support. It needs support on different terms: terms that recognise leadership rather than dependency; relevance rather than imitation; systems rather than projects; learning rather than control; enabling rather than leading. Terms, in short, that make it possible for education research in Africa to be genuinely in, for and by Africa.