Content Divide: Africa and the Global Knowledge Footprint

1. Content Divide: Africa and the Global Knowledge Footprint Daniel Gelaw Alemneh University of North Texas, Digital Libraries Services Daniel.Alemneh@unt.edu

2. Content Divide • Global knowledge production • Scientific and innovation capabilities • The role of higher education vis-à-vis government and private sector partnership • National and regional research and education networks • Gross expenditure on R&D and research performance

3. Gross Expenditure on R&D and Research Performance

4. Gross Expenditure on R&D • Research and Development Activity in Developing Countries • R&D Importance for development • R &d Expenditure • National • Specific Fields • Patterns in R & D workforce Mobility • Tracking the flows of Mobile Students • Looking Ahead

5. Gross Expenditure on R&D and Research Performance • Abbreviations: • GERD: Gross Domestic Expenditure on R&D • GDP: Gross Domestic Product • NEPAD: New Partnership for Africa’s Development • OECD: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development

6. Gross Expenditure on R&D and Research Performance • World: Africa; America; Asia; Europe; Oceania. • Developed countries :North America; Europe; Japan; Australia and New Zealand. • Developingcountries:- Africa; Latin America and the Caribbean; Asia excluding Japan; Oceania excluding Australia and New Zealand. • Leastdeveloped countries: Afghanistan; Angola; Bangladesh; Benin; Bhutan; Burkina Faso; Burundi; Cambodia; Central African Republic; Chad; Comoros; Democratic Republic of the Congo; Djibouti; Equatorial Guinea; Eritrea; Ethiopia; Gambia; Guinea; Guinea-Bissau; Haiti; Kiribati; Lao People's Democratic Republic; Lesotho; Liberia; Madagascar; Malawi; Mali; Mauritania; Mozambique; Myanmar; Nepal; Niger; Rwanda; Samoa; Sao Tome and Principe; Senegal; Sierra Leone; Solomon Islands; Somalia; Sudan; Timor-Leste; Togo; Tuvalu; Uganda; United Republic of Tanzania; Vanuatu; Yemen; Zambia.

7. Infrastructure & Research Performance • Several indexes exist to measure the performance of nations connectivity and broadband penetration: • The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Digital Opportunity Index (DOI) • The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) E-readiness rankings • Based on infrastructureand skills & usage as important indicators for connectivity, the recent connectivity scorecard considered 50 countries • Botswana, Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tunisia are selected from Africa.

8. Infrastructure & Research Performance

9. Infrastructure & Research Performance • Digital divide in content network is more severe compared to the physical network. • The contribution of African universities to the global scientific knowledge base is very small. • A search of African authors and researchers in the ISI web of knowledge database (or using anyone of the analytics tools there) reveals that very rarely you find works out of Africa.

10. Research Performance • Only 31 countries in the world account for more than 98% of the world’s highly cited papers, of which south Africa is the only country from Africa in the 31 countries group. • The world's remaining 162 countries contributed less than 2% in total.

11. Global Knowledge Production

12. Visitors per minute for News Traffic (Consumption)

13. Gross expenditure on R&D and Research Performance

14. Gross expenditure on R&D and Research Performance

15. Expansion in Higher Education • There has been a great expansion in higher education enrolment across the world over 170 million students participated in higher education, which is a five-fold increase since 1970 and a three-fold increase since 1980. • One in five of the world’s international students are from either China or India, with more than 700,000 tertiary-level students enrolled in a higher education system outside their home country.

16. Patterns in Higher Education • A growing trend is also seen in cross-border higher education, which is characterized by the movement of : • People: (students, professors, scholars, researchers, experts, and consultants) • Programs: (course, academic programs, and degrees) • Providers: (institutions, consortia, and companies across national borders)

17. Patterns in R & D workforce Mobility

18. Patterns in R & D Workforce Mobility • The Southern African Development Community (SADC) has the highest outbound mobility ration worldwide (6%). • However, unlike their African counterparts pursuing tertiary education in Europe and North America, nearly one-half of SADC mobile students are choosing to study in South Africa. • Social science, business, and law are the most popular disciplines amongst mobile students from the region.

19. Patterns in R & D workforce Mobility

20. Challenges • Multi-disciplinary (inter-disciplinary) • Grand challenges at various (intersection) disciplines • Multi-sector (local to international) • Academic, government, commercial not-for profit • Multi-formats (multi-scale) • Format diversity, big and small data aggregation • Multi-lingual (semantic & meanings) • Temporal variation, different units and scales of measurement

21. Opportunity • Increased availability of interoperable Open Access contents and repositories • Help to integrate, aggregate and enhance access to diverse digital contents • Standards and common practices • Support re-use, interoperability, and the linkage of local systems into global networks • The current infrastructure development • Help to reduce the information poverty in developing countries

23. Summary • There are several initiatives underway: • NEPAD: New Partnership for Africa’s Development • AGORA: Access to Online Global Research in Agriculture • HINARI: Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative • OARE: Online Access Research in the Environment • What should be the role of Information Scientists? • What can the various scientific communities do?

24. Thanks! Daniel.Alemneh@unt.edu