At the heart of the most basic inventions or innovations in today’s highly competitive market is research.
Quite a number of times, I had desperately searched for data to enable me make an informed decision and to my amazement, all I usually found online were foreign based research results and white papers.
This is a situation that I find somewhat ironical and sometimes, frustrating. How is it that a continent so endowed, does not have the capacity to carry out research that the world will find credible enough to be found online for the benefit of humanity?
On the other hand, maybe there are enough researchers and research results in our universities but what may be lacking is that they are not online. This is where we need to encourage African start-ups to rise up to the occasion.
Africa remains a continent of valuable resource to the world; hence the growing demand for African focused research. In the last few decades, the overwhelming call for the accessibility of African research has stretched traditional archiving methods.
Prior to this time, debates about civilisation or science have always eluded Africa because traditional African societies did not value the act of writing ideas and archiving them. History was moonlight tales, and then folklores and then myths and legends.
The result is that the history of great wars, advancements in herbal and traditional medicine, intriguing architecture, development of African arts, music and sound were all lost. Fast forward to today, the need for archiving and digitising African-focused research is not an ambitious task but a response to the call to make African research accessible on a global scale.
A great deal of valuable indigenous African researches is inaccessible to policy makers, investors and manufacturers. Some of the challenges this poses may include the under-utilisation, under-citation and under-valuation of African researches.
Conventionally, research works are usually archived in personal, institutional or community libraries, but this approach fails to grant global visibility to both the research and the researcher. There must, thus, be a deliberate leap from paper and conventional archiving to a more technology-driven market.
There is sufficient value in African focused research output. From providing data and facts to non-governmental organisations to utilising these data by investors, manufacturers and policy makers; the entire process has proven to be a rich endeavour.
In Nigeria today, many people applaud the BudgIT Team (www.yourbudgIt.com) led by Oluseun Onigbinde, who has continuously simplified complex budget data through colourful infographics. — Finish Reading on the Punch Website
