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| December 2006 |
Insight |
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Barry Mendelow |
Take a seed survival expert from Durban, an insect researcher from Pretoria, a Johannesburg haemotologist who knows more about blood than your average vampire, and a dapper Cape medical biochemist. Then put them all in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel in downtown Yaounde. At midnight.
Sounds a bit like the opening line of a joke, doesn't it?
The time can be easily explained. Midnight isn't merely the witching hour.
It's also when Kenya Air likes to pop in and out of Cameroon, a good time to consider the shortage of east-west flight schedules in Africa.
The South African delegation was arriving via Nairobi - along with a biotechnologist who regularly incurs the wrath of devoutly anti-genetic modification crusaders for his column in the Farmer's Weekly magazine, and a scattering of people from the Department of Science and Technology - for the second meeting of the African Science Academies Development Initiative (Asadi).
The initiative's going to run for 10 years, bankrolled with $20 million of Microsoft money courtesy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation needs local science brain power - brain power that can speak to political power - to achieve its goals of helping the one billion people who live in extreme poverty.
For a decade, with the help of the prestigious US quartet of private, non-profit national academies, African academies are being coached in the arcane arts of assessing research and producing advice on demand. After that, they will be on their own.
It's a complicated business, requiring specialists to leave their computers, laboratories and students to learn new skills in fund-raising, communication, management and administration. But the need for understandable, impartial science advice in Africa - to boost the economy, to cut poverty, to fight disease - is overwhelming.
The people from the Academy of Science of South Africa included Pat Berjak of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Robin Crewe of the University of Pretoria, Barry Mendelow from Wits University and former UCT deputy vice-chancellor Wieland Gevers.
The reason for the large delegation is that the South Africa academy, with its sister organisations in Nigeria and Uganda, has been chosen to spearhead the most intensive efforts to increase the ability of African academies to make an impact on society.
Academies are not meant to compete with universities, research institutes and in-house advice within governments. But they do have the skills to carefully sift through a bewildering amount of existing and sometimes contradictory research to reach agreement on what can be done, without fear of departmental backlashes, funding cutbacks or antagonising special interests.
At last year's Asadi meeting, former Ugandan vice-president Speciosa Wandira-Kazibwe noted that this was what East African states needed to reach agreement on how to tackle the deadly water hyacinth weed choking Lake Victoria.
This year, the focus was on how to harness research on malnutrition, agriculture and the environment to reshape government activities so that fewer people suffer from hunger. Although the proportion of hungry people living in sub-Saharan Africa has decreased dramatically, population increases mean that about a third of the region's people lack minimum food requirements.
About 150 scientists came together in Yaoundé including those from academies in Ghana, Kenya, Senegal and Cameroon.
According to reports on the website of the US National Academies, science advice can be a matter of life and death. Urbain Olanguena Awono, Cameroon's minister of public health, listed tangible results, including community nutrition outreach efforts for people with HIV/Aids and a huge drop in the number of bottle-fed babies after a breast-is-best campaign.
Nearly half the nation's pre-schoolers suffered from Vitamin A deficiency. Now vitamin supplements are included in expanded immunisation drives for children.
He said more than a quarter of the population suffered from iodine deficiency, which can cause enormous lumps in the throat. Now salt producers routinely add iodine to their salt and the number of goitre sufferers has dropped to 5%.
All well and good. But the network of African academies found it necessary to send a statement to African science ministers last week, reminding them of their existence - and noting that constant financial worries are not a good thing for organisations meant to be both sustainable and independent of politics.
It all forms part of the painfully slow and sometimes difficult evolution of African academies from prestigious but cash-strapped clubs for respected scientists into fiercely independent organisations that can publicly offer governments (and voters) advice they don't always want to hear.
There was considerable interest in the South African academy's first attempt, now under way, to judge evidence on a disputed topic. Not only is the "hot potato" study one of nutritional influences on human immunity, there is a focus on possible links between malnutrition and HIV/Aids and tuberculosis.
Wits University pathology professor Mendelow, who chairs the study, ended his presentation with an enlightening 1923 quotation from US philosopher and poet George Santayana: "Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect … and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer."
Beetroot, anyone?
More information:
Christina
Scott, of the Science and Development Network news website, was in Yaoundéas a
guest of the African Science Academy Development Initiative www.nationalacademies.org/asadi
or www.assaf.org.za
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