University scientists in Cameroon have had their pay cheques increased by over 40% over two years. I was told this by the vice-chancellor of the University of Buea, Vincent Titanji, during lunch today.

Amid the gloom of the tales coming out of African universities about how they are facing uncertainty as a result of the financial crisis, this comes as a ray of sunshine.

Apparently, the government of Cameroon has decided to spend part of the money it “received” as a result of two major debt write-offs on health, engineering and teacher education. How very wise!

Titanji’s university is also getting a whole new faculty for health sciences with two specialised laboratories.

The payrise has stabilised the university sector, says Titanji. People are happy in their jobs now, and the institutions work harmoniously.

It is too early to evaluate the impact of the programme. But it is reminder that there are many possible sources for funding for S&T if a government is serious about supporting it.

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In other news, Mohammed Hassan, executive director of TWAS, has been away from the conference today. For a good reason, we are assured. He has supposedly been to see South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma who has been awarded TWAS presidential medal.

We hope he will take a photo

Linda Nordling, SciDev.Net

School Children in Cameroon. Photo credit: Flickr / emeryjl

This morning we heard from some of the more recent success stories in science and technology. Atta ur Rahman, the former science advisor to Pakistan’s prime minister, described how targeted policies had managed to increase the country’s citations in international journals by 1000% in the last four years.

He emphasised the importance of nurturing excellence, saying that too often, developing country universities lack the creative “soul” of science embodied by the “beautiful” minds that work in places like Oxford or MIT.

Excellence had been top of the list when drawing up Pakistan’s S&T policies, he said. Paying high salaries for mediocre scientists would not give the desired results. So efforts focused on identifying the brightest students used independent auditors to ensure they got the scholarships rather than the merely well-connected.

Quality has been a buzzword at this conference. This indicates a growing maturity in the debate. But not all developing country governments seem to have caught up on this. One South African delegate I spoke to after Rahman’s lecture told me his government would never place such emphasis on top of the line science and technology.

South Africa’s science minister Naledi Pandor would disagree. She is actively promoting excellence, she says. But some academics fear that a more left-leaning government in South Africa will regard elite universities and research as a bourgeois luxury. The country’s mid-term budgets next week may show which way the wind is blowing…

Linda Nordling, SciDev.Net

The University of Oxford - really excellent. Image credit: Flickr / Missy and the Universe

In one of today’s lunchtime sessions at the 6th World Conference of Science Journalists, Chris Whitty, head of research at the UK Department for International Development (DfID), said the point of research was not doing the research itself, but putting its findings to use. He emphasised that the media has a key role in facilitating the transition from one to the other.

This reflects an idea presented yesterday by Ugandan journalist Patrick Luganda that science journalists, if they do their job right, can provide a platform for informed decision-making and debate.

But creating such a platform means that reporters and researchers have to be fully engaged with each other and committed to getting the science out there.

Yet, more often that not there is, according to Whitty, “mutual antagonism, more often indifference”.

Why? It seems it all boils down to two simple excuses — from both sides: don’t want to; don’t know how to.

Journalists are reluctant because they think science is boring, irrelevant or just too complicated, or because they don’t know who to talk to. Researchers, on the other hand, don’t talk to reporters because they don’t know any, because they worry that their research will be oversimplified or misrepresented, or because they just don’t see communication as part of their job.

The answer, according to two DfID-funded projects in Africa presented at today’s meeting, is to get the two sides round a table to talk the issues through. For example, a discussion on language in one project in Zambia quite quickly led to a set of terms and definitions that journalists felt comfortable using in their stories, but which researchers felt still retained scientific meaning.

More difficult is determining where researchers’ responsibility in communicating science ends and journalists’ begins, said Alex Hyde from the TARGETS Health Research Consortium.

Indeed, as pointed out by TVE Asia Pacific’s Nalaka Gunawardene, some researchers have started bypassing journalists altogether and feeding their findings to policymakers more directly, using the plethora of tools available through new media.

Does that mean we’ll all soon be out of a job? Let’s hope not.

Sian Lewis, SciDev.Net

One of the frustrations of meetings at which scientists gather to discuss policy-related issues is the speed with which the requirements for evidence-based discussion they would expect in a professional context can go out of the window.

Such has been the issue over the past two days in the meeting jointly organised in London by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Royal Society on the topic “New Frontiers in Science Diplomacy“.

There has been much lively discussion on the value of international collaboration in achieving scientific goals, on the need for researchers to work together on the scientific aspects of global challenges such as climate change and food security, and on the importance of science capacity building in developing countries in order to make this possible.

But there remained little evidence at the end of the meeting on how useful it was to lump all these activities together under the umbrella term of “science diplomacy”.

More significantly, although numerous claims were made during the conference about the broader social and political value of scientific collaboration – for example, in establishing a framework for collaboration in other areas, and in particular reducing tensions between rival countries – little was produced to demonstrate whether this hypothesis is true.

If it is not, then some of the arguments made on behalf of “science diplomacy”, and in particular its value as a mechanism for exercising “soft power” in foreign policy, do not stand up to close scrutiny.

Indeed, a case can be made that where scientific projects have successfully involved substantial international collaboration, such success is often heavily dependent on a prior political commitment to cooperation, rather than a mechanism for securing cooperation where the political will is lacking.

Three messages appeared to emerge from the two days of discussion. Firstly, where the political will to collaborate does exist, a joint scientific project can be a useful expression of that will. Furthermore, it can be an enlightening experience for all those directly involved. But it is seldom a magic wand that can secure broader cooperation where none existed before.

Secondly, “science diplomacy” will only become recognised as a useful activity if it is closely defined to cover specific situations (such as the negotiation of major international scientific projects or collaborative research enterprises). As an umbrella term embracing the many ways in which science interacts with foreign policy, it loses much of its impact, and thus its value.

Finally, when it comes to promoting the use of science in developing countries, a terminology based historically on maximising self-interest – the ultimate goal of the diplomat – and on practices through which the rich have almost invariably ended up exploiting the poor, is likely to be counterproductive.

In other words, the discussion seemed to confirm that “science diplomacy” has a legitimate place in the formulation and implementation of policies for science (just as there is a time and place for exercising “soft power” in international relations).

 But the dangers of going beyond this – including the danger of distorting the integrity of science itself, and even alienating potential partners in collaborative projects, particularly in the developing world – were also clearly exposed.

The take-home message: handle with care.

David Dickson, SciDev.Net

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“Forget about using science to achieve political goals; it doesn’t even work.”

Christopher Whitty (Credit: LSHTM/Anne Koeber)

That was the stark message delivered by Chris Whitty (right), recently appointed head of research at the UK Department for International Development (DFID), to the two-day meeting taking place in London this week on “New Frontiers in Science Diplomacy“.

Whitty, a malaria specialist who was appointed in January (see UK’s DFID appoints research chief) and emphasised that he was speaking in a personal rather than an official capacity, delivered what he described as a “hymn of praise” for the role of science in international development.

He listed some of the “wonderful things” that science was capable of doing to help to mitigate the effects of poverty around the world, while adding that “it has been massively overlooked by those involved in international development for many years”.

But he was scornful of efforts to use scientific and technical assistance to achieve broader political goals such as increasing influence or even contributing to social stability, both of which he included among “less good reasons” to engage in science in developing countries.

“They are less good because they don’t work,” he said.

One idea he criticised was that training scientists was a valuable way of buying influence with a country’s scientific community. The historical record showed that highly trained scientists often left their countries of origin to continue their work overseas.

“Another idea is that science can promote social stability,” said Whitty. “The evidence is the reverse. Science can be a transformative influence. But transformation can lead to turbulence, which itself can lead to conflict.”

Even the idea that science should be promoted because it was an unalloyed good had its problems. “This is clearly not correct. For example, there is some good south-south collaboration on nuclear issues that does not bring joy to the rest of the world.” No names were mentioned; but no names were needed.

The reason for engaging in science in developing countries should have a single, clear, purpose, he suggested: “to transform the lives of the poor”. A simple enough message. But one that placed a large question mark over the desirability of seeking to use science for diplomatic ends, particularly in the context of relationships with the developing world.

David Dickson, SciDev.Net.

There was therefore some confusion among science journalists sent to cover the opening yesterday (4 May) of the third Knowledge Management Africa (KMA) conference, currently taking place in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, about what they were being expected to write.

Some light — but not a lot — was thrown on the topic of the meeting from its title “Knowledge to Re-position Africa in the Global Economy”.

But any doubts about the importance of the meeting were dispelled in the opening session. This heard a message from the President of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, in which he suggested that effective knowledge management lay at the heart of one of his pet projects, to help secure an “African renaissance”.

Wade’s idea, widely shared by all participants, is that, if properly handled, science and technology provide the key both to allowing Africa to meet the needs of its people, and to putting it in a strong position to benefit from globalisation and the growth of the global knowledge economy.

Put in these terms, the concept of “knowledge management” soon took on a more concrete form. Speakers suggested that it can cover issues that range from the provision of health services to poor communities in South Africa — where the failure to deliver key services is proving a major political embarrassment to the post-apartheid government — to global concerns ranging from climate change to coping with swine flu.

And delegates to the conference responded warmly to the call from the chief executive officer of the Development Bank of Southern Africa — one of the driving forces behind the KMA initiative — that research relevant to such issues was important, but that the time had come to put ideas into action.

All this made it easier for the science journalists present to understand what the conference is intended to achieve — even though putting this into easily accessible terms for local readers must have presented a major challenge.

But there was one area where the organisers of the conference had failed to provide their own knowledge management. A press conference was held at the end of the day entirely in French — the language spoken in Senegal — with no English translation.

A clutch of South African journalists who have come to cover the event looked somewhat unimpressed. The message was simple: on a multilingual continent, appropriate knowledge management begins at home.

David Dickson, SciDev.Net

[BAMAKO] Tense relations between scientists and policy-makers are a barrier to ensuring science achieves its potential impact on health in Africa, delegates at the Global Ministerial Forum on Research for Health heard.

The two groups perceive each other to have different world views and different timeframes for action — and policymakers say scientists provide overly technical, inaccessible information.

Read the full story on SciDev.Net