A pattern that repeats across sectors

Consider a food fortification programme with a four-year horizon. Over its lifetime it commissions a landscape assessment of processor capacity, a technical feasibility study on a candidate food vehicle, an analysis of premix supply economics, and a review of the regulatory environment. Each is methodologically sound. Each answers a question that could not have been answered without conducting the work.

The programme concludes. The firm that produced the studies moves to its next engagement. The ministry retains the reports. The local university that hosted two of the studies retains approximately the research capability it held at the outset — and possibly less, since the researchers who conducted the work have moved to whatever followed.

Four years later, a different funder commissions a landscape assessment of processor capacity.

The evidence was generated. It was used. It did not accumulate.

The loss is capability, not documentation

The intuitive response is better knowledge management: shared repositories, open data commitments, structured learning agendas. The sector has invested seriously in these over the past decade, and they help.

The more consequential loss, however, is not the documents. It is the capability that produced them.

When a programme commissions research, it assembles something temporarily. A team that understands how to design an implementation study in that specific context. Working relationships with the institutions that hold the relevant data. A practical sense of which methods survive contact with the operating environment. That capability is substantive, and it is almost always constituted for the duration of the programme and disassembled at its close.

The next programme reconstitutes it, frequently from a lower base, because the individuals who held it have moved into other sectors or other countries.

This is what the researcher-density figures describe. UNESCO's 2026 data release places Sub-Saharan Africa at 88 researchers per million people, against 4,358 across Europe and Northern America. Global research intensity rose over the same period — from 1.71 to 1.92 percent of GDP between 2015 and 2023 — while Sub-Saharan Africa remained at 0.38 percent. The gap is wider now than a decade ago.

These figures do not indicate that research about Africa is not being conducted. A substantial volume is. They indicate that the capability to conduct it is not being retained by African institutions.

Three design choices that would change the pattern

None of the following requires a new funding instrument, and none depends on additional research budget. Each is a design decision available at programme inception.

1. Commission through local institutions, not only through international firms with local staff

The distinction is operationally significant. One arrangement leaves an institution with a completed deliverable and a payment. The other leaves it with a completed deliverable, a payment, and a team that has now performed the work once — which is the precondition for performing it again without external support.

2. Specify a capability outcome alongside the evidence outcome

Where a programme intends to generate implementation evidence, it can also intend to leave a named institution demonstrably better able to generate that evidence subsequently. Stating what this would look like at design stage converts an incidental benefit into a deliverable. At present it is neither specified nor, in most cases, expected.

3. Measure research capability at close-out, not only evidence produced

Programmes routinely report the studies commissioned and the findings disseminated. Few assess whether local research capability was higher at close-out than at inception. In the absence of measurement, the outcome is not designed for — and cannot be improved between programme cycles.