Advancing Africa’s inequalities agenda

UCT has launched the African Centre of Excellence for Inequalities Research (ACEIR), under the banner of the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA).

“When the call for ARUA’s centres of excellence was published last year, we at UCT felt that we should use it as an opportunity to respond to our strategic plan and vision of being inclusive, engaged and African,” said Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng in her introduction to the two-day launch workshop.

This, the first such centre of excellence, seeks to consolidate and magnify the efforts of African universities as they relate to poverty and inequalities research, with a mind to informing policy and advancing civil society action.

ACEIR is one of 13 planned ARUA centres, each addressing a research theme aligned to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

UCT was selected to host two centres: the first focused on climate change and the second on poverty and inequities research.

“We at UCT felt that we should use it as an opportunity to respond to our strategic plan and vision of being inclusive, engaged and African.”

Although housed at UCT, under the direction of Professor Murray Leibbrandt, the centre will be made up of three nodes across the African continent.

This lateral organisation reflects the way the centre plans to work: as partners seeking to advance the African perspective on inequality.

“It’s a wonderful privilege,” noted Leibbrandt. “You know, it’s really something we wanted to do. We wrote the grant with our African colleagues.

“Obviously UCT has to be super careful, to make it clear that we don’t think we’re better than anybody else, and we’re not stomping through … It’s a positive agenda, and we gain as much as anybody else.”

UCT will host the southern African node, drawing on the expertise of DataFirst to constitute ACEIR’s data centre. The two other local hubs will be situated at the University of Ghana and the University of Nairobi.

A consolidated African voice

“Our main objective is to improve on the quality and quantity of African research and enhance the voice of Africans in global debates,” explained Professor Ernest Aryeetey, secretary-general of ARUA.

The collective also seeks to expand graduate programmes, and improve research management and the use of research for advocacy. The centres of excellence are to be the main means of achieving these goals.

“Each centre is expected to bring together a critical mass of African experts in the area. So, we expect the centre of excellence here at UCT to manage to mobilise all the top African experts on inequality, and bring them together for research purposes, and also for teaching purposes. If they do their work well, they will also produce enough evidence to be used for advocacy.”

He continued: “The centre of excellence on inequality here is one of the most advanced that we have so far. It’s been lucky to receive support from [the] French Development Agency [Agence Française de Développement], and itʼs building itself up on an existing network of African researchers.

“We do believe that it will provide the direction for other centres of excellence.”

Taking control of the African research agenda

“In other areas, the idea of an Africa-wide research centre, with strong nodes of research across the continent – that might be difficult or forced,” said Leibbrandt.

But this kind of continental connection is essential in the poverty and inequality space: particularly as it relates to data-informed policy and taking control of the African agenda on inequality.

“Something like ARUA arrived at just the right moment because it’s of huge concern to a number of us African scholars that the UN … are beginning to pick up on the SDGs, but it was turning into them bossing us around and telling us to measure stuff and report back into the UN.

“The centre of excellence on inequality here is one of the most advanced that we have so far.”

“That’s completely antithetical to the SDGs being useful. At all. There has to be local buy-in and local capacity.”

Inequality has emerged as perhaps the most important social science issue of this decade, Leibbrandt explained. Within this context, southern Africa has emerged as one of the most unequal regions globally.

“So, it is particularly egregious that all of this discussion of global inequality is happening without [an] explicit African voice coming into the discussion.

“If we want to be taken seriously as the African voice, then we’ve got to insert ourselves.”

Capturing complexity

But the real work is still to be done: in ensuring that local nodes are established and capturing the many variations in local level dynamics, before coming together as a whole to reflect on the larger debates on African development and inequality.

“It’s a wonderful agenda that requires that we’re academically excellent, that we’re training a lot of students, that we’re bringing the national discourse alive in each of our contexts,” Leibbrandt said.

“If we want to be taken seriously as the African voice, then we’ve got to insert ourselves.”

“It’s this wonderful mix of being good at what we do research-wise, and making data available for the research community … and that’s a democratisation of this discussion of inequality, in and of itself.”

A dream project

Having just entered into his third and final term holding the National Research Foundation / Department of Science and Technology (NRF/DST) National Research Chair of Poverty and Inequality Research, Leibbrandt is thrilled to be leading ACEIR.

“This is my dream project for my final term,” he said. “We do have very good training programmes to offer our centre. And we are very proud to do that. Other partners also do.

“We’ve also been quite sophisticated in the South African context of pushing between evidence and policy,” he said. This is a dynamic that has been brokered over many years.

“We are so fortunate to have initial launch funding from the French Development Agency. So, we were able to talk very concretely.”

Ensuring that the workshop participants did not lose sight of the broader vision, Phakeng urged them to work with urgency, noting, “It is not enough to theorise, to publish, to do the work … the work has to have impact on the ground.”