Martin Henry | Honouring Nelson Mandela with funding research and development

Twenty-nine years later, the lump returned to my throat, the mist to my eyes, as I listened on Monday, February 11, to rebroadcasts of Nelson Rolihlahla Madiba Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom as he was released from 27 years of imprisonment.

Mandela, after whom we have named park and highway in honour of his visit to Jamaica in July 1991, only 18 months after his release, is going to star in my repeat story about financing science and technology in Jamaica.

February 11 is also the UN International Day of Women and Girls in Science. The much lower proportion of women in science, even in the most liberal and gender-equal societies, is a little more complicated than patriarchy and is a subject of extensive social scientific study.

One place in our own country not very far from near gender equality in science and technology among both students and lecturers is the finance-starved University of Technology (UTech), where I work.

Right at the top of academic power, four of eight current deans are women heading up engineering and computing, science, and sport, health sciences, and oral health sciences. The men are leading education, management, law, and the built environment.

It is a great time to write about money for science and technology. Which is why I am doing it – again.

Finance Minister Dr Nigel Clarke made two very important money announcements in his keynote address at the opening of UWI’s Research Days on February 6.

UTech, with far less resources under inequitable financing, will be showcasing on March 14 its own research output, which is largely tilted towards solving practical problems of economy and society. With results that can hit the ground running like the graduates.

Minister Clarke announced that the Government is soon to start computing research and development spending in calculations of gross domestic product (GDP) in line with 2008 revisions to the System of National Accounts (SNA) methodology by the United Nations Statistical Commission. And the Government will be making budgetary allocations in the coming financial year for research and development.

ALTERNATIVES

A rich research fund (not part of housekeeping money for science and technology – S&T – agencies) of $500 million ($0.5 billion) would be only 0.06 per cent of the $803.2 billion Budget announced at the opening of Parliament last Thursday. Not exactly a budget buster. But I doubt very much if the research community has the capacity to absorb so much money in one year. And the Government doesn’t even have to tap into the Consolidated Fund so deeply for research and development (R&D).

I’ll soon show alternatives – again.

And the prime minister finally relieved himself of the energy, science, and technology portfolios and appointed a quietly effective woman, Fayval Williams, shifted from Finance and the Public Service to head up the ministry, which had been decapitated with Dr Andrew Wheatley’s implosion over Petrojam. The big focus, with all the troubles of Petrojam and NESol, is on the energy portfolio. But let’s not forget the S&T.

So how does World Citizen Nelson Mandela figure in all of this? Mandela, by choice, served a one-term presidency between 1994 and 1999. One of the legacies of his administration was the creation of a state-funded National Research Foundation.

The Research Fund was created by the National Research Foundation Act (Act No. 23 of 1998). According to Section 3 of the act, the object of the NRF is to: “Promote and support research through funding, human resource development and the provision of the necessary facilities in order to facilitate the creation of knowledge, innovation and development in all fields of science and technology ... .”

The broad strategic goals of the agency are to:

= Promote internationally competitive research as the basis for a knowledge economy;

- Grow a representative science and technology workforce in South Africa;

- Provide cutting-edge research, technology, and innovation platforms;

- Operate world-class evaluation and grant-making systems;

- Contribute to a vibrant national innovation system.

The foundation stands on three pillars:

1. Research and innovation support and advancement, which promotes research in research institutions by way of programme-based competitive grants from funds provided by the Parliament through the host Department of Science & Technology.

2. The South African Agency for Science and Technology Advancement, tasked with communicating the value of S&T to South African society towards building the science, engineering, and technology human resource base, beginning at school level.

3. National research facilities, which are the custodians of large pieces of scientific equipment or large collections of data and specimens available for the use of researchers across the country.

South Africa has included research on Indigenous Knowledge (IK) into the operations of its NRF.

In a recent financial year, the NRF of South Africa had a total budget of 2.1 billion rands (about US$235 million or J$23 billion at the then exchange rates).

BILATERAL AGREEMENT WITH SOUTH AFRICA

 

 

When our National Commission on Science and Technology (NCST) was set up in 1993, I pointed out then that the NCST would fail to be an effective body for the promotion of research without an attached research fund. So said, so happened. But things are about to change. So says the minister of finance.

After email interaction and a survey of their online material at http://www.nrf.ac.za, a University of Technology delegation in which I participated as a key organiser along with a UWI delegation visited South Africa in 2013 and visited the National Research Foundation (NRF) for observations and discussions.

In a way, Jamaica has been a beneficiary of the South African National Research Foundation. Apart from the example set, following pioneering contacts of the kind I have described, Jamaica signed a bilateral agreement with South Africa on scientific and technological cooperation in February 2013.

I said I would get back to talking about off-Budget financing for research and development. Another virtually painless source of financing for research is earmarking small portions of the many special funds held by Government to support research, funds such as the HEART Trust Fund, the National Housing Trust Fund, the Universal Access Fund, the Tourism Enhancement Fund, and the CHASE Fund. These ‘funds’ are, by definition, ‘development funds’, and a solid case can be made that research conducted in areas related to the fields of operation of these funds can benefit these areas of development.

The country should also adopt the practice of attaching a relatively small R&D levy to the international contracts for services to the Government of Jamaica and to foreign direct investments as a relatively painless cost of doing business. Their operations in Jamaica would thereby leave a tangible legacy of development through the development and applications of S&T.

We can also go the same route of negotiating with donors the allocation of portions of grants to research and development as standard procedure.

It is all well and good doing more research, but there is a dangerous problem on the D side of R&D – the development side. The problem is crossing the ‘Valley of Death’, the financing gap between innovation and market. A problem that has its own body of research literature.

ey of Death is a universal problem, but as we all know, the commercial financial system in Jamaica is exceptionally risk averse. Even the Development Bank of Jamaica will not finance good ideas but wants an established business to back.

Government may very well have to go beyond funding research to providing early backing for commercial developments from results evaluated as having good business potential in a kind of state venture capital system with clear agreements on risk-sharing and profit-sharing if successful.

So it is over to Minister Clarke and Minister Williams. They could honour the Mandela legacy better than with that tattered park in Half-Way-Tree.

- Martin Henry is a university administrator. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and medhen@gmail.com