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Paper short abstract:

As a result of the SOHA project on open science and cognitive justice, 10 science shops were born in 2019 in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Niger, Senegal and in Haiti. This paper presents the difficulties, challenges and achievements of the enthusiastic teams of these shops.

Paper long abstract:

The action research SOHA movement (https://projetsoha.org) about open science and cognitive justice in Haiti and Sub-Saharan Francophone Africa has recently (2018) given birth to several science shops in 7 African countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Niger and Senegal) and in Haiti.

A science shop is a program through which students, under the guidance of their professor within a course, help local community organizations to achieve their goals thanks to a research or an intervention project. Experiential learning is therefore combined to service to the community. More than 100 science shops exist in the world, mostly in European universities. They constitute a powerful tool of social responsibility but also of student professionalization for these universities.

In Africa and Haiti, this concept, as presented by the author in some papers and lectures, has created a huge interest and the desire to create one among several professors and graduate students in social and human sciences. Enthusiastic teams have been formed in 10 cities (Abidjan, Bobo-Dioulasso, Bambey, Ouagadougou, Conakry, Niamey, Parakou, Port-au-Prince, Ngaoundéré and Cotonou). However, these teams face very specific challenges compared to the ones situated in the North. For instance, their universities have very few financial, human and material resources while facing an ever-growing number of students, which greatly hampers their ability to develop original educational initiatives or even their mission of service to the community. Yet the potential contribution of science shops to sustainable local development in Africa and Haiti has been easily seen and understood. But how to make it a reality?

Beyond the resource difficulties, one hypothesis is that the concept itself of science shop needs to be adapted to local contexts. For instance, one team wishes to include transversal methodological training for students of all disciplines; another wants to be a laboratory for action research. Others proposed to add to their science shop life-long training activities and the preservation of local traditional and scientific knowledge. Two of the teams have become distrustful of their universities and want to anchor their science shop in an association. A recent initiative brought all these emergent science shops in a global action research project about climate change narratives. Will this solidarity between the teams help them conquering their difficulties?

The paper will sum up how far these science shop teams have come and what are their perspectives in the near future.