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Contribution short abstract:

This roundtable contribution takes a decade of experience of Busara—based in Kenya—in advancing behavioural science in beneficial and appropriate ways for diverse people in different African contexts, while navigating a funding environment that is largely skewed against such local ownership.

Contribution long abstract:

The challenges of integrating Africa in a global knowledge production system are well established. The Covid-19 pandemic has made some of the inequities even more visible: a tiny fraction of global funding for social science research on Covid 19 went to Africa. Global funding for strengthening of Africa’s research capacities in public health is already extremely limited—where it is dispersed, it is most commonly administered by a research institute in the Global North or allocated to a handful of African universities. Certain disciplinary approaches are entirely in their infancy, such as behavioural science.

This is a crucial challenge: behavioural science is increasingly important in policy making; methods are advancing rapidly. However, for an equitable future, the advancement and application of behavioural science needs to be Africa-owned, both methodologically and through changed funding mechanisms.

This roundtable contribution draws on a decade of experience of Busara—based in Kenya—in seeking to advance behavioural science in ways that are beneficial and appropriate to Africa while navigating a funding environment that is still largely skewed against such local ownership. The advance of behavioural science provides many opportunities, but also comes with pitfalls of continued transplanting of non-contextualised research methods. The paper concludes with recommendations of how such opportunities need to be shaped by the experience of seeking to change the research ecosystem.