Editorial: Ghana National Research Fund Must Be Seen To Be Working

The Chronicle has followed with growing concern the slow and hesitant steps this country continues to take toward building a credible research and innovation ecosystem. We say this not to disparage the efforts made so far, but because the evidence demands plain speaking: Ghana is legislating boldly and funding timidly, and the cost of that contradiction is compounding by the year.

In December 2020, Parliament passed the Ghana National Research Fund Act (Act 1056), a landmark piece of legislation that signalled this country’s intention to take research and development seriously. Five years on, the Fund is only now becoming operational, sustained by a GHS 50 million seed allocation that even its own proponents acknowledge falls far short of what is required. We welcome the seed, but we insist it is not enough.

Ghana currently spends between 0.38% and 0.4% of GDP on research and development, when African Union target is one percent. The gap between these two figures is not a technicality. It is a policy choice and it is a choice with consequences.

We have said it before and we will say it again, no country has industrialised on the basis of borrowed ideas alone. The fourth industrial revolution is reorganising global economic power around technological capacity and knowledge production.

Countries that treat research funding as a line item to be trimmed when budgets tighten will find themselves permanently dependent on the innovations of others. Ghana has visited the IMF seventeen times. If we are serious about ending that cycle, we must be serious about building the knowledge base that makes it possible.

The institutional architecture is not the problem. The Ghana Research and Innovation Support Programmes Coordinating Office exists, the legal framework exists. Partnerships with the United Kingdom under the Ghana ST&I Strategy (2023 to 2027) and the UNESCO linked Sankore project are providing external support for governance and grant management. International partners are signalling confidence in Ghana’s potential.

The question The Chronicle asks Jubilee House is this: are you prepared to match that confidence with your own budget?

Private sector participation in research remains weak. Start-ups and SMEs lack the incentives, infrastructure, and institutional linkages to convert ideas into commercial enterprises. Human capital for research is constrained. Laboratory infrastructure is inadequate. These are not new observations -they appear in policy brief after policy brief, conference after conference, and yet the funding allocations do not move.

Ghana is, to its credit, emerging as a credible force in artificial intelligence on the African continent. That recognition is encouraging, but AI capability built on an underfunded research foundation is a structure without adequate support. We cannot be content with rankings if the ecosystem beneath them is fragile.

The Chronicle, therefore, calls on the Mahama administration to treat the GNRF not as a worthy initiative, but as a national priority. Ring fence its allocations, protect them from the annual budget negotiations that have, year after year, whittled down commitments to science and technology.

Government must also create the incentive environment that brings private capital into research and innovation and as well hold the relevant ministries accountable for outcomes, not just disbursements.

Act 1056 was a promise to the Ghanaian people that this country would invest in its own ideas. That promise is five years old and still waiting to be kept. The time for waiting is over.

 

 

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