The conversation around decolonizing education research in Africa often centres on theory, highlighting the need to move away from “parachute research” and elevate local voices. But while these debates are vital, a recent evidence synthesis by the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) and Education Sub Saharan Africa (ESSA) shows that changing ideas alone is not enough. Real change will also require reforms in how research is funded and how institutions are managed and governed.  

To move from ideas and discussions to real change, we must treat the localization of education research as a system-wide issue that needs strong policy action. Small, disconnected efforts and short-term funding are no longer enough.  Instead, African governments, higher education institutions, and international partners must focus on four key policy actions

Policy Lever 1: Legislating Domestic Funding and Institutional Autonomy – The root of research dependency in Africa is a political economy problem. According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2026), sub-Saharan African governments spend an average of just 0.38% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on Research and Development (R&D), falling significantly short of the African Union’s 1% target and the global average of approximately 1.92%. This long-term funding shortage forces universities to rely on external donors, who often shape the research agenda.

The Policy Action – Governments must go beyond promises and put laws in place to increase investment in research and development, targeting at least 1% of GDP — or even 2%, as proposed in Kenya’s Science, Technology and Innovation Act. In addition, governments must enact laws that protect the independence and autonomy of universities and research institutions.  Empowering, financially, national research councils—such as Tanzania’s Commission for Science and Technology—can ensure funding is directed toward nationally determined developmental goals rather than externally driven priorities.

Policy Lever 2: Enacting National Language Policy Frameworks – Language is one of the main ways people are excluded from producing and accessing knowledge.

 The dominance of English, French, and Portuguese in African academia limits who can participate in and benefit from research. Remarkably, 94% of African journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals require submissions in English. When indigenous languages are left out, research reaches fewer people and has less influence on policy and decision-making. 

The Policy Action: Governments and Ministries of Education must develop and enforce strong national language policy frameworks. These policies should mandate the integration of indigenous languages—such as Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, or Amharic—across educational curricula, policy formulation, and research dissemination.

Policy Lever 3: Rewriting University Evaluation and Workload Metrics – Within universities in Africa, policies governing career advancement often work against local research priorities. Promotion criteria heavily favor scholars who publish in internationally indexed, high-impact journals, prioritizing publication venue over the research’s relevance, reach, or community impact.  This unfairly disadvantages important forms of research — such as community-based and participatory studies — and the outputs they produce, including policy briefs and locally disseminated reports, even when they are equally rigorous, simply because they do not fit traditional academic measurement systems. It also marginalizes research grounded in indigenous epistemologies and African knowledge systems, which rarely conform to the methodological and presentational conventions privileged by Western-indexed journals. Reforming these criteria to recognize diverse outputs and explicitly reward locally grounded knowledge production is therefore essential. Compounding this structural bias,  heavy teaching workloads disproportionately burden early-career and female researchers, who often have additional gendered responsibilities, severely limiting their capacity to produce knowledge.

The Policy Action: Higher education institutions must fundamentally rewrite their performance evaluation and promotion criteria to explicitly reward locally relevant research, the use of indigenous epistemologies, and publication in local institutional journals. Additionally, universities must mandate workload policies that intentionally protect research time and create targeted structural support systems—such as formal mentorship and writing support—to promote gender equity in research outputs.

Policy Lever 4: Institutionalizing Local Education Groups (LEGs) – To truly democratize the research agenda, the power to define what gets studied must be distributed. Multi-stakeholder platforms, particularly Local Education Groups (LEGs), are highly effective at aligning research with national priorities by bringing together governments, civil society, donors, and indigenous knowledge holders. However, in contexts where LEGs lack formal backing, research agendas remain dominated by external actors.

The Policy Action: Governments must create an enabling environment by formally recognizing LEGs and embedding them into official policy initiatives. Kenya provides a powerful blueprint: the Harnessing Education Research for Impact (HERI) Africa initiative and the Education Evidence for Action (EE4A) forum systematically bring together researchers and policymakers to collaboratively shape and enact a National Education Research Agenda (NERA).

Moving Forward 

The localization of education research in Africa requires systemic, coordinated policy reform. By legislating sustainable domestic funding, enacting bold language frameworks, rewriting academic incentive structures, and formally institutionalizing LEGs, African nations can build a robust, self-determined research ecosystem.