Source: Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) | Published: 2026-08-07
Category: ODA·개발금융 | Keywords: donor, education
There is a long history of donor funding for African universities, research and publishing, going back to the colonial period, and the foundation of the International African Institute in 1926. The crises of higher education and knowledge flows of the 1980s, described by the historian of Africa Michael Crowder as a ‘book famine’, led to a plethora of donor-funded initiatives in support of African journals, book publishing and donations. New publishing NGOs were established including the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publication and African Journals Online (AJOL). Later, other NGOs promoting access to Northern published journals included the Dutch-based Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) and the Research4Life (R4L) partnership funded by UN agencies and several of the major commercial publishers including the largest scientific publisher Elsevier.
Although these NGOs have increased access to online publishing, and to journals published by the commercial presses, they have not strengthened the economic sustainability of African journals. Over 25 years after the launch of these NGOs, African journals remain as dependent on donor funding as they were at inception. Digital discoverability tools, submission platforms, and publishing standards have rapidly evolved, making traditional print publishing obsolete, marginalising journals, and reinforcing knowledge hierarchies.
Dependency and extraversion
Hountondji understood dependency as a condition created by the capitalist core, colonial or metropolitan centres, over the colonial peripheries. This has underpinned the extraversion of scientific publishing and dependency on development donors. As Hountondji foresaw, the science communication system reinforces extraversion and dependency.
Well before the promises of the internet economy and debates about digital or data colonialism, Hountondji wrote that scientific infrastructure on the continent mainly served to facilitate the export of information and data, integrating the scientific legacy of the South into the intellectual production managed and controlled by the North.
The dependence of African academics on international journals and their reviewers has a well-documented negative impact on academic autonomy. Echoing Hountondji, Nyamnjoh rightly argues that the African academy continues to suffer from endemic reliance on external validation through Northern journals.
Jean-François Bayart criticised Hountondji and dependency theory for not properly historicising societies. Bayart developed the concept of extraversion in a new and different way, focusing on the political agency of African elites. He argued that in unequal environments elite actors, such as NGOs, may deliberately deploy ‘financial extraversion’ to mobilise donor aid. His work emphasises the actions of private foreign actors, or multinational companies, that capture Africa’s trade with Europe for purposes of commercial gain, exacerbating Africa’s dependence.
The fall and rise of multinational publishers
During the late colonial period, British multinationals dominated publishing in anglophone Africa. Their presence expanded in the postcolonial period due to increased demand for educational materials in the newly independent states. Most multinational operators withdrew in the financial crisis of the 1980s as textbooks became increasingly unaffordable.
Where once Macmillan and Oxford University Press controlled textbook markets, including in apartheid South Africa, the company with the largest academic footprint today is Taylor & Francis (T&F). Exploiting the market opportunities brought about by the end of apartheid from the mid-1990s, T&F has taken over the publishing of over 70 Africa-related journals, setting up co-publishing agreements with the University of South Africa and launching many new journals.
More recently, T&F has been publishing a rapidly growing number of papers in its ‘mega’ journals modelled on those of the science publishers. Around 40% of articles published in T&F’s Cogent Social Sciences are from Africa. Many of these papers are published with open access waivers or discounts funded by its partnership with the donor-funded EIFL. T&F reports that since 2020 more than 18,000 researchers have received either 50% discounts or complete fee waivers to publish in its journals.
The library at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal (Wikimedia Commons, 2008)
R4L initiatives and the Elsevier Foundation continue to support the provision of thousands of journals to more than 12,000 institutions in poorer regions across the global South, including most African countries. Whilst the continent’s scientists are unequivocally dependent on such philanthropic access, these programmes allow Elsevier to conduct research on future markets, identifying content for their journals and citation indexes. The ‘grants’ that underwrite them, small-scale relative to the commercial publisher’s exorbitant profits, might be best understood as tax-efficient public relations exercises.
Looking to the future
Commercial actors are capturing an increasing share of the continent’s research economy. Publishing in commercial journals owned and managed outside the continent, or in so-called ‘predatory’ journals that attract ever more African submissions, might be the only viable strategy for individual academics. The extraversion of the continent’s scientific output is at the expense of its own journal and book publishers.
As has been covered on this blog, the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) separated from T&F in 2023, unhappy with its move towards an author-pays publishing model, in a step proclaimed as ‘a revolutionary new beginning’. ROAPE funded the transition using historically accrued royalties from T&F and now relies on institutional and individual subscriptions and donations. It has been independently published since 2024 and has achieved a subscribe-to-open support base of about 60 academic libraries.
The Oxford-based African Books Collective (ABC), established with donor funding in 1990 (and where we are currently co-directors), is setting up a new Kenya-based NGO/trading company, having recognised the need for publishing infrastructure on the continent. A majority of the directors of the new non-profit organisation are associated with the independent East African Educational Publishers that was ‘indigenised’ from the British Heinemann under the leadership of Henry Chakava in 1992.
The new autonomous company will initially be supported by ABC in Oxford until it reaches financial sustainability. Drawing from ABC’s large list, it will pursue the intra-African distribution of books published across the continent, initially focusing on East Africa, and raise grants to support African journals and editorial training.
What does ‘decolonising’ African studies mean?
Writers including Ndlovu-Gatsheni have asked us to consider the ‘terms and modes’ of the ‘coloniality of knowledge production’. We suggest that revisiting the history and political economy of extraversion allows us to foreground the epistemic questions that Hountondji first posed about scientific production in 1977 . A donor-funded journal ecosystem, and normative policy promises of ‘open science’ or ‘community-led’ open access, will not challenge the deep structural inequalities exacerbated by the market-making actions of the publishing multinationals. Decolonising African studies must begin with an understanding of the complex history of the continent’s extraverted research and publishing economy.