South Africa is booming in the 2021st century: The number of research publications and the size of the scientific collaboration sector in the next 100 years
Moreover, the number of South African research publications continue to grow. In 2021, its researchers published 27,052 journal articles indexed in Web of Science. In 2000 this was an increase from 3,693. The country is now ranked 30th worldwide for the number of scientific papers produced annually. The countries that have similar levels of output are Portugal, Mexico and Malaysia. Egypt is the continent’s leading producer of research, with 32,283 articles in 2021.
“In some fields, such as health sciences, astronomy and high-energy physics, foreign collaboration now typically comprises more than 90% [of papers],” according to the 2023 South African Science, Technology & Innovation Indicators Report by the National Advisory Council on Innovation. The country is also a member of the SKA and a partner of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research.
“We are increasingly relying on international collaborations,” says physicist Azwinndini Muronga, dean of science at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, South Africa. “If one was to cut that lifeline, we probably would be in a very dire situation.”
Jonathan Jansen is an education researcher at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa and was the former president of the Academy of Science of South Africa.
MeerKAT: Bringing attention to the Milky Way’s smallest black hole: the challenges of basic education in the South African region
Since 2018, its 64-dish MeerKAT radio telescope has been capturing the Universe in unprecedented detail, including the chaotic region around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. The country is one of the sites of the Square Kilometre Array telescope. MeerKAT will eventually form the heart of the SKA’s mid-frequency array.
Keeping young people in the education system is also a challenge. According to a survey by Statistics South Africa, almost 10% of teenagers dropped out of school in the year 2021. It is thought that between 50 and 60% of students drop out after the first year of an undergraduate course.
Four out of five ten-year-olds in South African schools are unable to understand what they read, according to the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study.
Several people that Nature spoke to lamented the leak of talent into universities as they try to attract and retain talent. Basic education is the problem, they say.
Public and private spending on R&D has been declining since 2017–18, and sits at under 35 billion rand (US$1.9 billion) for 2020–21, the most recent period for which data are available. It accounts for 0.61% of the GDP, which is less than half of the government’s target.
The ANC has a history in astronomy, geology, botany, zoology, clinical medicine and nuclear technology. R&D was a strength in the military.
Blacks were excluded from the 22,000-strong scientific community before the party took power. That has changed over time.
Human Rights Watch has warned political parties to avoid using words that could lead to more violence. The ASSAF round table last year heard of attacks against Black African university staff and students who are not from South Africa.
When it comes to politics in South Africa, the last thing people talk about is science. We’ll be talking at very material levels about what people need who are desperately poor,” says Jansen.
The GDP per capita has been falling over the past decade, dropping from US$8,737 in 2012 to $6,753.50 in 2019. Last year, according to World Bank data, more than 60% of people lived in poverty — defined as those earning below $6.85 a day, the poverty line for upper-middle-income countries. One in three adults is unemployed. Frequent power cuts are needed because of a 17-year-long energy crisis.
Source: ‘Stop the xenophobia’ — South African researchers sound alarm on eve of election
The African National Congress and its First Democracy: How the South African Parliament can re-build their independence and how it will be used to support the poor
The ANC has been in power since 1994, after Nelson Mandela was elected as the country’s first democratically elected president.
As Nature went to press, South Africans were going to the polls to vote for a new parliament — as they have done every five years since 1994, when the country held its first free, multi-party election. Once the votes cast on 29 May have been counted, it is possible that the African National Congress, which led the struggle for liberation and has governed South Africa continuously for 30 years, will have to share power with other parties for the first time. The country is at risk of being overwhelmed by deep-rooted problems, and for the best chance of resolving these, all parties need to work together. Researchers are ready to play their part.
Progress seems to be going in a different direction. South Africa has debt problems, worsened by two big setbacks — economic growth nosedived after the 2008 financial crisis and again during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Progress towards a number of SDG targets could be improved with more funding. The study found that the number of people with access to water and Sanitation in South Africa will need to be increased by between 8% and 11% annually by the date of theSDG deadline. This is not a small sum, and would require the government to borrow more, tax people more or cut public spending — or some combination of the three.
South Africa is in a similar situation to other low- and middle-income countries in that it isn’t strong enough to sustain further borrowing. Raising more money through general taxation or cuts in spending could hurt the people who theSDG aim to help.
An alternative is to impose an additional tax on the wealthiest citizens. Among the countries for which data are available, South Africa is the world’s most unequal society (A. Chatterjee et al. The World Bank has an old Rev. 36. The wealth tax would be used to support public services that help the poor, including universities. It does not need to be a recurring tax, but could be a one-off charge, for use in the aftermath of emergencies.
The idea of wealth tax is gaining ground among economists, notably at the Paris-based World Inequality Lab (WIL; see go.nature.com/3yyicmf). Data is lacking. “We have much better information on people’s income than on their wealth,” says Léo Czajka, a researcher at WIL who studies inequality in South Africa. For a wealth tax to work, an international agreement would be needed that countries would collect and share relevant data on citizens’ wealth. As well as decreasing the risk of more nations becoming tax havens, this will allow governments to better anticipate the implications of a wealth tax.