A pioneer in research capacity building
Ehsan Masood talks to Benta Olsson, director of the Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation
Sweden is unusual among developed countries in that a commitment to research capacity building in developing countries has been integral to its overseas aid programme for many years. Indeed, the success of its many initiatives means that from next next year, Sweden will increase its $60 million annual research budget for developing countries to $100 million. But Berita Olsson, director of the Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation (Sarec/SIDA), is in reflective, rather than celebratory mood. Olsson, who has been in Budapest all week, says that even with the increased funds, Sweden's efforts to kick-start 'endogenous research' in poor countries is a drop in the ocean. There could be better news on the way. Having ploughed a lone furrow for many years, Sweden's strategy of funding activities in knowledge creation has slowly begun to influence the aid policies of other European countries, particularly the Netherlands and Britain, as well as other Scandinavian countries. Half of Sarec's budget is used to fund what Olsson calls "knowledge producing" research. This includes investing in areas such as a malaria vaccine, or areas of agriculture "where there are gaps in the knowledge". Such research is often conducted in cooperation with agencies such as the World Health Organization. But it is also often conducted with a local partner, such as the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok. The other 50 per cent, says Olsson, is spent on activities that enable developing countries to set up and sustain their own research institutions. Sarec pays particular attention to setting up and strengthening universities and training researchers. It aims to develop research, mentoring, and supervisory skills among students, rather than simply focusing on helping them to publish research papers. The agency, in addition, is strongly opposed to paying for researchers to pursue PhD programmes abroad. "They never come back," says Olsson. Sarec's focus tends to be on the poorer developing countries including Bolivia, Eritrea, Tanzania and Vietnam. The reason for such selectivity is simple, Olsson says. "We find that our efforts in smaller countries have many more benefits" in addition to enabling one researcher to complete a PhD. For example, Sweden insists on ensuring that Sarec-supported PhD students conduct the bulk of their research at a university at home, with periodic trips to see a second supervisor in Sweden. One such geology doctoral student in Nicaragua, she says, attracted further students, which lead to the creation of a research group, supervised by the student who had not yet completed a PhD. Olsson says that this student took longer to com-plete his thesis. But she adds that his role in guiding and setting up a research group was more im-portant. By contrast, Olsson says that "if we had funded a PhD student in a large university in a larger developing country, the student would have completed on time, published in journals. And that would have been the end of that." There is another distinctive element to the Swedish approach to development assistance: this is the increasing - but not yet widespread - tendency of Sarec-funded projects to incorporate local knowledge, customs and traditions into research capacity building. The aim here, says Olsson, is to get poorer countries to integrate newly-acquired analytical methods with existing, traditional ideas and technologies. Olsson describes an 'ethnomathematics' project in which Sarec-funded researchers are trying to establish why schoolchildren in Mozambique fail to pass examinations in mathematics. She says that the researchers discovered that the children were unable to grasp concepts such as multiplication and division, partly because they were being explained in a context the children regarded as alien. By contrast, the children quickly picked up ideas about basic arithmetic when explained in terms of basket-weaving, which is taught at a young age, and where knowledge of division is needed to shape the patterns. Similarly, Olsson says that children in certain parts of Mozambique are taught traditionally to count in bases of 5, instead of 10. Findings such as these have highlighted an area, which, says Olsson, Sarec does not pay enough attention to, namely the need to build a firm, and relevant base of primary science. Olsson says that Sarec chooses not to fund primary education on the scale of higher education and research, mainly because primary education tends to be well looked after in aid programmes of other countries, few of whom pay attention to research.
EHSAN MASOOD .
 Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 1999 Registered No. 785998 England. |