Congratulations on getting into ARPL. It has been a tough journey, I am sure; it was me though who made it tough. Ha ha ha.

It was indeed, yet for a reason: to select you. You are very precious that we had to develop this whole tough selection process to end up having the very you. Just as with ALA, in ARPL, you deserve to be here, and here deserves you to be. ARPL’s moto is “Developing the Next Generation of African Researchers.” It is moto that we very afraid Mr. Hatem would see as something sacrilegious as altering the aim of ALA. Yet, ARPL is seriously required, it is needed. It fills a gap.

You can’t be a leader without knowledge, and knoweldge comes from research. See? very short path. Leader —> Knoweldge —> Researcher. You perhaps expected more profound or complex or hellish or the fuck out of a relation on why a leader needs to be a researcher, or more precisely, why all researchers are leaders. To be a researcher, it is a must you are already a leader. You may be a leader

without doing research, yet you can’t be a research without being a leader. And, if you were a leader who doesn’t do research, trust me: you miss out. A leader doing a research leads better, does a better impact, and eventually and actually change.

Gap

Taking from Mr. Hatem words, beside that Africa is bigger, more diverse, more different, more beautiful, more delicious, more safe and although I agree, i want to emphasize the following: he said talking about the next genreation of africa, those who will made africa by 2100 the place who has half humanity that “they are arriving into the most unequal place in the world. And a place of immense of abudance.”

According to AD Scientific Index, which ranks based on H-index and citations (of which you will make sense of soon), among the top 100 scientists till this moment, only 1 african scientist is among the top 100. and only 12 in the top 1000. can you see dreadful this is. yet, it is not a surprise. African students usually don’t get to do research except while in graduate school, and very rare who does so in undergraduate studies.

Want to hear some vey saddening news:

• 1% of global scientific research is generated in Africa
• Only 0.1% of global patents are filed from Africa
• Africa requires another 1,000,000 PhD scientists to develop homegrown solutions.
• Sub-Saharan Africa contributes about 0.4% of its GDP to research and development (R&D).
• Many West African countries spend less than 0.25% of their GDP on R&D, while most East and Southern African countries spend 1% or less.
• Collaboration between Sub-Saharan African researchers ranges from 0.9% in West and Central Africa to 2.3% in Southern Africa.
• There is a ratio of only 198 scientists per million inhabitants in Africa compared with an average of 1,150 per million in the rest of the world. The continent contributes less than 1% to the scientific production in the world.
• Helicopter science or parachute studies are common. (You would get to know more, where foreign researchers conduct studies in Africa with little involvement or credit given to local African researchers.
  • About 50% of researchers in African medical journals have encountered such practices, “which included unacknowledged contributions of local researchers and community members of study design and data collection, logistical support, and review of results.”
  • Less than 50% of studies on infectious diseases conducted in Africa had an African first or last author.
  • Two-thirds of high-impact geoscience articles on Africa had no African authors.
• There are closely related problems to those research results, such as in education invovlmenet and female descirmnation:
  • Female
    • Only 4 out of 56 full professors were female in 2004. 2004 is so old. Ha ha ha. in 2019, 8% of Professors in Ghana are women.
    • Togo and Burkina Faso had 8% of female reserachers.
    • No West African country reached 25% women researchers
  • Education:
    • 78.8% of men had no formal education
    • 89.3% of women had no formal education

what we did while writing this file and see how accurate what we claim is in order of speaking about how limited is, we did the following, and you will learn to do it, and how to best do it.