The Sunday Mail
African countries should consider easing immigration regulations and procedures in order to facilitate the mobility of scientists in their research work, a latest UNESCO Science Report says.
The report says Africa’s mobility is being fostered through the continent’s expanding networks of centres of excellence like that in biosciences, through which participating institutes offer their facilities for sub-regional use.
However, the report also stresses that one persistent obstacle to scientific mobility is the difficulty African scientists face in travelling freely around the continent.
It observed that ‘the question of African countries easing immigration regulations and procedures in order to facilitate the mobility of international experts, and African expatriates in particular, has figured repeatedly on the agenda of African Union summits without ever being resolved’.
In 2014, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda took a step towards easing travel restrictions by adopting a single tourist visa.
The 2015 edition of the UNESCO Science Report argues that ‘an important aspect of economic integration in Africa would be the transition from national innovation systems to a single regional innovation system. The opening up of borders to the free movement of people and services would also enable informal cross-border pools of tacit knowledge and social capital to emerge’.
The report stresses ‘the increasingly urgent requirement for Africa to engage in a unified manner in a world that is increasingly characterised by economic blocs and large emerging economic powers’.
However, the development of regional programmes in science, technology and innovation is high on the list of priorities’ of the African Union and regional bodies. The countries on the continent have been expanding technological networks through collective use of research facilities. — Big News Network, Extra Reporter.
