NN41, December 2008
The New Politics of Partnership: Peril or Promise?
Experiences of Partnerships from Kenya: North-South and South-South
By Fatuma Chege, Kenyatta University, Nairobi
Email: fatumasee@wananchi.comKeywords
Research Partnership, North-South, South-South, Kenya
Summary
This article reflects on some of the differences and similarities between North-South and South-South research partnerships, based on the experience of Kenyatta University. It notes the unidirectional nature of much of the North-South ?partnerships? that they have been involved with. It contrasts this with a more positive experience of South-South partnership.
It is in the constructions and narratives which are basically experiential that the concept of partnerships between categories of actors may yield a life of contexualised meanings and reflections. In this context, I have chosen only one apect of partnerships, namely, research, to locate my experiences dating back to the mid 1990s when I began working with senior Kenyan researchers on research projects that were designed to respond to educational issues and questions. Notably, these research projects had been hatched and defined mainly by ?experts? who were outsiders to the local Kenyan settings. They included ?experts? on Kenyan education, history, development, politics and so on. As is the case in contemporary Kenya, many of the research projects were funded from outside organisations/institutions based mainly in Europe, particularly the UK, Germany, Netherlands, and Sweden among others, as well as the USA and Canada. During those years, the idea of problematising the nature and purpose of research ?partnerships? across the continents hardly ever occurred as many of us focused on doing the research and submitting acceptable products. In retrospect, however, it has become increasingly clear that the dominant North-South research encounters were often unidirectional ? with the local Kenyans acting mainly as field researchers and at most as participants in generating draft reports and presenting the same. Looking back at this North-South engagement, it is difficult to identify the essence of partnership, which entails interactions right from the conceptualisation of the research problem and its relevance to local Kenyans, all the way to implementation of findings in the interest of the local communities. Often, the engagement was in the form of international sponsors?not partners- donating the funding as well as the topics of research, then complementing this package of donations with ?experts?. The role of the ?expert? was clearly to alert the locals towards the ?correct? and most appropriate research direction. Examples abound of times when we locals would watch helplessly as the ?experts? expunged data items that were deemed to be, in their view, embarrassing (to who?).
Ten years later, in 2004 I was to enter into a clearly new experience of research partnership with colleagues from the East, namely Japan and by association, India, the Philippines, and Indonesia. This turned out to be a partnership with a difference of freshness of space through which African research partners found their place on an equal footing to develop and pursue research ideas. This novel approach is traceable to one pioneering Japanese institution, The Centre for the Study of International Cooperation in Education (CICE) of Hiroshima University. CICE has played a key role in bringing together the African and Asian partners of like-minded vision and mission, in a partnership which came to be named the ?Africa-Asia University Dialogue on Basic Education Development?. This partnership, which has been dubbed simply and fondly as the ?A-A Dialogue? was founded on the need to create a self-reliant approach in conducting policy and action research among its partners. The Dialogue has since diversified its research mandate beyond basic education and expanded the partnership from the initial four African countries (Kenya, Malawi, South Africa and Ghana) to twelve African countries from the Eastern, Western and Southern regions of Sub-Saharan Africa. The Asian partners have remained relatively fewer and this tends to have some positive effects on the African partners who have been historically a minority in such engagements. While most of the initial funding of the A-A dialogue activities came from the Japanese Government as well as CICE and UNESCO, the participating African partners ushered in a well-received wealth of ideas and experiences emanating from their expertise as local African researchers in their own right as well as from their histories of colonialism, its effects and the lessons it had taught the African people.
Within the same year of initiating the Africa-Asia Partnership, I got engaged in another venture of North-South partnership that involved not just the North-South (Western Europe and Africa), but a triangulation of North-South-East (Western Europe-Africa-Asia). The actual partners who include the UK, Kenya, Ghana, India and Pakistan engaged to work jointly in a research project funded by the UK DfID under the Research Consortium on Educational Outcomes and Poverty (RECOUP). In this triangular partnership, new approaches of conducting policy research among poor communities were prioritised. The main role of the partners from the South is taking the lead in providing voice ?through participatory research approaches- to the local communities that have been identified as living in poverty. Here, the local expertise of Southern partners is recognised as vital in working with communities as they construct local meanings of their situations in the context of education and the role it plays (or ought to play) in transforming their lives. To a large extent, the Northern partners who are renowned researchers in their own right also play a major role in offering technical support within the project research themes. Apart from producing research reports and disseminating findings, RECOUP undertakes joint publication with the partners and is committed to capacity building at different levels.
A comparison of the two concurrent partnerships of the A-A Dialogue (between Africa-Asia) and the RECOUP (for Africa-Asia-Western Europe) reveals a renewed zeal in conducting research that could influence evidence-based policy and its implementation. It also reveals a renewed interest directed at working with African partners in the area of developmental research. Experientially, the two partnerships function differently and the effects of the nature and form of inclusion of the African partners are also experienced differently. For example, while most of the projects in RECOUP were conceptualised through leadership of the expertise from the North, all the projects in the A-A Dialogue have been defined, conceptualised and concretised through round-table sittings of all partners. Consequently, the RECOUP research projects have all the theme leaders coming from the North, while research leadership in the A-A Dialogue has remained on the African platform in the most fundamental ways that entail not only the design but also the methodology components. Experientially, therefore, there is relative ease in the engagement between the South-South partnerships ? perhaps because of the histories involved - than there is between the North-South partnerships. However, the outcomes of these two concurrent partnerships that have Africa, as the common denominator will, without a doubt, provide insights to feedback on the broader picture of the experiences of research partnerships in Kenya and other countries in the region.
Full contents of NORRAG NEWS 41.
Download the full issue of NORRAG NEWS 41 in pdf.