Reforming research assessment in Kenya: an ethics and governance agenda

This report records the panel ‘Reforming research assessment in Kenya: an ethics and governance agenda’, held at the 10th Bioethics Society of Kenya Conference in Nairobi on 10 September 2026. The panel treated research assessment as a question of ethics and values rather than of administration. It reached a shared position: the inherited system of assessment, built on journal prestige and citation counts, is misaligned with what Kenyan and African societies need from science, and reform must begin from locally defined values and institutional self-evaluation rather than from imported models. The discussion addressed who sets assessment standards and for whom, where resistance to reform will come from, the pull of external funding, the examination of ethics and integrity, and the obligation to decline research that offers its host community no credible benefit. The panel closed with a proposal that the Bioethics Society of Kenya, with one or two Kenyan universities, host a pilot of the CoARA-ERIP self-evaluation approach through SE4RA, and with four working principles for reform.