Research funding in Portuguese-speaking African countries: Patterns and alignment with health needs

Health research performed in the PALOP can play an important role in creating the capabilities, human capital and solutions necessary to solve the often-unique health challenges in these countries. This paper uses WoS data to map the research funding activities in “Health Sciences” from PALOP researchers with the overall objective of supporting the research funding strategies of different actors, including international funding organizations and local actors.

We found that although PALOP researchers still produce a relatively low amount of published research, they are significantly open to the world, with a very large share of the publications developed in international collaboration with international funding. Mozambique (which comprises around 70% of all PALOP research) and Guinea-Bissau research production displays a relative high citation impact which mostly is led (corresponding author) by “foreign” authors. The most prolific areas in all PALOP are Malaria, HIV, Maternal Mortality, Tuberculosis and Measles, which tend to be aligned with the areas in which these countries have higher disease burden in relation to the world average. In Angola, there is a strong specialisation (>15% of their total output) in ‘Malaria’ related research, and in Guinea-Bissau in ‘Measles’ and ‘HIV’. We found a large diversity of research funders which often support specific areas with multiple funding partners. The three main funders (National Institutes of Health (NIH), Gates Foundation and the European Commission) support each around 13% of all funded research in these countries. We also found strong co-funding patterns between institutions that belong to the same countries. For example, Danish institutions (DANIDA, Danish NRF, Novo Nordisk) appear in most (~50%) publications together, and Spanish institutions (Carlos III, AECID and Spanish Ministries) also tend to co-fund together very often. The European Commission (EC) is a strong co-funder of both Danish and Spanish institutions. US institutions (USAID, CDC, NIH) also tend to co-fund substantially together, but less than Spanish or Danish institutions. In general, we find that co-funding patterns mirror the specialisation patterns of specific funders. Meaning that when we observe that a group of funders in specialised in one topic, it usually co-funds more often with other funders that are also specialised in that topic. On the other hand, research funders that tend to be less specialised, also tend to co-fund less often.