Dr Kiiru is a towering figure in conservation, known in particular for her work in saving elephants and their habitats and promoting an easier co-existence with people who share their space. She is now the Executive Director of Mpala Research Centre in central Kenya, a former cattle ranch which encompasses 48 000 acres of semi-arid savannas and shrublands. Next month, she will be addressing the 13th Oppenheimer Research Conference in Midrand on the subject of “Transforming spaces of research”.
Underlining the urgency of her topic, she notes that in the 30 years of its existence, Mpala has notched up an impressive list of 746 publications, but only about 162 of them have African authors, and of those only 86 African lead authors. This trend is not just observed at Mpala. In biomedical research, Africa contributes minimally to the literature despite its high burden of infectious diseases. In conservation science, a global survey on the status of African authorship concluded that African authors were significantly under-represented in global conservation journals and in large multi-country studies.
Her concern is not one of chauvinism, but that the imbalance skews scientific knowledge and that this diminishes the impact required to combat global warming, for example. “Transformational leadership is key in transforming research spaces to support collaboration between the natural resources-rich global south and the financially connected scientific communities of the global north.
“By embracing transformational leadership, we can co-design research initiatives with all relevant parties, ensuring that research topics are relevant and collaborative efforts are effective.”
Dr Kiiru says she started out as a research scientist working in the field and studying elephants “and somewhere in between, I went into advocacy and policy. And in fact, the job I had before I went to Mpala was continental policy and advocacy. And that’s when I realized that the world operates in silos, that if we don’t break them down, the people who control resources that can make a difference, the people who can make a legislative change are not scientists.
“I was in a space where I was trying to convince African presidents that the ivory trade is bad for Africa. And whenever they have a global stage, whether it’s at the United Nations General Assembly or if they are talking to a president from a country like China that can change their legislation and save elephants, they need to put it in their speech. They need to say it. They may know it, but they don’t say it. It has to be on the agenda in just the same way they’re negotiating for food and medicine. They need to negotiate for the wildlife, for biodiversity.”
Her manner when interviewed on Zoom is benign, and perhaps it is this kindliness that led Dr Kiiru to assume when she took over at Mpala that because it is located in Africa “it is surely a place that builds capacity for African scientists. I did not imagine these statistics.”
But “the problem is we clearly have a research environment where questions are formulated by non-African authors. They basically decide what questions to ask. They invite collaborators. They carry out research.
“Now if I come from the global north, what will I be curious about? Maybe I could come in and say, I want to look at climate change, but how will I be looking at it? Am I going to ask questions that could probably solve the problems of the people in the area where I’m working? Maybe not. I may be just carrying out an adventure because I’m in this place. I can ask all sorts of questions, so I just do it. It started to dawn on me that as long as questions are formulated somewhere else and funding is provided for those questions to be answered, it means that there are always going to be questions that are relevant to the African reality that will never be asked.”
For example, says Dr Kiiru, “There’s a lot of focus on climate. People are very focused on extreme weather events. So there are a lot of studies about changes in temperature, rainfall, and maybe even how they are shaping the biodiversity that is around us.
“However, in Africa, 80% of the population lives in rural areas. So the impact of climate change is not just on plants and animals that live in the wild. It’s affecting real people’s everyday lives. Now if I come from the global north, I’m fascinated with climate change in terms of the big numbers. But as a woman in rural Kenya, I’m interested in climate change in terms of how much further I need to walk to find my water, and my ability to feed my child.
“It’s a survival issue and the problem may not be the same problem that’s affecting somebody in Norway. They are concerned about climate change, but it’s not a life-and-death matter for them. For this person in rural Kenya, it’s actually a life and death matter. The disease profile that is now emerging around the climate crisis is changing, and we are seeing new emerging diseases that nobody knows anything about. Somebody in the tropics is needing to be very concerned because the changes are happening so much faster in the tropics, and a tropical biologist will be asking ‘What does this zoonosis look like?’ What do these changes look like for a person who depends 100% on this cow and this goat that they have in their compound? While another person looks at this at a macro level, as world-changing science. But for the person here in this village, it’s real. When their cow dies, they can die.”
It’s not that the right questions aren’t being asked by African scientists, she says, but that they aren’t getting the funding to match the question.
She would like to see funders insisting that collaborations be established with local scientists, “so that sub questions can be asked alongside the big question that can solve real relevant problems on site”.
That way, “we start addressing the problem of extractive research, where a researcher parachutes into a site, does some research that is exciting and comes up with 10 publications, which make it to Science and all the fantastic journals, while next door to their research site there is somebody’s life that could have been saved by just expanding a little bit the scope of their research and finding out a little more how that problem is affecting the population and how it could solve this.”
These are not the concerns of parachute science, or extractive science, which Dr Kiiru scathingly says are “a form of biopiracy … just taking and taking and taking”. While her tone remains genial, and exhibits no anger, her bitterness slips out in mockery. “They take it in the nicest way. They say ‘I met such good friends. You know? I changed the life of my research assistant. You know, my research assistant had not drunk yoghurt before I showed up. I introduced them to yoghurt. Nice.”
Far more useful, suggests Dr Kiiru, would be if a researcher “studying big-headed ants and their impact on acacia could ask ‘how is this affecting the community next door?’ and offer a solution by telling them ‘if you subjected this particular woodland to fire at a particular time, you would be able to control those big-headed ants for the season when you don’t need them to be around’.”
She says that while there is a global biodiversity crisis, “the animals we need to save are not in America. They are not even in Europe. They are here on this continent. Researchers (from the North) must get interested in what it takes to keep those animals alive by investing in the people who are here 100% of the time. If we don’t involve them, one day they’re going to show up expecting to find some elephants around. They won’t be here. One day they’re going to show up expecting to find some lions around. They won’t be here. One day, there will be a disease, something like COVID, which we could have studied – how it emerges and how it grows – but we’ll have missed it because we’re just not collaborating with the people who’ve seen it before.
“Zoonosis is about disease crossing boundaries between humans and animals, and if we are not spending time and talking to that person who is in an African reality 365 days a year, we’ll miss it.
“All this other stuff that we are missing is what is going to trigger extinction. If we don’t do it, we are damned,” says Dr Kiiru.
The 13th Oppenheimer Research Conference takes place at Randjesfontein Cricket Pavilion in Midrand from October 9-11. It will be livestreamed.
Yves Vanderhaeghen writes for Jive Media Africa, science communication partner of Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation.
- From Conference Guide to Conference Ranger - October 2, 2024
- R6million Oppenheimer grant funds wildlife corridors research in Namibia - October 2, 2024
- We’ll miss the big one if Africans aren’t asking the questions - October 2, 2024