There is running number that people in tech like to quote about the African knowledge ecosystem accessible online- 6-8%. The short answer, however, is that even though the proportion is small, even by the standards of countries with comparable population sizes, such as India, the true size is not known because it has never been measured.

As someone who works in human rights, I am most concerned about and continue to witness that this question is tied deeply and closely to the question of who gets to define “truth”- crucial and inevitable in this age where both the politics and the technology vie for distraction and monopoly on veracity. The politics of knowledge in conflict and human rights work in Africa or elsewhere is indeed about — whose evidence counts and whose suffering is legible.

Of course, language intersects with visibility and access, so the information concerning knowledge production on and by Africa reflects principally knowledge production in English. With this caveat, it is possible to look at the question of who generates knowledge about Africa through various threads:

• Epistemic hierarchy: Much of the scholarship and data framing African conflicts still comes from Western institutions, even when the research subjects or fieldwork are African-led. 

• Conflict reporting and human rights documentation: International NGOs often set the standards and methodologies, which can marginalize local knowledge systems or oral traditions that don’t fit Western evidentiary norms. 

• Political risk: Local scholars and human rights defenders operate under constraints: censorship, surveillance, funding dependencies that shape what can be written, and for whom. 

• Gatekeeping in publication: Major journals and think tanks often demand theoretical framing aligned with Euro American academia, sidelining community-based or praxis-oriented research. 

These are constraints that permeate across sectors or scientific fields. The few studies that exist on the subject do show some rise in research output from the continent. According to a 2016 report by the African Union, for example, Africa’s share of global scientific publication output rose from – 1.5 % in 2005 to 3.2 % in 2016. The number are slightly higher for specific fields: in 2021 Africa’s shares were 5.2 % in Agricultural & Biological Sciences, 4.7 % in Immunology, 4.5 % in Environmental Sciences, but much lower in others such as Neurosciences (1.5 %) and Physics (2.2 %). In yet more specialized domains such tech/innovation that number dwindles even more sharply. A bibliometric review of computer‐vision research found Africa’s contribution to top-tier publications was just -0.06 % over the past decade. So while output growth in some fields is evident, it remains a small fraction of the global total even though Africa is 17-18% of global population.

The overview on funding is similarly mitigated. Funding is increasing in some countries on the continent but remains very uneven and heavily dependent on external sources. For example, research by the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA), shows that cumulative research funding for “Case 1” universities rose from roughly US $483.8 million in 2015 to US $817.7 million in 2023 (almost 69% increase). However, in a study of research centres/institutes in West & Central Africa, 78% received funding from international public partners, while only 61% got public (state) funds and 44% private national funds. That affects autonomy, research direction, capacity.

There is also a clear gap in African leadership in research about Africa especially in first/last-author positions (which often signal control of the research agenda). Bibliometric studies are few and domain specific but they confirm the same finding. For example, one focusing on Covid-19 related studies found that only 3.9% of COVID-19–related articles in the top 10 medical journals were relevant to Africa or among African-country articles and 66.1% of authors were not African-affiliated. More than 40 African countries had no health‐science journal indexed in major international databases in 2023. These numbers reinforce structural dynamics: reliance on collaboration, walls to independent infrastructure, and low representation in higher prestige/leadership roles.

These numbers also speak for or relate to knowledge in conflict/human-rights spheres. For example, a regional study of armed conflicts found 270 articles about internal armed conflicts in Africa in high-ranking security studies journals, more than any other region in that sample. So there is a growing volume of research in conflict/human-rights domains in Africa and growth in participating institutions. However, leadership and local affiliation remain weak. Even in health (not strictly conflict studies) the percent of papers without local authors is non-trivial (around 12%).

Even as we live the contemporary history and the events, perhaps because of it, we fail to understand the magnitude of the problem and its importance on the framing, the voice and the interpretation of our own history- both for remedy and crucially for prevention on future conflict. For example, in Ethiopia, despite the significance of the Tigray war, we do not yet have a full picture of Ethiopian‑led knowledge production on the war. Publishing constraints, access issues, and indexing biases make this difficult.

In addition to the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission’s work between July 2020 and February 2025, media, research centres and INGOs remain to date the predominant source of information not just on the Tigray but all the conflicts that plague the country since April 2018. While none of these constitute or qualify as knowledge production, they underline how narratives matter: most local sources angling for one perspective while international ones leaning towards another. (Future work should map not only the conflict events but also the epistemic terrain: which institutions produced knowledge, where it was published, how accessible it is, and who led it.)

So here again issues of field coverage (clear, comparable bibliometric series some in health and some STEM areas), authorship vs. output, funding and regional disciplinary variation arise. There’s good high-level evidence on underinvestment (R&D <1% GDP), and many conflict-research projects rely on external grants, but there’s no single, reliable pan-Africa dataset tracking grant flows for African-led conflict/human-rights research. Some African countries (South Africa, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya) produce much more research than others; some subfields (health, agriculture) have stronger African presence than conflict/security or high-tech fields.

A commentary on South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) states that Africa’s share of global scientific articles (all fields) is just over 3% and that many journals are outside the index- which relates to political science/area‑studies as well. 

Though not specific to “African political history”, this gives a rough ceiling for how small Africa’s share is generally, which implies political history will likely mirror this smallness.

Accessibility online data reflects the same trend as the production related metrix. The platform African Journals Online (AJOL) lists, as of one recent note, 675 journals, of which 55% (372) are open access. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and OpenAlex, only 21% of African journals are in Open Access (OA) databases. Of all journals in Scopus (global index), only 1.22% are from Africa. Similarly in terms of “Diamond” open‑access journals (no author fees), the database registers 199 journals based in/from Africa in one survey- of which 17.1% (34 journals) are from South Africa and 21 from Nigeria. A study on Sub-Saharan Africa publications found that authors based in Southern Africa contributed: 50 % of the publications surveyed; West Africa 17 %; North & East Africa 15 % each; Francophone & Lusophone countries 5 %. And in a sample of publications about sub‑Saharan Africa funded by a major U.S. institute: only 20‑25 % of papers had first or last authors from the country of focus. This data points to structural constraints in the field (which affect political history specifically).

In summary, while precise figures are unavailable, available bibliometric studies suggest that only a minority (perhaps 20‑30 %) of Africa‑related academic publications are authored under African‑affiliation leadership without heavy international co‑authorship. The proportion that is digitally available, by Africans only, and focused on African issues is likely lower still. The absence of reliable data means this should be understood as a working estimate rather than a firm statistic.

Leadership (first/last authorship) by Africans remains quite limited in many domains=including cultural and arts studies where there is clear evidence that African‑produced cultural and artistic content is present and globally accessible. On Spotify, for example, the genre “Afrobeats” (African music‑genre) had around 13.5 billion streams in 2022 and a report on Netflix content claims there are over 5,300 African productions (movies + series) across streaming services globally.

By contrast, Amazon Prime announced that it will no longer commission new local originals in Africa/MENA region because its market share in Africa was under 6%. So while the share of those platforms’ content libraries or viewership that is African‑produced remains unclear, there is data to suggest that African markets are being engaged by global platforms and a global consumption of African content.

However, even in this domain, of African culture (arts, music, visual media) while there are journals and articles led by African‐based scholars and produced locally, the absence of systematic bibliometric mapping means we cannot yet confidently say what share of the knowledge production is Africa‑based. But the presence of non‑African author dominance is observable in bibliographies, editorial boards and publication venues. This observation does not mean that African scholars are absent but rather that authorship and institutional control remain uneven. This invites questions: when art about Africa is written primarily by scholars from outside Africa, how does that affect framing, interpretation and voice?

The picture is the same for Ethiopian culture and arts. Although at a much less rate and number than in local languages, English‑language academic output exists and shows Ethiopian scholar leadership in selected areas. But the mix of purely Ethiopian authorship and collaborative/international authorship indicates a layered knowledge‑production environment. However, without comprehensive bibliometric data we cannot say what proportion of all such work is locally authored, or how much is digitally and openly accessible. It with this framework/background that I recently read and wish to introduce two books – 1) Lost In Transition: Deceit and Conflict in Ethiopia by Befekadu Hailu and 2) Sites of Remembering: The meaning of African Art Through Memory by Professor Abebe Zegeye – both of which will be the topic for my next blogpost.