Govt urged to pay serious attention to research

By Edmund Smith-Asante, ACCRA

Prof Dr Daniel Buor

The Vice Chancellor of the Valley View University, Professor Daniel Buor, has urged the government to give more attention to research, as it holds the key to most of society’s problems.

He expressed concern that much attention had not been given to research in the country, as well as in other Third World countries, a situation which had rather worsened the countries’ plight and resulted in overdependence on the developed world.

The overdependence of developing countries, especially those in sub-Saharan Africa, on the developed world for aids and loans rendered their so-called political freedoms meaningless, because they had to accept conditionalities which could weaken the aspirations of the dependent nations, he said.

Barriers to research

Delivering the keynote address at the first Annual School of Social Sciences colloquium at the University of Ghana, Legon yesterday, Prof. Buor listed the main barriers to research work in the country as budgetary constraints, the lack of implementation of research work and the challenges of data collection.

Speaking on the theme: “Theory and Practice of Social Sciences in a Changing World”, he stated that “bottlenecks to the effective operation of the social scientist must be removed if he should make an impact on society through research”.

“The researcher in the Third World countries faces a serious budgetary constraint. This is because research does not seem to be a priority in budgetary allocation in such countries; yet there is a positive association between research and development,” he added.

Quoting the World Bank 2014 Report, Prof. Buor said the research budget in most Third World countries was less than one per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), unlike in developed countries where it was more than 1.5 per cent of GDP and 3.7 per cent and 3.3 per cent in the United States and Japan respectively.

While alluding that China began to develop substantially when it invested a huge portion of its GDP (1.9 per cent) on research, he said “in Ghana, the research budget is just about 0.38 per cent of GDP”.

According to him, the low budget injection by government in research required the researcher to also become a fundraiser and so must be well versed in proposal writing. 

He said “the second constraint is failure of government, especially, to implement the findings and recommendations of research projects, a factor which has the potential to discourage further efforts”. 

“Government must do well to overcome such implementation inertia,” he charged.

Touching on the constraint in data collection, Prof. Buor said in some cases the 

Writer’s email: edmund.asante@graphic.com.gh 

This story was first published by the Daily Graphic on April 17, 2015