Moving Africa away from the global knowledge periphery: a case study of AJOL

Abstract

Introduction Bibliographies played a crucial role in education and research during the 'papyrocentric5 era (when publishing and written communication were solely paper-based) as tools that allowed people to maintain systematic awareness of published formal research outputs of interest, and of how to locate these. Actually accessing the content summarized in bibliographies was often, if not usually, a challenge for African academics, however, due to African institutions being generally beset by substantial resource scarcity (with the exception of the larger universities in South Africa, and a handful in other African countries). This resulted in the bibliography, even a national one, being something of an unfulfilled wish list for Africans rather than a guide to assist access to readily available content. Decades of underinvestment in higher education on the African continent, and less developed countries in general, partly due to a 55-year World Bank policy determining that higher education was unimportant for economic growth in developing countries,1 resulted in a global scholarly information divide already entrenched before the advent of the internet. Modern journal publishing is young within Africa, and essentially postcolonial. It suffered disproportionately from the crises in higher education in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The 1980s were also an economically difficult time for many developing countries, so recovery in African scholarly research and communication was stifled. Until at least 2000, 'the international development community encouraged African governments' relative neglect of higher education. The World Bank, which exercises significant influence over developing country governments, has long believed that primary and secondary schooling are more important than tertiary education for economic development'. The World Bank's global education-sector spending was 17 per cent on higher education from 1985 to 1989, but this figure dropped to just 7 per cent from 1995 to 1999.2