Responsible research and innovation in Sub-Saharan Africa

When Carnegie Mellon University Africa researchers Wambui Njogu, Ines Ineza, and Patrick Iradukunda began exploring responsible research and innovation (RRI), they faced an unexpected challenge: convincing their peers of the project’s purpose and significance.

"When we were presenting, people would ask, 'What are you even doing? What is the purpose of this? How is it going to help us?'" said Ineza, a recent graduate of CMU-Africa and who now works at the affiliated Upanzi Network. "It took a lot of convincing, not only of other people but also ourselves."

Researchers and innovators should use responsible research and innovation (RRI) to evaluate how ethically they have designed projects and software. They already utilize a similar concept, security-by-design, to address security concerns from the beginning of the design process. In the ethics-by-design approach promoted by RRI, they consider the possible impacts of their products on users and society, and ensure their projects adhere to certain principles such as privacy and security, gender equality, among others.

"When you come up with a project, how sure are you that we won’t have people lose their jobs?" explained Njogu, also an alumna of CMU-Africa. "How can you empower people to stay employed or continue having that power, and yet technologically advance? These are the questions that must be answered when you start a project."

RRI was first introduced in 2011 to the European Commission and has made its way around the Global North, as well as to some African countries such as Morocco and Egypt. However, it has received very little attention in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the method as it was given at the European Commission does not address the needs of users in the Global South. The team noted that RRI principles in the Global North tend to be given on a top-down basis, with governments telling researchers and developers what they should strive for. However, the team advocates that RRI should be implemented in the Global South from the bottom-up, with users telling developers what they need.

Patrick Iradukunda, another collaborator on the project and research associate at CyLab-Africa, said, "As a software engineer, it became clear to me and my colleagues that while we understood these ideas, we lacked a comprehensive framework to integrate and prioritize them effectively."

How can you empower people to stay employed, and yet technologically advance?

Wambui Njogu, Research Associate, The Upanzi Network

So, the Upanzi team has developed a framework to hold researchers in Sub-Saharan Africa accountable to these responsible research principles, which they identified in a systematic literature review. Based on the review, they proposed that certain principles be given greater or lesser priority than others, creating three tiers or layers of priority. Then they surveyed other Upanzi researchers to determine how important they found each of the principles. From these results, the team weighted each principle and created an equation, the RRI Index, which quantitatively evaluates the RRI-readiness of a project.

They tested this framework on projects by their peers at the Upanzi Network. The network is based around research that supports digital public infrastructure, hosting a diverse array of projects which the team can use to evaluate their framework’s applicability. They have found that the framework assists their peers because developers can use it to prove to stakeholders how they benefit society.

"An important focus of the Upanzi Network is to influence technology policy recommendations to support low- and middle-income countries. So, RRI is a project that can help African research make a more of an impact in communities at a faster pace than before," said George Okeyo, the primary investigator on this research. Okeyo is an associate teaching professor and director of academics at CMU-Africa.

This project is one of the first of its kind, which was the basis for the team’s main challenges: they do not have much precedent as they settle into a large research gap. However, there is a silver lining to this position, because they have the opportunity to set expectations for RRI in Sub-Saharan Africa for years to come.

They intend to start a broader conversation about RRI in the Global South with a large audience, and so they are currently writing their framework as a paper, which they wish to publish soon. They are also hosting an awareness workshop next semester in order to hold a more wide-reaching conversation about RRI with governments, researchers, other shareholders, and universities. They hope their RRI framework will be adopted by universities, laboratories, governments, and other places where researchers and innovators are, and they will make it as accessible as possible by translating it into several more languages, such as French, Swahili, and Kinyarwanda.

Despite the challenges they faced at the beginning of the project, they are now, as Njogu puts it, "conquering." Ineza presented the project during CMU-Africa Week in Pittsburgh this spring, with good reviews and feedback from the students and faculty she spoke with, and even received offers to potentially collaborate with some groups in the future.

The project has also come with another, more personal triumph: the collaborators had been strangers before working together, but now they are close friends. Njogu said, "We learned a lot, we keep learning, we were challenged, but we’re here now. We’ve met people, networks have been created. We're definitely better people now."