The number of think tanks per country doesn’t necessarily stack up with economic heft, growth rates, or demographic size in Africa.

A Kenyan think tank, the Kenya Institute of Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA) has been ranked as the top think tank in sub-Saharan Africa, according to a new report released last week.

The rankings reveal some interesting insights about the business of thinking in Africa.

The 2015 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report, published by the Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, lists think tanks according to their influence, output and impact; this is the report’s ninth year of publication.

Think tanks – organisations that carry out research, analysis and engagement to shape public policy, and advise governments and the public on domestic and international issues – are a key player in contemporary governance, but their influence has been waning in recent years, as the combined impact of social media, the internet, globalization and political dampens their impact.

Still, there are some clever institutions expertly riding the winds of change, and have been able to adapt and maintain their relevance in an increasingly competitive environment.

In the Africa rankings, Kenya’s Institute of Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA) came out tops; followed by IMANI Centre for Policy and Education from Ghana, Senegal’s Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa and Botswana’s Institute for Development Policy Analysis come in second, third and fourth places respectively.

South African institutions made up the next four places: the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes; the South Africa Institute of International Affairs, the Africa Institute of South Africa and Centre for Conflict Resolution.

Leading Egyptian institution Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies was ranked under the Middle East and North Africa section.

In the overall global rankings, Brookings Institution of the US, Chatham House of Britain and the US-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace are ranked as the top three think tanks in the world.

Out of the total of the world’s 6,846 think tanks the index covered, 634 are from Africa, making up 9.2% of the total. That’s an undersized performance for a continent that makes up more 15% of the world’s population.

Globally, the US leads with the number of think tanks, with 1,835 organisations included in the rankings.

Still, it is interesting that out of the 634 African think tanks, South Africa leads in the number of organisations overall (86 think tanks), followed by Kenya (53), Nigeria (48), Egypt (35), Ghana (37), Uganda (28) and Zimbabwe (26).

That listing suggests a few interesting things about the business of thinking in Africa. First, the it doesn’t stack up with economic heft, growth rates, or demographic size in Africa.

Mirrors geopolitical influence

Rather, it roughly mirrors geopolitical influence in Africa, and suggests that a think tank ecosystem requires some level of political openness, and private sector competition, to thrive. If your economy is dominated by the state, and your politics constrained, there isn’t much room for numerous organisations to do research, advocate, and lobby for particular issues.

 

Bring a regional hub also helps – several of the think tanks in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya serve the southern, western and eastern African regions respectively.

Furthermore, the top countries in number of think tanks are all former British colonies/ Anglophone, which might suggest that the global domination of English (including on the internet) offers a bigger market of ideas, disadvantaging the French and Lusophone institutions in Africa.

Think tanks first emerged in the post-World War II era in Europe and America, when the demands of a new information and technological age, and increasing complexity of policy issues fuelled the demand for concise and timely policy analysis.

Cold War tensions, too, meant that each side wanted research and evidence to further their ideological agendas. It meant that by the 1970s and 80s, think tanks had become indispensible advisers to presidents, prime ministers, members of parliament and congress and as the saying goes all they had to do was “research it, write it and policy makers would beat a path to their door”.

But the past decade or so has put new pressures on the think tank model of organising the knowledge society. First, funding is a fundamental challenge – with the rise of professional philanthropy, donors have been chanelling their support to short term, high impact, project specific funding. This change has forced think tanks to change their fundraising strategies so they can raise the resources needed to cover their core operations.

Golden donors gone

“The days of a small a group of ‘golden donors’ who provide large, multi-year institutional grants are gone,” says the report.

Secondly, as the vanguard of ideas on political and economic reform, think tanks are often the first victim of the growing ‘NGO pushback’; the subtle authoritarianism that is becoming common in many places in Africa and the world, as governments try to maintain a hold on power in the face of its technology-mediated diffusion.

This often involves the use of legal and extra legal means to limit the number, role and influence of think tanks, such as caps on foreign funding, and even arbitrary arrests and detentions.

And third, the rise of the internet, social media, smartphones and cable news networks means that we are in an information-rich environment, and think tanks have to compete to be heard, and for their message to reach the right people.

Kill the PDF

One quick win for think tanks would probably be banning the PDF, that much-loved format by scholars everywhere – a recent report by the World Bank revealed that nearly one-third of their PDF reports had never been downloaded. 

Another 40% of their reports had been downloaded fewer than 100 times. Only 13% had seen more than 250 downloads in their lifetimes.

It means that there have to be new and more relevant ways of reaching the intended audience, such as social media chats, Twitterthons, info-graphics, videos and podcasts, instead of pages upon pages of PDF documents. There are probably only a handful of smartphone users in the world, who would download a PDF on their device.