The humble fruit fly is helping the African science community to thrive

Abstract

Africa generates less than 2% of the world’s research output, while representing 15% of the global population. This limits Africa’s capacity to lead its own way towards important sustainable development goals, which requires bringing knowledge generation to the forefront to reduce disease burden and boost the economies. Africa has around 200 researchers per million people, while the UK, for example, has 4,000. The challenge is how to generate — and later retain — the million of postgraduate researchers needed to meet the world average, in a continent where governments struggle to cover their health-care programme and spend less than 1% of their GDP in research and development. In 2013, after teaching in a course in Kampala International University in the Bushenyi District of Uganda, with participants from various African institutions, we, Isabel, Maria D. (Lola) and Marta, realized that the continent is full of talented scientists who find little support to pursue their passion for active and competitive research. To work towards improving this situation, and inspired by the example of Spain, where popularization of the fruit fly as a model system during the second half of the 1900s led to a period of unprecedented growth and development of biomedical research, we founded DrosAfrica in 2013.