A group of young Liberian professionals interested in research invited me to speak to them. I chose to reflect the nation’s emerging culture of scholarly research. I drew on my experience administering a Liberian-led think tank in the homeland over the last two years. I defined the problem as follows:
1) an underdeveloped infrastructure/culture of scholarly research;
2) low priority given to scholarly research;
3) limited or no funding or moral support provided to scholarly research;
4) academics or university faculty generally not expected to produce empirical knowledge;
5) research/publication not often tabulated in advancement of academics;
6) seeming absence of national research agenda;
7) youth not often trained, mentored, and supported to pursue careers as researchers;
8) academics not given ample incentives to conduct scholarly research;
9) research done are often foreign-led, and seldom emphasize building and mainstreaming indigenous knowledge;
10) minimal or no research partnerships exist between university and industry;
11) research findings are prone to being politicized;
12) a seeming culture of convenience dominates, where academics rely heavily on regurgitating existing; and
13) universities are underdeveloped and the higher education institution accreditation process is weak, causing proliferation of sub-standard higher education institutions and underprepared graduates. This is not a research-based article. It is informed exclusively by personal observations, which require empirical validation.
It might just not be an over estimation to say that many of our higher education institutions are largely “glorified high schools” producing many poor performing or uncompetitive graduates. In my own practice, this assertion has proven true.
But all the solutions to our national problems rest heavily on the state of scholarly research – our failing social fabric (weak communal family system), endemic corruption, deepening economic and unemployment crisis, deteriorating education and healthcare delivery systems, this subject must claim national attention as the nation makes its pending critical transition.
What is happening in our higher education system also mirrors what is occurring in our primary and secondary schools, partially reflected in the persistent mass failure of applicants in college entrance exams.
We have no longitudinal data banks on our national problems that can be used to conduct scholarly research and apply the findings to management and governance decisions. If I were to ask: Is Liberia getting better or worse, many people would rely on hearsay, antidotes, conjectures, hunches, and speculations to superficially compare a despotic government to a democratic one.
I should note that in qualitative research, instincts can be used to form hypothesis in exploratory studies. But with many people being basic in their thought processes in a largely illiterate society, they are likely to get nostalgic for previous regimes (failed or successful) and suggest that one is better than the other devoid of context or empirical evidence.
Put differently, could this “data-less” environment be producing the kind of pettiness and triviality that we see over taking our society today? Because the country lacks large data bases to be mined for scholarly research it might just be resulting in heavy reliance on data collected and mined by international organizations, information that might be stripped of keen understanding of the cultural context. Without scholarly research rooted in the context, governance becomes rudderless.
The prospect of governance improving the livelihoods of citizens becomes remote and/or abysmal. Without scholarly research, we cannot understand the socioeconomic conditions that ail us collectively. Our criticisms of society become based on perceptions of reality. It is of strategic importance that as a people we develop better research institutions, better data, improve our analytical tools, and increase the number of trained researchers.
Research is a life changing enterprise. The future of our society depends on whether its governance is guided by empirical evidence on the variety of issues that it confronts.
When society has a system for collecting and updating data regularly, the possibility of change becomes possible because no “data-less” society can make durable progress.
If policies are to be effectively executed, Liberia must become a data-driven society. This will change our civilization radically. Our leaders will be elected on the basis of evidence of their impact on the living conditions of the citizens in prior positions.
And when we compare their legacies, we will do so objectively rather than on mere whims. We need to build data repositories on different sectors of the society, which can be the basis for research and decision making. Sadly, our media, even academics have become victims of functioning in a “data-less” society where the intellectual tradition is sparse.
You can read a whole news story without finding the evidence backing the narrative or the conclusions reached. Some journalists rely on innuendoes, even half-truths and then tarnish the reputations of individuals. Some professionals rely on single or shallow interpretations of events and/or things that go wrong without fact-checking or they do not go back to history to see how far society has come.
Also, we have many instances in which our academics do not conduct research, but rather continue to parrot information from other sources, sometimes without giving the authors credit. Worse, when research is done, the results are often politicized to please the whims of individuals or political aims. All these factors undermine the building of a durable research culture.
Access to accurate data makes scientific breakthrough possible. Political and civil liberties are at the heart of our development, especially as a fragile society transitioning from war to peace and democracy. But we do not have standardized ways of measuring improvements in our political and civil liberties. We do not have indexes that measure these important variables.
We therefore set our thresholds for such important issues as poverty using external standards. Hence, many of our standards do not reflect local realities. When a society is not driven by data, it cannot make adequate projections into the future. When unexamined questions or dimensions of society are left unexplored, we risk building a dysfunctional state. The simple reason is that information about today tells something about the future.
In the end, it will be a huge deal for us to take the making of data seriously. By doing so, we will be taking the arts and craft of research seriously, even making it indispensable to good governance. Unless and until Liberian society combines the natural sciences, social sciences and the arts in a bid to enable new technologies to address its wide-ranging socioeconomic problems, it will not build the smart enterprises or unfold bold innovations to confront chronic diseases, poor governance or even endemic corruption.
Data is created in Liberian society every day and it is everywhere around us. Data is created in how we live, work, travel, purchase goods and services, attend school, play or are unable to do these things. But we lack interest in capturing and understanding it and translating our findings into new knowledge that can transform our livelihoods.
Research must be definitely prioritized, if we want to leave our current state of backwardness behind. In our National Community Perception Study on Ebola as well as other research with ordinary Liberians, we have learned that they have a rich reservoir of indigenous knowledge that has gone untapped in public policy development. Their perceptions need to be studied and lessons learned mainstreamed and transformed into public policy/programs.
The infrastructure for funded scholarly research has to be developed and supported including building competencies in grant writing and the various tricks of the trade amongst our youthful populations. We need to increase opportunities for interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarly research and publications in academic journals and the popular press. Funding incentives for researchers need to be increased and procured from diverse sources.
Many low cost inventions or innovations by Liberians need to be improved and commercialized so that the larger society can derive maximum benefits. Scholarly research constitutes a heartbeat of our recovery, development, productivity, progress, and prosperity.
We cannot rely on existing rudimentary academic and research systems, structures, and practices and expect to develop our education systems or governance institutions. Leveraging scholarly research as a strategic national asset will help commit us as a people, our leaders included, to backing up our actions with evidence, while improving our collective livelihoods.
The Author
Emmanuel Dolo is the President/CEO of the Center for Liberia’s Future, a Liberian-led think-tank that is currently conducting a National Community Perception Study on the Spread and Containment of Ebola during the 2014-2015 epic epidemic as well as the Reintegration Experiences of Ebola Survivors, Orphans and Caregivers and Post-Ebola Preparedness. CFLF has also conducted studies on the livelihood challenges of drug-involved/street youth, job creation for marginalized populations, and an assessment of extra-curricular education programs in Liberia. CFLF researches and mainstreams indigenous knowledge originating from the Mano River Basin. [email protected].
