Brown Bag Seminar on Mapping STI Capacity for Implementing STI Roadmaps for the Six Transitions

Background

UN DESA, the UN Interagency Task Team on STI for the SDGs (IATT), and Future Africa organized a brown bag seminar to present preliminary findings of a mapping exercise, primarily using case studies from Africa which will be further integrated into other initiatives and activities from the Global North and Global South as part of the guideline contributions. The discussion during the brown bag seminar highlighted the activities, skills, and capacity challenges and opportunities in Africa that can be leveraged to build regional and global STI partnerships to contribute to enabling the six transitions. The insights from Africa will show how various African countries and sub-regions, in collaboration with various stakeholders, are revising their STI policies and reconfiguring their institutional arrangements to make them relevant and effective for the six transitions linked to the SDGs.

Of particular relevance in Africa is the role of various STI ecosystem stakeholders through pan-African global STI steering mechanisms, such as the AU-EU STI Agenda and partnership platforms (e.g., the Science Granting Councils Initiatives (SGCI)) in building capacity and skills to support STI for the SDGs – despite the fragmented and competitive nature of some of these initiatives. The seminar also utilized these insights to build awareness and understanding of how to build effective and transformative capacities and skills across government, civil society, and the private sector through appropriate conceptual tools for transformative STI policy design. Evidence in preparing these guidelines reveals the required capacities and skills across all stakeholders which include STI policy analysis, formulation, monitoring and evaluation capacity, establishing multisectoral platforms for science-society-policy dialogues, and strengthening national parliaments and other policy bodies to engage actively in STI policy processes, particularly in ensuring the allocation and effective use of public funds for STI, regulatory oversights, and monitoring STI policy implementation.