Science in West Africa after the First Regional STI Policy: A Global View (2011-2020)

The West African countries adopted in 2012 a five-year STI policy document that should have helped States to master all science fields required for the emergence of a scientific community able to compete and exchange with the best research teams worldwide. This paper aims at measuring the scientific productivity of West Africa after the first regional science, technology and innovation policy and compared to the period 2001-2010. West African countries’ scientific data were collected from Web of Science and analysed with regard to the annual production, the total production, growth rate, relative growth index, growth index, international collaboration rate, partner countries and their shares. Over the decade 2011-2020, the region produced more than three times its output over the decade 2001-2010. The international collaboration rate is still higher. The major partner countries are the same as over the previous decade, either in the world or on the African continent. Nigeria is still the local giant with more than half of the regional output; it is followed by Ghana, Senegal and Burkina Faso. The dynamics of production are not the same at country level. West African scientific production is growing more rapidly than the one of the World. Within the region, not all countries have the same volume of production or the same growth speed. Nigeria by far is the local giant, however Ghana is the one that imparts production speed to the region. Taken into account the skewness of the scientific production per country, the study proposes in-depth analysis of the 15 countries grouped in five clusters as follows: small producers (8 countries), lower intermediate producers (3 countries), upper intermediate producers (2 countries), higher producer (1 country) and highest producer (1 country).


INTRODUCTION
Science, technology and innovation are recognized as essential means to boost development, so that at any level, policies are adopted to make them contribute to economic growth and social welfare. The Sustainable Development Goals by the United Nations General Assembly [1] assign to the 9 th goal to "build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation and foster innovation" and targets (in its point 9.5) to "enhance scientific research, upgrade the technological capabilities of industrial sectors in all countries, in particular developing countries, including, by 2030, encouraging innovation and substantially increasing the number of research and development workers per 1 million people and public and private research and development spending". At the African continent level, the Constitutive Act of the African Union, [2] the recent Agenda 2063 [3] and the resulting Science, technology and innovation strategy for Africa (STISA-2024), [4] the Lagos plan of action [5] and the Africa's science and technology consolidated plan of action, [6] all, underline the role of science, technology and innovation in African development. In 2012, the West African countries, members of the Economic Community of the West African States (ECOWAS, see Appendix 1) adopted a five-year science, technology and innovation policy, the ECOWAS Policy on Science and Technology (ECOPOST) [7] with the target of helping Member States to master all science fields required for the emergence of a scientific community able to compete and to exchange with the best research teams worldwide.
Both regional and international institutions, as well, encourage individual countries too to establish a formal science, technology and information policy; some of the West African did it, but others not (Appendix 2). However, the majority of the African countries are still facing basic social and economic needs like access to food, education and health services or water and sanitation services. Most of these countries are the poorest of the world and are still under international financial assistance, heavily indebted and classified within the bottom 1 The countries list was updated on changes; the last version is provided by the African Union Commission [49] . [41] ).

Existence of a STI policy
Year of the adoption of the first STI policy Year of the adoption of the current STI policy classes of international development indicators whatever the sector is, though endowed with natural untapped resources. [8] Studies related to the state of science, technology and innovation in Africa are growing. Either, they deal with group of countries (including the whole continent) [9][10][11][12][13][14] or individual countries. [15,16] The share of the whole African continent to the world knowledge production is negligible though it is trending upwards. [9,10] In 2005, UNESCO [17] asserted that

Number of STI policies yet formulated
The Netherlands, on its own, produces scientific publications annually more than all the African countries taken together; the African Union noticed that "The output of the African Union (AU) is relatively small, and similar to that of single European countries" [12] and illustrated that the whole Africa's scientific output in Scopus in 2005 "was about the same size as that of Switzerland, Sweden and Poland". [12] According to the ECOPOST, [7] Member States have researchers in quality in universities and research centres, but their number is insufficient; besides, the contribution of science technology and innovation to economic development of countries and the region is very limited and invisible due to a long list of problems many studies underlined [4,18] among which (i) lack of coordination between research programs and research activities, (ii) lack of human and financial resources and equipment, (iii) insufficiencies or inadequacies of funding and equipment.
The West African scientific output over the period 2001-2010 were studied. [19,20] The region's annual output increased linearly. Nigeria, the largest country of the region and also one of the biggest African science producers, on its own, outputs half the West African total production. Medicine and Health Sciences and Natural sciences are the main fields of output. The comparison of the region with the BRICS revealed that West Africa performs less than these countries taken individually: [19] with respect to the total scientific production over the period 2001-2010, West Africa stands the last position; with regard to the percentage of citable documents, the region is ranked behind South Africa, India, Brazil and China, but in front of Russia; West Africa depends more on international collaboration. BRICS countries and West Africa share three partners among the top five, namely USA, UK and Germany. However, West Africa depends more on these three countries than the others. Even though scientific output reported to total population size is considered, West Africa is still at the rear.
This paper aims at measuring the scientific productivity of the ECOWAS after the first regional science, technology and innovation policy; it addresses the following three research questions: 1) How does the scientific research landscape in West African countries look like after the ECOPOST? 2) How does West African science output over the decade 2011-2020 compare to that of the previous decade 2001-2010 at the regional level? and 3) How does West African countries' scientific output over the decade 2011-2020 compare to that of the previous decade 2001-2011? It is organised as followed: section1 introduces the subject and formulates research questions and objectives; section 2 describes data and methods; section 3 analyses data; section 4 discusses the findings and section 5 summaries and concludes.

The ECOWAS and the ECOPOST
The Economic Community of the West Africa States (ECOWAS) is an African regional economic integration organization grouping together 15 Western African countries, in alphabetical order: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Cote d'Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo. The ECOWAS was established with the Treaty of Lagos [21] signed on 28 th May 1975 in Lagos. The Treaty was revised in 1993 [22] to enable the region to face new challenges. The organization aims at promoting economic cooperation and integration and regional security that should lead to an economic and monetary union through a complete integration of the economies of Member States. The end of these aims is to "raise the living standards of its peoples, and maintain and enhance economic stability, foster relations-among Member States and contribute to the progress and development of the African Continent" (Article 3 of the Revised Treaty).
Article 27 of the ECOWAS Revised Treaty [22] clearly spells out that Member States shall ensure proper application of science and technology to the development of agriculture, transport and communications, Industry, health and hygiene, energy, education and manpower and the conservation of the environment, meaning that research should serve other sectors to develop and thus contribute to economic growth and social welfare. In 2007, the ECOWAS Commission created within the Office of the Commissioner in charge of Human Development and Gender, a Department for Education, Culture, Science and Technology with a mandate to promote science, technology and innovation for regional integration, economic development, overall poverty reduction and social emancipation of the people of West Africa.
The ECOWAS Policy on Science and Technology (ECOPOST) and its action plan [7] were adopted by the Authority of Heads of State and Government on 29 June 2012. [23] The ECOPOST addresses 12 thematic areas: (a) scientific research, innovation and technological development; (b) support for education and training; (c) higher education; (d) scientific culture; (e) enabling environment for scientific creativity; (f) regional and international cooperation; (g) capacity building; (h) science and technology and private sector involvement; (i) information on science and technology: data, statistics and indicators; (j) gender, science and technology; (k) E-governance and Internet massification; and (l) transfer of technology and technology watch. [24] The ECOWAS countries in particular have common hindrances, includinf [7,18,[24][25][26][27][28] i) insufficient funding and equipment, ii) lack of motivation of personnel, iii) lack of explicit science, technology and innovation policy in some countries, iv) inexistence of a regional database on publications, vi) lack of well-informed and organized policy research institutions and advisory bodies to help identify key priority areas where countries may invest their limited resources and set clear and measurable targets, vii) lack of dynamism in STI policies policy design, development and implementation, viii) lack of assessments, monitoring and evaluation of the impact of policy actions, iv) lack or absence of interactions between innovation actors, and, x) non-involvement of universities and research centres to the establishment of STI policy, plan or strategies.

SUBJECTS AND METHODS
From the Web of Science, we searched on 28 th February 2020 for all documents with at least one author with a home address in any of the 15 countries of West Africa published between 2011 and 2020 included. The following databases were selected from the Web of Science Core Collection: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI), Conference Proceedings Citation Index-Science (CPCI-S), Conference Proceedings Citation Index-Social Science and Humanities (CPCI-SSH), Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) 1 . The search expression was (cu=benin or cu=burkina faso or cu=cote ivoire or cu=cape verde or cu=gambia or cu=ghana or cu=guinea or cu=guinea bissau or cu=Liberia or cu=mali or cu=niger or cu=nigeria or 2,895.3 where y is the number of papers and t the period of time (t = 1 in 2011 and R 2 = 0.93); this means that each year of the considered period, West Africa is expected to produce 1,286 additional papers as compared to the previous year.
We computed two indicators that measure the speed of production: the growth rate and the relative growth index. The growth rate is the extent to which the production grows between two periods of time, here within an interval of one year. The relative growth index is the production of a specific year divided by the production of the year considered as reference (2011 is this study); it measures the speed output is growing compared to the output of the reference year. Table 1 gives the growth rates and the relative growth indexes of the West African science over the period 2011 to 2020. It shows that the growth rate in 2015 is the highest (more than 50%) meaning that from 2014 to 2015, there is a shift in the structure of the production of science in West Africa. This shift is also noticed in Figure 1 where a sudden move is recorded on the curve.
As far as the relative growth index is concerned, it slowly increases at the beginning of the period and reaches 123% in 2014; it then rises to 188% in 2015 and 300% in 2020. This sudden growth stems from the high growth rate in the year 2015. This means, for example, that in 2016, West Africa produces twice its total output of 2011 (this year being considered as period of reference, basis=100) and that in 2020, the region produces three-fold its output at the reference year. The comparison to the period 2001-2010 shows that West Africa produces twice more in 2011-2020 (both growth rate and growth index).
In summary, West Africa science production is growing at a linear trend over the decade, so that at the end of the period, the region could triple its production. Table 2 ranks West African countries by their scientific output over the period 2011-2020. Nigeria stands out with more than half the region production; it is followed by Ghana (18.30%); on their own, these two countries authored more than 7 papers out of 10 produced by scientists with a home address in West Africa. Senegal, ranked third, comes far behind with less than half the production of Ghana (7%), followed by Burkina Faso (5.3%). Each of the eleven remaining countries has a share lower than 5% of the regional output. These data show that the distribution of scientific output within member countries is much skewed. If the Gambian production, the median one, is considered as unit, Nigeria produced 27.84 units, Ghana 9.36, Senegal 3.61, etc. (Figure 2). This ranking of the West African countries by their total scientific output is the same as the one by UNESCO [28] based on data from Web of Science and the one by the African Observatory of Science,  cu=senegal or cu=sierra leone or cu=togo) and py=2011-2020. Even though papers have studied the regional output over the period 2001-2010, we executed the same search expression for that period 2 , to avoid any bias in our analyses, especially in relation with the selected databases by other studies. Then, we used the Analyze results option of Web of Science to obtain results presented hereby.

Regional diachronous analysis
Over the period of study (2011-2020), the West African region produced around one hundred thousand papers 3 . The repartition of number of papers per year is given in Table 1 and plotted in Figure 1; it reveals that the region's output regularly increased over the period. The production is best fitted by a linear function of which equation is y = 1,286.3t + 2 (cu=benin or cu=burkina faso or cu=cote ivoire or cu=cape verde or cu=gambia or cu=ghana or cu=guinea or cu=guinea bissau or cu=Liberia or cu=mali or cu=niger or cu=nigeria or cu=senegal or cu=sierra leone or cu=togo) and py=2001-2010.
Journal of Scientometric Research, Vol 10, Issue 3, Sep-Dec 2021   Technology and Innovation [12] based on data collected from Scopus; however there is a little difference with the ranking given in Mêgnigbêto [16,20] with data obtained from Web of Science and Scopus where Cote d'Ivoire ranked the 5 th place and Benin the 6 th one.
Because, analyses are synchronous, we did not compute growth rate, but relative growth index, and we introduced the growth index which is computed with data from a geographic area as reference (Table 3) and measures how speedy the production grows as compared to that of the area of reference. It appears that while the world production grows only of 18% in 2011-2020 as compared to 2001-2010, Africa triples its output between the two periods; as a consequence, Africa published 2.66 times faster than the world (growth index/ world = 266%). All Member States have a relative growth index greater than 100% meaning that each produces more over the period 2011-2020 as compared to the period 2001-2010. However, the speed of production shows variations among countries: only few countries have a growth index (the region considered as reference) greater than 100, expressing that their production grows faster than the one of the region: Ghana (137%), Sierra Leone (246%), Guinea (318%), Liberia (318%) and Cape Verde (167%); the remaining countries produces at a lower speed than that of the region.
In summary, the distribution of papers among countries shows that the region's science production is much skewed: few countries produce the majority of publications. Some countries double their production as compared to their output over the period 2001-2010, other triple, etc. Even though some smaller producers have a very high speed of production, the region's speed of production is imparted by Ghana and Nigeria, the top-two producers with a growth rate equal to 3 and 4 respectively.

International collaboration
Over the 100,383 publications attributed to West Africa, 49,729 (49.83%) are written by authors with addresses in West Africa only, which is about the half. In other words, one half of the West African countries publications (50.47%) are co-authored with at least one non-West African country. Table 4 provides the list of 24 partner countries with at least 1% share. At the top are USA, UK, France and Germany in this order). The first African country, ranked 5 th , is South Africa; it is followed by Kenya (14 th ) and Cameroun (20 th ).

Institutional actors
Over the 41 thousand institutions co-authoring West African papers, Table 5 lists only institutions (22) with at least 1% share. They are based mainly in Nigeria; then, come 2 institutions in Ghana (University of Ghana and University of Cape Coast), 1 in Senegal (Université Cheick Anta Diop) and 1 in Benin (Université d'Abomey-calavi). One may notice that neither Burkina Faso ranked 4 th nor Cote d'Ivoire ranked 6 th by the total production have institutions appearing in this table. This expresses that the two countries are best ranked at country level, but their production is split among home institutions so that no institution from them could compete at the regional level in terms of share. More globally, Nigeria dominates the  region's scientific output at both country and institution level as well.
As far as non-West African institutions are concerned, UK, France and USA are the main partners of West Africa ( Table 6). The only one African institution appearing in the top is based in South Africa (University of Cape Town), meaning that the main institutional partners of West Africa are non-African.
Out of the 17 institutions with a share greater than or equal to 1%, one is an international organisation (World Health Organisation); among the remaining, one is African (South African), 16 are from Western World of which 5 from UK, 4 from USA and 5 from France. Not only are the main partner countries out of African, but the main institutional partners are out of Africa also.

Specialisation fields
Based on the concordance table provided by Clarivate Analytics. [29] Web of Science's categories were mapped with the Frascati Manual Fields of Science; [30] then the West African output per science field were computed. It comes out that the region produced mainly in Medical and Health Sciences (44.34%), followed by Natural Sciences (35.63%), Engineering and Technology (16.17%); Social Sciences are ranked 4 th with 12.93%, followed by Agricultural science 9.39% and Humanities at the rear (with 2.21%) (Figure 3).

DISCUSSION
The paper draws the landscape of scientific publishing in West African countries with a focus on the decade 2011-2020. It reveals that i) West Africa science production triples as compared to the previous decade; ii) the production growth varies over countries; iii) the region is still depending on abroad to produce knowledge and iv) the region specialises in Health and medical sciences and Agricultural sciences.
West Africa triples its output over one decade As compared to the production of the region over the period 2001-2010, the scientific output of West Africa triples over the period 2011-2020; this expresses a significant growth in research activities and, probably, a change in the database coverage. Indeed, databases regularly assess new journals or existing ones to cover them, inducing growth in publications; [31] in the case of the European Nordic countries for example, Schneider [32] stated that indexing new journals explains 60% of the rise in the number of publications. On the other hand, the growth in doctoral students number noticed by UNESCO [28] may have induced increase in research activities resulting in growth of number of publications.
This growth index of West Africa (both with the world and Africa and reference) is higher than 100, meaning that the region's science grows faster than the one of the World on the one hand, and the one of Africa on the other hand; if the continent's share to the world knowledge production is less than 1% in 2005, a trending upward was recorded starting of the year 2000 so that the continent doubles its share around 2010. [9,10,12] With data we collected from Web of Science, Africa authors 2.56% of the world production over the period 2011-2020; however, disparities are recorded between regions share to the continent scientific production: the biggest producer is the Northern Africa (48.18%), followed by Southern Africa (31.45%), West Africa (13.84%), East Africa (12.16%) and Central Africa (2.9%) at the rear. Note that the sum of regions' shares is greater than 100% due to intraregional collaboration.     Table 7: Growth indexes of scientific production in Africa and its regions (2011-2020). Table 7 presents the growth index of African regions with various geographic areas as reference. It shows that all African regions have produced speeder than the world and the West Africa has the highest speed; as a consequence, the growth indexes of the continent and its regions with West Africa as reference are lower to 100.
At individual countries level, the relative growth index varies, expressing different national dynamics. If Nigeria and Ghana, the top-two producers display a value around 3 and 4, some of the lower producers display higher values. This is the case of Sierra Leone (780%), Guinea (377%), Liberia (998%) and Cape Verde (525%) which have a growth index higher than the one of the region. These countries have probably a weak research infrastructure, become aware of it and engage process to improve it in order to face development challenges. [7,33] Distribution of publications number among countries is much skewed According to raw data presented above, Nigeria is the biggest science producer in the region, with more than half the total regional output, i.e., Nigeria, on its own, produces almost equally as the remaining 14 countries. A number of factors give such advantages to this country: the seize of its population, its economic weight in the region (nearly 70% of the regional GDP in 2016, [34] more than half the industries installed in the region [8] ) and as consequence of these two factors, the number of universities (more than half the number of public university in West Africa, [7] ) the number of students, the number of researchers (70% of the regional numbers of researchers [7] ) and the GERD. However, when the number of inhabitants is taken into account, Nigeria is no longer at the top position, but ranked 7 th ; The Gambia comes first, followed by Ghana and Cape Verde (  [35] Not all countries produce scientific data on regular basis, so they are scarce. The Gross Expenditure in Research and Development (GERD) measured as percentage of the Gross Domestic Product and the number of researchers are given for the most recent years in Table 8. The highest value (0.7) is registered for Burkina Faso in 2017; it is however far from the target of 1% African countries committed on in many policy documents [e.g.5] These data show that West African countries, on the one hand, are still far from the target of 1% they committed to early in 1980 with the Lagos plan of action [5] and renewed in many other policy documents, and on the other hand, lack researchers. [12][13][14]20,28,36,37] The region is still highly depending on abroad The international collaboration rate of the region is around 50% meaning that the region produces at least half its papers with non-West African countries. Compared to the period 2001-2010, USA, France and UK are still the top-three partner countries; however, France moves back and ranked 3 rd over the period 2011-2020, after UK ranked 2 nd . Colonial ties or cultural link explains the strength of the relations. [10,20] South Africa is becoming a major scientific actor on the African continent; ranked 5 th before over the period 2001-2010, it is positioned 4 th for the second period, probably due to recent cooperation agreements this country signed with some Member States in West Africa. [28] China that did not appear in to top-10 partners in 2001-2010 is ranked 6 th now; note that the China-Africa collaboration is increasing and is likely to grow in the coming years as China is emerging as a leading global research hub in the world. [40] These ranks may change more rapidly because, Africa seems not to be a reserved field of USA and Western Europe countries any longer; the multiplication cooperation frameworks with periodical high political level summits to yield and monitor agreements with Africa that encourage cooperation in science, technology and innovation (e.g. with Europe, Russia, Japan, China, Turkey, Brazil, etc.) may explain the high collaboration rate and changes in partner countries rankings. On their own, the top-5 partner countries (USA, UK, France, Germany and South Africa) share around 50% of the total production against 40% over 2001-2010; this increase expresses interests of foreign countries to collaborate with African countries but also the dependence of the country to the rest of the World.

The region specialises in Health and medical sciences and Agricultural sciences
Raw data gives advantages to Health and medical science and Natural sciences fields, in this order; Agricultural sciences is ranked 5 th after Engineering and technology (3 rd ), Social sciences (4 th ) and before Humanities (6 th ). This findings somewhat is in contradiction with those of Mêgnigbêto [41] where Agricultural sciences and Engineering and technology have the same share and ranked 3 rd and 4 th . UNESCO [28] noticed that even though government adopted developments policy where the priority to feed citizens is expressed, agriculture is not the field countries produced enough in.
However, when specialisation indexes are taken into account, the ranking differs: West Africa specialised in Agricultural sciences and Health and medical sciences; it is neutral in Social sciences and Natural sciences but under specialised in Engineering and technology and Humanities. According to Dahoun, [42] countries priorities are feeding people and taking care of their health; moreover, on their independence, countries inherited solid colonial research institutions in these two fields, [7] that explains these specialisation indexes. Besides, Web of science under covers Social sciences and Humanities in favour of Natural sciences, Health and medical sciences, [43][44][45] so the under specialisation may result from bias due to the data source; note that social sciences generally receive the least funding. [46] The under specialisation in Engineering and technology originates from the weak share of students in these fields (less than 25% [7] ) and, as a consequence, the lower investment of governments in the postsecondary vocational and professional education and training (less than 5% of education budget [47] ) and is common to all the sub-Saharan Africa. Table 9 displays that specialisation indexes divide the African continent into two parts: the Northern Africa specialised in Natural sciences and Engineering and technology, and the Sub-Saharan-Africa (grouping the 4 other regions) under specialised in Natural sciences and Engineering and technology but specialised in Health and medical science, Agricultural sciences, Social sciences and Humanities.

CONCLUSION
This paper gives a global view of the landscape of scientific publication in West Africa over the decade 2011-2020, after the first regional science and technology policy compared to the decade 2001-2010. It reveals that West Africa triples its scientific production expressing a dynamics in research activities in the region. The dynamics is however of different levels depending on the countries: if Ghana and Nigeria, the biggest science producers within the region, triple their outputs, some of the smallest producers multiply their production by more than 5. The international collaboration rate is still as high as over 2001-2010. The top-5 partners are the same as in 2001-2010, but South Africa and Germany interchanged their rank. China now has an appreciative share to the regional output and is becoming a major partner of West Africa.
The distribution of publications among countries is much skewed:, when The Gambia, the median country's output is taken as unit of measurement, Nigeria produced around 27 units, Ghana 9, Senegal around 4, but the smallest producers like Guinea Bissau 0.28 and Cape Verde produced 0.18. Due to the high skewness, country-specific analyses are needed to better understand the weakness and strengths of research and innovation infrastructure at national level and explain the performance of the region. To this order, we propose the division of the 15 countries in 5 clusters as follows: i) cluster 1 (small producers), grouping countries with at most 2% of the regional output: The Gambia, Niger, Togo, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia, Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde; ii) cluster 2 (lower intermediate producers), grouping countries with contribution higher than 2% and less than 5% of the regional output: Benin, Cote d'Ivoire and Mali; iii) cluster 3 (upper intermediate producers), grouping countries with contribution falling between 5% and 15% of that of the region: Senegal, Burkina Faso; iv) cluster 4 (high producer), countries with contribution higher than 15% and lower than 50% the total of the region: it is constituted with Ghana only; and, v) cluster 5 (highest producer), grouping countries with contribution higher than 50% the total of the region: it is constituted with Nigeria only.
Some (combined) factors may explain the performance of the region: governments may have allocated more means to science, technology and innovation; Africa has the youngest population that needs education; combined with the trending upwards of life expectancy, African people have opportunities to access high education; in accordance, countries are strengthening and widening their education infrastructures. The fact that the number of doctoral students is increasing is an illustration, favoured by diversification of the number of doctoral schools within the region. Therefore, people have much opportunity to study at home instead of abroad. As a consequence, the cost of doing doctoral studies diminishes, so more people can register. Moreover, the development of distance learning may have offered opportunities to stay home and access education in Western countries, both in fields covered or not covered by the home educational system.