The SA Medical Research Council (MRC) has secured R400m in commitments from donor organisations willing to step into the breach after the Trump administration slashed support for scientific research in SA, provided the government matches their contributions rand for rand.
The MRC has consequently increased its bid for emergency funding from the National Treasury from R150m to R400m, according to MRC president Ntobeko Ntusi. The bid has been made in terms of section 16 of the Public Finance Management Act.
The funds are urgently needed, as research-intensive universities such as UCT and Wits that relied heavily on grants from the US have already set large-scale retrenchment processes in motion, said Ntusi.
“There’s ... massive panic in the sector,” he said. “Almost all the principal investigators are employed by the universities, but they have teams of 100 or more that are employed through research grants,” he said.
Wits health dean Shabir Madhi confirmed retrenchments were under way. A total of 1,815 Wits Health Consortium staff, ranging from researchers to field workers, were already affected and more were likely to follow, he said.
“Considering that SA is only spending 0.6% of [GDP] on research and is below its own target to spend 1.5%, any new injection of funds is welcome. It will be useful in [the] short term to enable researchers to stabilise and avoid a sudden brain drain,” he said.
Considering that SA is only spending 0.6% of [GDP] on research and is below its own target to spend 1.5%, any new injection of funds is welcome.
— Shabir Madhi, Wits health dean
Madhi warned that a one-off grant would not be sufficient as the sector required sustainable funding to ensure research remained a viable career option.
SA’s universities and research organisations are reeling from a series of moves by US President Donald Trump’s administration that have already seen thousands of research grants terminated worldwide, and left the future of the rest hanging in the balance.
In April the institutions launched an appeal to the Treasury for emergency funding, co-ordinated by the MRC. The MRC convened a meeting with potential donors in late April, in which it set out the scale of the looming funding gap and the perilous consequences if it was not filled.
The first blow to SA scientists came in late January when the Trump administration abruptly terminated research grants issued by the US Agency for International Development. That was quickly followed by the termination of hundreds of research grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to scientists in the US and further afield, while thousands more grant recipients were not issued with notices of renewal for multiyear grants.
In the latest development, the NIH announced on May 1 that it will not renew or issue new “foreign sub-awards” after September. These are NIH funds that a US principal investigator gives to international partners to complete projects, often spanning multiple countries.
SA is the biggest recipient of NIH grants outside the US and most SA researchers who receive funding from the NIH are sub-award recipients.
The MRC previously told Business Day that the NIH had awarded grants valued at more than R1.2bn to SA researchers for this fiscal year. University of Cape Town received the most grants (155), followed by Wits (110), the University of Stellenbosch (96) and the African Health Research Institute (38).
Not only are jobs and research projects at stake, but so too are the careers of the next generation of scientists, said Ntusi. “A lot of postgraduate students are losing their training opportunities, which is a huge potential threat to our ability to develop the next generation of scientific excellence and leadership,” he said.
Science, technology & innovation minister Blade Nzimande, who has until now said little about the threat Trump poses to SA science, announced at the weekend that he is setting up a working group to consider the issue. The working group is to be chaired by his former adviser Derrick Swartz, and has been given until June 30 to draw up a report.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.