Association of African Universities (AAU)
Background: Established in 1967 and headquartered in Accra, Ghana, the Association of African Universities (AAU) is the apex body and voice of higher education in Africa. With more than 450 higher education institutions as members, the association promotes collaboration, quality higher education, research, innovation, and institutional development across the continent. The AAU also serves as a platform for dialogue, partnership-building, and collective action on issues shaping the future of higher education in Africa.
The AAU is the Cluster Lead for the Higher Education, Research and Innovation (HERI) cluster of the African Union’s Continental Education Strategy for Africa (CESA 2026–2035). In this capacity, the Association is positioned to convene governments, universities, development partners and the private sector around a shared continental agenda for higher education, research and innovation.
Mission: AAU’s mission is to be the leading advocate for higher education in Africa with the capacity to provide support for its member institutions in meeting national, continental and global needs. It aims to enhance the quality and relevance of higher education in Africa and strengthen its contribution to Africa’s development.
The Cost of Knowledge
“Why do the costs to access and share knowledge continue to increase? For too long, the answer to that question has been framed narrowly: subscription fees, article processing charges, paywalls. These are real costs. But they are not the only costs. And for Africa, they are not even the most consequential.”
“We need to reframe the conversation. There are costs that remain invisible in mainstream debates: the infrastructure costs, the human costs, and the epistemic costs that Africa bears in a global knowledge system that was not designed with us in mind.”
“African researchers produce knowledge of global significance, yet African scholarship remains systematically underrepresented in the global knowledge system. The rules of indexing, the dominance of English-language publishing, the concentration of editorial power in the Global North - these are not neutral features of an objective system. They are choices. And those choices have costs. The most significant cost is invisibility.”
“When African research is not indexed, it is not discovered. When it is not discovered, it is not cited. When it is not cited, it is assumed not to exist. And when it is assumed not to exist, the world loses access to knowledge that could save lives, inform policy, and advance human understanding.”
“There is the cost of the infrastructure that makes open science possible. The repositories, indexing services, persistent identifiers, metadata systems, and publishing platforms that turn these ideals into functioning reality. These systems are largely non-commercial. They are underfunded. And they are vulnerable. When they falter, the cost is borne disproportionately by institutions and countries with the least capacity to absorb it.”
“There is a human cost in a system that extracts value from those who can least afford to give it. Open science in Africa depends on the labor of editors, reviewers, and journal managers who work largely without compensation. They sustain journals that serve their communities, their disciplines, and their continent. They do this work not because they are paid to do it, but because they believe in the mission. This is a subsidy from African scholars to a global system that often refuses to recognise their contribution.
“Across the continent, African institutions are building the infrastructure, policies, and practices that a different knowledge system requires. Diamond Open Access is flourishing in Africa. The African Platform for Open Scholarship is building a tenant model for decentralised hosting, empowering universities to publish rigorous journals and books under African governance. Association of African Universities (AAU) and the African Research Innovation and Development (AfRID) have a comprehensive platform for academic networking, research tracking, and collaboration across Africa.”
“Infrastructure alone is not enough. Without policy, infrastructure is a library without readers. The Association of African Universities calls on African universities to adopt open science mandates. Revise promotion and tenure criteria to recognise open publishing. Allocate resources to sustain the infrastructure we depend on. This is not about compliance. It is about ownership.”
“The costs of the current system are real. They are financial. They are human. They are infrastructural. And they are borne disproportionately by those who have the least power to change the system from within.”
“There is a cost of not building something different. The cost of continuing to depend on infrastructure we do not control. The cost of continuing to accept evaluation systems that were not designed for us. The cost of continuing to treat knowledge as a commodity when it should be a commons. The choice before us is not whether to bear costs. It is which costs we choose to bear, and who bears them.”
“Africa's position is clear. We choose to bear the costs of building our own infrastructure. We choose to bear the costs of sustaining our own journals. We choose to bear the costs of policy reform and capacity building. Because the alternative- continuing to pay for access to knowledge we produced, in systems we do not govern - is a cost we can no longer afford.”
-Dr. Felicia Nkrumah Kuagbedzi, Acting Coordinator - Communications and Knowledge Management, Association of African Universities