It is widely known that African researchers are dramatically underrepresented in academic journals. But it’s still astonishing to see this reality starkly represented in numbers.
For the past eight years we have run the Research, Policy and Higher Education (RPHE) programme, a research and peer-support scheme with Rwandan scholars, through the Aegis Trust. As part of our work, we’ve analysed 12 leading journals in disciplines relevant to our researcher cohort. We found that from 1994 until 2019, of the 398 articles focusing on Rwanda that appeared in these journals, only 13 were authored or co-authored by Rwandan scholars. That’s just 3.3%. This amounts to 25 years of post-genocide literature almost entirely devoid of Rwandan voices.
