Mombasa, Kenya · 27 November 2023 — SciDev.Net, the world's leading source of science and technology news for global development, delivered a science communication workshop at the 2023 Science Granting Councils Initiative (SGCI) Annual Forum and the Global Research Council (GRC) Sub-Saharan Africa Regional Meeting in Mombasa, Kenya, teaching African scientists and grant administrators how to use narrative storytelling to make publicly funded research more accessible to policymakers and the public.
Dr Charles Wendo, SciDev.Net's training coordinator, led the workshop titled "Harnessing the power of storytelling to enhance dissemination and research uptake of public funded research." The session was presented at the SGCI Academic Symposium as part of a broader exploration of training for researchers funded by the initiative, and was moderated by Dr Prudence Makhura, Director for Overseas Collaborative Grants and Initiatives at the National Research Foundation of South Africa.
The Problem: Important Research, Poor Communication
The workshop addressed a persistent challenge in African science: researchers funded by public science granting councils produce findings that are relevant to national development, but those findings frequently fail to reach the audiences who need them most — government officials who shape policy, communities affected by the research, and journalists who could amplify the work.
Dr Wendo articulated the gap directly:
"Scientists funded by Science Granting Councils across Africa are contributing some very important research in various disciplines but often their findings are not well communicated to the policymakers and the public. Storytelling is a powerful tool that can really humanize scientific research so that it is more easily understandable and relevant to people. As such, it can help influence policy and personal decisions that can enhance society."
The approach represents a shift from traditional science communication models — which often focus on transmitting facts and figures — toward narrative techniques that contextualise research within human experiences, making complex findings more memorable and actionable for non-specialist audiences.
The Script Programme: Nearly 9,000 Trained Since 2018
The workshop at the SGCI Annual Forum was not an isolated event but part of a sustained capacity-building effort. SciDev.Net's Script training programme, which provides training and networking resources for journalists and scientists to communicate science in an engaging and accurate way, has been running since 2018.
In July 2023, SciDev.Net formalised a partnership with the SGCI to deliver training to 18 Science Granting Councils across 17 countries. The Mombasa workshop represented a continuation of this arrangement, extending the programme's reach to the councils' annual convening.
Script's featured courses, produced by Dr Wendo, include:
- Science communication skills for journalists — equipping reporters to cover scientific topics accurately and engagingly
- Science communication skills for press officers — training institutional communicators to effectively disseminate research findings
- Media skills for scientists — helping researchers navigate interviews, press releases, and public engagement
The SGCI: Strengthening Africa's Science Funding Infrastructure
The Science Granting Councils Initiative is a multilateral initiative established in 2015 to strengthen the institutional capacities of public science funding agencies in sub-Saharan Africa. Its mandate is to support research and evidence-based policies that contribute to economic and social development — a mission that depends not only on funding good science but on ensuring that the science produced actually informs decision-making.
The 2023 Annual Forum and the concurrent Global Research Council Sub-Saharan Africa Regional Meeting brought together science funding agencies from across the continent to share experiences, advance good practices in granting, and evaluate progress in implementing capacity-strengthening and collaborative activities. The forum engaged partners from academia, industry, civil society, government, and intergovernmental organisations.
Storytelling as a Research Uptake Strategy
The emphasis on storytelling reflects a broader evolution in how science communication is conceptualised in the African context. Where earlier models treated communication as a one-way transmission of findings from scientists to passive audiences, the storytelling approach recognises that research uptake — the process by which evidence influences policy and practice — requires engagement, relevance, and emotional resonance.
This is particularly important in the African context, where science must compete with political narratives, cultural frameworks, and economic pressures for the attention of policymakers. A well-told story about how research on malaria vector behaviour translates into fewer childhood deaths in a specific community is more likely to influence a health minister's budget allocation than a table of entomological data, however rigorous.
A Growing Ecosystem of African Science Communication
Script operates within a growing ecosystem of science communication capacity-building on the continent. Other actors include the Training Centre in Communication (TCC Africa), the first African-based training centre focused on scholarly and science communication, and the Africa Scientifique programme run by African Gong, which takes an explicitly Afrocentric approach to decolonising scientific engagement.
What distinguishes the Script–SGCI partnership is its institutional anchoring. Rather than training individual researchers in isolation, the partnership works through the science granting councils themselves — the bodies that fund research and set priorities across 17 countries. This creates the potential for systemic change: if councils begin to require or incentivise communication training as part of their grant conditions, the impact could scale far beyond what individual workshops can achieve.
The Road Ahead
The 2023 SGCI Annual Forum workshop represents a milestone in the institutionalisation of science communication within Africa's research funding architecture. But the challenge remains substantial. With nearly 9,000 people trained since 2018, Script has reached a fraction of the continent's research community. The quality of science journalism in many African countries remains constrained by limited resources, editorial priorities, and the absence of dedicated science desks.
For Dr Wendo and SciDev.Net, the path forward involves deepening the partnership with granting councils, expanding the Script course catalogue, and building the kind of institutional capacity that ensures communication is not an afterthought but a core component of how publicly funded science is conducted and shared.
As the SGCI continues to strengthen the institutional capacities of Africa's science funding agencies, the integration of communication training into its framework may prove to be one of its most consequential contributions — not because it produces new scientific knowledge, but because it ensures that the knowledge already produced reaches the people who can act on it.
Sources
- CABI, "SciDev.Net provides workshop at 2023 African Science Granting Councils' Annual Forum," 27 November 2023 —
- Script Training Programme —
- Science Granting Councils Initiative —
- SciDev.Net —
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