Official Development Assistance for research and development fell from US$2.7 billion in 2018 to US$1.7 billion in 2022 — a real-terms drop of more than a third — according to figures uncovered by a team at the OECD's Development Cooperation Directorate, which also serves as the Secretariat of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC).

The number that disheartened the OECD analysts is starker still: in 2022, only 1% of bilateral aid from DAC countries went to research and development, and only 0.2% went to research institutions. The figures carry significant gaps in the underlying data, and seven DAC members supply the lion's share of the total — a concentration that raises questions about diversification and about how other funders report on evidence, particularly in an era of budget cutbacks.

The structural problem, as Francesco Obino of the Global Development Network (GDN) argues in an analysis published by CLACSO, is that research is embedded throughout development work — so pervasive that reporting standards are not particularly useful for tracking it. Several OECD DAC sectoral codes, the standard vehicle through which donors report expenditure, relate to research, but it remains unclear where social science research would even fit within them.

Obino, who coordinates GDN's Doing Research initiative, writes that his team has spent over a decade asking who funds research at the national level in low- and middle-income countries. The consistent finding: national science ministries often lack even basic information about who is funding their own social sciences. In many cases, ministries do not know how many social scientists are conducting research in, or about, their country.

A measurement gap with portfolio consequences

For R&D managers and research administrators in LMIC universities, the absence of data has direct operational consequences. Without aggregated information on funding flows, neither ministries nor institutions can make informed decisions about where to invest, how to improve fund delivery, or how much additional funding is needed and who should help raise it.

Obino points out that the information itself exists — every funding window has someone behind it who could, in theory, answer basic questions about destination and purpose. But it is not systematically collected, let alone aggregated or analysed.

He also draws a harder conclusion: international research funding may be, at best, a neutral factor in national research ecosystems and, at worst, a distortion that distracts researchers from their own questions and keeps the development of research systems and networks in limbo. He has argued elsewhere, in work on funding for African social sciences, that poorly designed funding devices risk doing harm rather than good.

Existing precedents and their limits

Methodological templates for tracking funding flows do exist. UKCDR and the Pandemic Science Institute have shown that mapping global research funding, at least for pandemic-related research, is both feasible and worthwhile through the Pandemic Pact. A team from NUPI in Oslo and ACDI in Cape Town applied a similar approach to climate change research funding, concluding that only 3.8% of global climate change research funding is spent on African issues.

But Obino notes that both teams tackled a more limited task: mapping research funding within the research funding sector, essentially by analysing research grant databases. Mapping research funding within the development sector is a more complex and less coherent exercise — and, he adds, more political.

Oxfam International has developed a methodology for tracking invisible and undeclared funding flows in humanitarian emergencies, and Obino has spent several years considering how to adapt that approach to North-South research funding flows.

A new tracking project takes shape

A team from CLACSO and CWTS at Leiden University, funded by Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC), is currently working to answer the question directly. Their project aims to track global research funding flows with a focus on the Global South, with the stated goals of exposing entrenched inequalities and proposing fairer, more inclusive funding systems.

Obino sets out the questions such tracking would need to answer. Beyond the OECD team's initial question of how much Northern funding goes to research, he asks: how much research funding flows to the Global South at all? Does ODA research funding land at institutions in the Global North or the Global South? And of the funding that reaches Southern researchers, even through North-South collaborations, whose questions is it meant to answer — donors', researchers', or those of social actors?

He also flags the ratio of research funding to research capacity building as a potential indicator of how much trust donors place in Southern researchers to lead, noting that many senior researchers from the Global South are frustrated at being included in partnerships only through capacity-building funding. A related question: how much of that funding goes toward infrastructure, doctoral fellowships, or simply the time of Southern researchers in North-South partnerships?

Finally, he distinguishes long-term research agendas from short-term projects. "There's a difference between a meal and a garden," he writes. "Both are useful, even vital, but they serve very different purposes."

The gap extends beyond ODA. Understanding under what conditions research contributes to improving lives also requires examining national public, private and philanthropic funding, using datasets such as the OECD's R&D statistics.

The stakes, in Obino's framing, go back to Joseph Stiglitz's 1999 argument that development is about ideas before they become resources. For ideas to be tested, refined and proven, research capacity is needed everywhere — and without tracking data, no one can currently say whether the next transformative evidence will be funded at all.