- Yabesh Onwonga argues that Kenya’s challenge is not producing research, but funding it adequately and using evidence in decision-making.
- He says publication pressures, weak infrastructure and costly publishing systems can push scholars towards quantity rather than meaningful impact.
- Onwonga wants universities and government to reward quality, local relevance and research that improves policy and people’s lives.
Research is supposed to be the nation’s alarm system. It should warn us about drought, disease, unemployment, food insecurity, failing education systems, political failures and the next crisis before it arrives.
Yet in Kenya, researchers are often treated as an afterthought — until politicians need statistics to decorate a speech.
This is the uncomfortable truth behind the turbulence of research publishing: Kenya has a knowledge problem, but even more fundamentally, it has a research-support and research-utilisation problem.
Our universities produce intelligent scholars, innovative studies and valuable evidence. But too many researchers operate in conditions that would embarrass institutions in countries that claim to take knowledge seriously.
Funding is painfully inadequate. National libraries may lack important primary and secondary data. Laboratories lack essential equipment. Field research is expensive. Research assistants are poorly supported. Data is sometimes inaccessible or unreliable. Grant processes can be slow and opaque.
Young scholars are expected to build international research profiles while struggling to secure the basic resources required to conduct credible research.
The concern over financing is not merely rhetorical. In May 2026, the National Research Fund launched the Kenya Research Financing and Capacity Strengthening Masterplan 2026–2036, explicitly identifying underfunding, fragmented financing, limited commercialisation of research outputs and overreliance on external funding as longstanding challenges in Kenya’s research ecosystem.
Then universities add another burden: publish or perish.
Academic promotion increasingly risks becoming a numbers game.
How many papers?
How many citations?
Which journal?
What ranking?
The researcher can end up chasing publication points rather than pursuing questions that could actually transform Kenyan lives.
And who benefits from this system?
International publishers can charge researchers substantial fees to make their work accessible. Kenyan institutions, already operating under financial pressure, cannot always afford these costs.
The result is a cruel paradox: African researchers are expected to generate knowledge about Africa, yet the global system can make publishing and accessing that knowledge prohibitively expensive.
Meanwhile, Kenyan policymakers frequently behave as though research is an optional extra.
A study warning about drought may be ignored until livestock die.
Research on health-system weaknesses can gather dust until hospitals are overwhelmed.
Education research can sit unread while students are stranded by policy failures.
Agricultural evidence can remain on shelves while farmers confront another season of uncertainty.
Then, when the crisis explodes, government commissions another study.
This is not evidence-based governance.
It is evidence-after-the-fact governance.
Kenya does not suffer from a shortage of intelligent people.
It suffers from a political culture that too often values announcements over evidence and short-term visibility over long-term knowledge.
Researchers must confront threats to credibility
Researchers must also confront their own uncomfortable realities.
Predatory journals, plagiarism, paper mills, manipulated peer review and the pressure to produce endless publications threaten the credibility of scholarship.
Artificial intelligence is adding another layer of uncertainty, making it easier to generate text while raising difficult questions about originality, authorship and academic integrity.
But blaming researchers alone would be convenient — and wrong.
The system created the incentives.
If a scholar needs ten publications to advance while one rigorous study that changes policy earns little recognition, the system is effectively rewarding quantity.
If a university celebrates international journal rankings while paying little attention to whether research solves Kenyan problems, the priorities are backwards.
Kenya must therefore stop treating research as a ceremonial activity confined to universities.
Government should establish predictable, transparent and adequately funded national research programmes focused on problems that matter: food security, climate resilience, public health, education, technology, employment, water and governance.
There are already efforts in this direction. In 2026, the National Research Fund offered postgraduate research grants of up to Sh2 million for doctoral research and Sh500,000 for Master’s research, with an explicit emphasis on work that contributes to innovation, evidence-based policymaking and national development.
Universities should reward quality, originality, public impact and locally relevant innovation — not merely publication counts.
Researchers need stronger mentorship, laboratories, data access, grant-writing support and affordable routes into reputable publishing.
Kenyan institutions should also invest aggressively in open-access platforms so taxpayers can actually access knowledge produced with public money.
And policymakers must be challenged to explain when and how they use research in making major decisions.
There should be no applause for a government that commissions research and then ignores it.
Publication is not the same as progress
Kenya cannot keep producing brilliant researchers and then forcing them to work with inadequate tools, insecure funding and perverse academic incentives.
Nor can we continue confusing publication with progress.
A country can have thousands of research papers and still have terrible policies.
The real measure of research is not how many papers sit in journals.
It is whether knowledge changes decisions, improves lives and prevents crises.
Kenya’s researchers are not the problem.
A system that underfunds them, overburdens them, commercialises their publishing and then ignores their evidence is.
We should stop asking researchers to prove their worth.
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It is time for the country to prove that it deserves the knowledge they are producing.
By Yabesh Onwonga
The writer is a history and language analyst.
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