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Black researchers in South Africa win more grants but less money

    

White men still dominate when it comes to large grant sums, 2018 NRF data show

Black South African scientists won more grants from the country’s National Research Foundation in 2018 than their white compatriots, the latest data show. But white researchers’ grants were worth more—indicating that there is some way to go in the country’s ambition to erase the fault lines of its racist past. 

Molapo Qhobela, the head of the NRF, presented spending figures for the NRF on 6 November during a colloquium on higher education funding at parliament in Cape Town. 

The NRF monitors the distribution of its research grants across the country’s apartheid-era racial categories—black, Indian, coloured and white—to chart its progress on transforming the overall racial profile of grant winners. Historically, most research funding in South Africa was reserved for white people. Today, more than 80 per cent of South Africa’s population falls under the category ‘black’. 

In 2018, Qhobela said, more than 2,500 NRF grants were awarded to black researchers, compared with just over 2,000 for white researchers. However, the amount of funding allocated to black researchers totalled R204 million (US$13.6m), while white researchers claimed R353m—more than black, Indian and coloured researchers, combined.  

Similarly, women and men won about the same number of grants last year. But in money terms, men took home a total of R363m while women won only R287m.  

Foreign researchers help pad the numbers to make South Africa’s transformation performance sound better than it may appear to local scientists on the ground. Counting only South African nationals, there are 1,799 black grant winners versus 1,677 white. But the total value of these white-held grants is more than double the black-held ones: R297m compared with R124m.

Success rates also still map onto the old racial fault lines. Black South African applicants had a success rate of 23.7 per cent, significantly lower than that of coloured (32.7 per cent), Indian (37.7 per cent) or white (36.9 per cent) applicants. And of the NRF’s grants to universities, 59 per cent went to just five institutions: Cape Town, Pretoria, Stellenbosch, Witwatersrand and KwaZulu-Natal—all of which either catered to whites historically, or were created by merging formerly white institutions with others.

Still, the data shows a significant redistribution of funding in recent years. The share of all historically disadvantaged groups of the NRF funding increased between 2015 and 2018. Black researchers’ share nearly doubled from 16.2 per cent in 2015 to 31.4 per cent in 2018. There were also increases, albeit less dramatic, in the share of funding taken home by coloured and Indian researchers. The share of total funding to white researchers fell from more than 70 per cent in 2015 to just over half in 2018. 

When only South African researchers are counted the gains are less, but still significant. Black South African researchers’ share in 2015 was just 10.6 per cent of total NRF funding, but increased to 24.8 per cent in 2018, while the proportion won by white South African researchers declined from 76.5 per cent in 2015 to 59.3 per cent in 2018.