Covid-19 and restrictive immigration policies strangling supply of foreign researchers
South Africa will soon face a shortage of postdoctoral researchers, experts have warned, as a result of blockages of supply lines by the Covid-19 pandemic and restrictive immigration policies.
Michael Kahn, a well-known South African science policy analyst, warned during a 22 June webinar that South African universities face a “severe crisis” because of dependence on foreign postdocs who shoulder a lot of teaching and mentoring duties.
He said that 60 per cent of South Africa’s postdocs come from abroad. But immigration restrictions, a change in policy by the National Research Foundation to fund fewer international students, and the continuing pandemic will lead to a shortage of this crucial resource, he said.
South Africa has recently cut many science jobs from a national critical skills list for special visas. Many universities use the critical skills list to hire scientists and postgraduate students in fields where locals have been deemed scarce.
“Clearly there are political heads who don’t want inward immigration to happen because the jobs should go to ourselves,” said Kahn, a research fellow at the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology at Stellenbosch University and an extraordinary professor at the University of the Western Cape.
He claimed that the Department of Science and Innovation is aware of the issues. “It has to be a major concern to the minister,” he said.
Mind the gap
Valerie Mizrahi, the director of the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine at the University of Cape Town, told the same meeting that South African universities are already experiencing the ”gap in postdocs”, which has been worsened by the pandemic.
This is shown by departments’ dwindling capacities to supervise and teach students, she said. “Each of us is fully aware of what international students and postdocs are doing to support supervision at honours level, and undergraduate teaching.”
Johann Mouton, director of the DSI and NRF Centre of Excellence in Scientometrics and STI Policy at Stellenbosch University, said the latest data suggests that 40 per cent of South Africa’s postdocs hail from elsewhere in Africa.
But South Africa’s national science system as a whole is in stasis, Mouton said. Postdocs cannot find employment and must rely on back to back fellowships until they are ineligible for funding. He said this is more prominent in the natural and health sciences than in the humanities and social sciences.