Data for 2021-22 shows slight recovery but experts caution against calling it a turnaround
South Africa’s research and development spend has increased as a proportion of GDP for the first time in four years, fresh data reveal.
The country’s gross R&D expenditure grew to 0.62 per cent of GDP in 2021-22, up from 0.60 per cent* the year before.
A R3.48 billion surge in business R&D spend was the main reason for the increase, with business R&D as a share of the total R&D spend accounting for 35.4 per cent, up from 30 per cent in 2020-21.
Science policy experts in the country cautioned against interpreting the 0.02 percentage point recovery as a turnaround.
“One swallow does not make a summer,” said Michael Kahn, an innovation policy analyst based at the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology at Stellenbosch University.
Mmboneni Muofhe, deputy director-general for socioeconomic innovation partnerships at the Department of Science and Innovation, called the growth “reassuring”. However, he added, it comes from low base, caused, in part, by Covid-19 and budget cuts. “We will have to look at the trend as opposed to just one year improvements.”
Real-terms increase
Overall, South Africa spent R38.2 billion on R&D in 2021-22, a 6.9 per cent real-terms increase from the year before.
The recovery claws back some of the ground lost in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, 2020-21, when the real-terms R&D spend dropped by 7.6 per cent.
That was the biggest drop that the Human Sciences Research Council, which conducts the annual surveys, had seen in 20 years, said principal investigator Nazeem Mustapha in a statement.
“The growth in R&D expenditure is reassuring, although this comes off a very low base,” he said. “We expect the next survey’s result to provide us with a better sense of what the trend is.”
Despite the increase, the country remains a long way off its goal of spending 1.5 per cent of GDP on R&D.
Business trends
Thandi Mgwebi, head of business development and global partnerships at the National Research Foundation, said the boost in business R&D spending pointed to a “shared commitment” across sectors to boost innovation to promote economic growth.
She also noted a positive trend in foreign funding, especially towards the higher education and business sectors. “This attests to the global recognition of South African institutions, and also highlights the potential for further international collaboration and knowledge exchange,” Mgwebi said in a statement.
Business R&D spend on basic research doubled between 2020-21 and 2021-22, the survey says. In terms of research fields, the biggest winners were ICT, environmental science and material science.
Health and social science are the two research areas with the most funding. However, it was the natural sciences that drove the increase—social science is “stagnant”, according to the report.
There has also been a geographical shift in business R&D spend, with the Western Cape seeing an uptick from 19.4 per cent to 23.4 per cent.
Meanwhile, Gauteng—the area around Johannesburg and Pretoria, which still houses nearly half of the business R&D in the country—saw nearly a five percentage point drop.
Where next?
In academia, the universities of Johannesburg and Limpopo saw significant increases in their research (R105m and R80m respectively), between 2020-21 and 2021-22, while the University of South Africa saw a R357m drop.
Universities of technology saw a R204m decrease in their collective R&D expenditure, with the largest drop recorded at the Walter Sisulu, Central and Tshwane universities of technology.
Anastassios Pouris, a professor at the Institute for Technical Innovation at the University of Pretoria, told Research Professional News that it would become clearer over the next few years whether efforts to boost R&D spending by encouraging cross-government coordination would bear fruit.
He cautioned that the spending freeze on government departments implemented in the current financial year could have dampened such efforts.
He also said that it would take time to raise business R&D expenditure back to the levels seen a decade ago, especially if South Africa doesn’t ramp up its subsidies for industry research.
“Those large companies did not stop funding research—they stopped funding research in South Africa,” he said.
*South Africa’s R&D spend to GDP ratio for 2020-21 is different in this year’s report (0.60 per cent) to that given last year (0.61 per cent), due to updated GDP values.