By : Doreen Ampofo
A Judge of the Supreme Court of Ghana and the African Court on Human and People’s Rights, Justice Sir Dennis Dominic Adjei, has critiqued Canada’s unequal research partnerships with Africa, describing it as extraction dressed as collaboration. According to him, the research ties remain structurally unequal, leaving African institutions and researchers as dependent sub-grantees rather than true partners.
The Ghanaian Jurist and scholar was speaking at the 3rd Conference on Economic Growth held in Atlantic Canada on the topic “Beyond Aid: Building Equitable Partnerships Between Canada and Africa”. He argued that decades of Canadian funding and goodwill have failed to create reciprocal relationships. “A beneficiary has no standing. A partner does have good standing,” he said. “The research relationship between Canada and Africa does not need more money. It needs better instruments.”
While admitting that both Africa and Canada have made efforts to bridge the research gap by instituting policy changes, Justice Sir Dennis Dominic Adjei said, these have not yielded much results. He cited the African Union Commission’s Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa, STISA-2034, published in 2025 which states the continent’s ambition of converting research into production. He was however quick to add that the document falls short of bridging the financing gap Africa faces in conducting research.
‘African spending on research and development sits well below one per cent of GDP against a Union target several times higher. A continent with a young population, a functioning continental trade agreement and an underfunded research base is not a charity case. It is an asset trading below its value, for reasons that are structural and therefore fixable’ he stated.
Justice Dennis Adjei noted that Canada on the other hand launched its first global Africa Strategy in March 2025 which commits to economic opportunity, security cooperation, and investment in the skills of young Africans. However, the document has no research partnership architecture, instrument, standing mechanism through which a Canadian university and African universities contract with one another as equals, as well as no clause specifying what either may claim from the other when the work is done.
He noted that the gap in both strategies creates an asymmetrical relationship where Canada has a strategy without instruments and Africa has instruments without capital.
AREAS OF INEQUALITY
Funding Architecture
Justice Sir Dennis Dominic Adjei identified five concrete fault lines where the imbalance is written into documents that govern collaboration. These are a funding architecture which gives intellectual property rights to funders and not Africans.
‘Most international grants are executed in the funder’s jurisdiction, denominated in the funder’s currency and administered under the funder’s audit rules. African universities therefore enter projects about African populations as sub-grantees.’ That status, Justice Adjei said, decides who sets the research question, who controls the budget and whose signature appears on the final report—effectively determining ownership of the intellectual work.
Authorship Patterns
He also mentioned authorship patterns which reveal the same skew. Justice Adjei said a systematic review of 1,182 infectious-disease papers conducted in Africa between 1980 and 2016 found African authors on more than 90 percent of publications, yet only 49.8 percent had an African first author and 41.3 percent an African last author. He explained that senior positions were dominated by researchers based in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Belgium and Germany, while African sources supplied under 10 percent of the funding. “A young researcher in Accra who does the fieldwork and appears fourth on the paper has not been mildly slighted,” Justice Adjei said. “She has been denied the credential that would have let her lead the next study.” Repeated over decades, he argued, this suppresses the emergence of a research leadership class on the continent and cites that absence as justification for continued external control.
Data Generation
The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights’ Judge also lamented how data generated on African populations frequently reside on servers outside African jurisdiction, governed by foreign law and reused years later without renewed consent or attribution. Justice Adjei questioned why Canadian institutions ignored rules such as the African Union’s Malabo Convention on Cyber Security and Personal Data Protection and statutory data protection regimes when entering into partnerships with countries like Ghana.
Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Capacity Building
On intellectual property and genetic resources, he said the asymmetry is explicit. Ghana has been a party to the Nagoya Protocol since 2019; Canada has not ratified it and states that the Protocol “is not legally binding on Canada.” Benefit-sharing obligations therefore bind African institutions but not their Canadian counterparts. The Ghanaian Supreme Court Judge said “Where the obligations are asymmetric, good conduct depends entirely on the character of the stronger party describing it as a poor foundation for a relationship that is supposed to last a generation.”
The final fault line he said was “capacity building” which leaves little lasting capability inside African institutions once grants expire. He stated that capacity building that builds no capacity is extraction with better manners.
RECOMMENDATIONS
While highlighting the use of existing contract laws to address these inequalities, Justice Sir Dennis Dominic Adjei, asked African universities and researchers to adopt institutional policies for standard-form equitable partnership agreements and reform their internal research assessment so that credit reflects contribution rather than geography. He also requested them to mandate that authorship protocols are agreed in writing before data collection begins.
“Once results are known, authorship becomes a negotiation between parties of unequal bargaining power, and we all know how those conclude. Require every partnership to specify what remains at close-out, and audit against it’ he added.
To funders and research councils, the renowned Jurist entreated them to permit direct-award eligibility for African institutions as prime recipients rather than only as sub-grantees. He also advocated that they fund indirect and overhead costs at African institutions at the rate they fund them in their home countries, explaining, that the differential is a subsidy which will flow in the wrong direction.
ACADEMIC HONOUR
A highlight of the third Conference on Economic Growth in Atlantic Canada, was the conferment on the Keynote speaker and the learned Ghanaian Jurist with full Professorship, by the hosting institution; the City Institute of Higher Learning. Part of the award read: This conferment is dedicated to Professor Justice Sir Dennis Dominic Adjei, and dated September 11, 2026.
Until his elevation to the apex Court of Ghana; the Supreme Court bench, Justice Sir Dennis Dominic Adjei was a Justice of the Court of Appeal of Ghana from July 7, 2010 to July 3, 2025. He is also a Judge of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, having been elected n July 2022 for a term of six years. He was one of the nine-member Advisory Committee of the International Criminal Court (ICC). He is a fellow of Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has authored a number of law books.
One Response
Fantastic. Congrats to him