‘EU should help developing countries to boost R&D’

The EU should focus its international R&D co-operation on helping the Sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb and Mashreq, Latin America and the CIS regions to strengthen their research infrastructures, recommends an EU project.

Scenarios for research and technology development co-operation with Europe, the SCOPE 2015 project, has produced a number of scenarios for the year 2015 on contextualised scientific developments in selected regions of emerging economies and analysed the consequences of those scenarios for Europe and the EU research policy.

The project focused on a selected group of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb and Mashreq, Latin America and the Commonwealth of Independent States and found that the four regions were facing to a large extent the same problems, such as chronic under-investment in R&D, brain drain, old research infrastructure and style of governance. As a result, the project recommends the EU to focus its co-operation with the four regions on helping them to strengthen the research infrastructures of the region. As the SCOPE 2015 partners also discovered that there was an interest in increasing links between countries in the same region, they recommended exporting the European Research Area (ERA) concept to these regions.

“Our recommendations make the case that the most valuable co-operation in the end is for the EU to help policymakers formulate policies and use its resources to help these regions talk to the people they need to talk to, to make this happen. Once this happens, industry and other actors will get behind it and research will flow,” said SCOPE 2015’s Dr Patrick Crehan to 
Cordis News
.

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