This essay written by Adeyemi Adetula (Alex Ekwueme Federal University Ndufu-Alike & Université Grenoble Alpes) is part of the book A Better How .

Despite constituting 79% of the world population, the Global South constitutes less than 6% of the sample used in papers in popular psychology journals (Thalmayer et al., 2021). In economics, even among those articles that focus on Africa, only 25% have at least one Africa-based co-author (Chelwa, 2021). In light of these facts, scholars have argued for greater Global South research contributions to maximize impacts on human and social development (Forscher et al., 2021). While a few Global South countries, such as China and Singapore, have the economic resources to meet their research and development needs, most countries from the Global South —especially African ones— are low-income economies grappling with limited research resources, facilities, and capacities to participate in global research (Kigotho, 2021). The cumulative effort to diversify and expand research investigation to countries in the Global South has fallen short, and typically failed to capture local priorities (Liverpool, 2021). This is especially true of African countries. 

One research approach to potentially address these problems is big team science. Big team science is an approach to pool resources, infrastructure, and expertise across teams widely dispersed geographically to accomplish projects larger than what any individual team could individually (Forscher et al., 2022). Big team science is a product of the credibility revolution, a movement for greater rigor, openness, transparency, and more credible claims that emerged in the wake of psychology’s replication crisis (Korbmacher et al., 2023). Big team science commits to inclusive and robust investigations for more generalizable and applicable science at low cost for partners and greater benefit to all. When implemented well, big team science offers all team members – including those located in African countries – extensive access to resources, infrastructure, and expertise, as well as credibility-enhancing practices. These resources can position African research partners to expand their personal and professional networks, improve their research skills, and acquire the right tools and resources to work at a global level. Yet, this approach remains unsuccessful in engaging and integrating Africans (Adetula et al., 2022).

Big team science originated in the Global North and is, as of yet, unpopular among African researchers. Even the few African researchers involved in big team science have limited expertise and struggle with poor infrastructure (such as unreliable power, intermittent and expensive internet, a lack of a proper workspace, and inadequate computing) to contribute and coordinate these studies locally. Furthermore, most big team science research questions are Western-centric and have little or no pressing relevance and priority to Africans. Big team science therefore runs the risk of supercharging Western dominance as well as missing out on crucial variations, research questions and methods that exist in African behavioral sciences. There is a need to improve local research capacities to optimize research for African development and for greater synergy between African and non-African countries.

In this chapter, I argue for the need for research capacity building to increase African research productivity (1) by highlighting big team science huge potential but limited impact on research capacity building, (2) describing our own efforts to build research capacity through our own ManyLabs Africa initiative, and (3) by concluding with lessons from the ManyLabs Africa initiative and recommendations on navigating big team science in Africa. 

Big team science can advance research capacity

There are many African research capacity building initiatives targeting human development in Africa, some of which are covered in part 1 of this edited volume. While such initiatives are laudable, the research sector can also be improved by engaging researchers in big team science replication-type studies for on-the-job training on a wide range of cutting-edge research skills. These studies can engage African researchers while simultaneously testing replicability and generalizability across and beyond their populations. Big team science distributes tasks that require partners’ expertise and experience. These tasks include project management for central and local coordination, manuscript writing and review, project conceptualization and design, material preparation such as study selection, ethics review, instrument cultural adaptation and translation, tool development and translation implementation for online and laboratory studies, data collection, and funding which entails grant sourcing and the writing of applications. Such big team science initiatives can facilitate sharing and synergizing thoughts, expertise, and resources on a large scale. As long as project roles are distributed equitably, these studies can also minimize the power imbalances between the partners with more resources and Africans with fewer resources allowing the latter to negotiate barriers and center their priorities. This approach would also allow differences in psychology and behavior to emerge within studies, both between Africans and non-Africans and between different African sub-populations.

Despite this potential for capacity building and career growth, few Africans have taken to big team science, as evidenced by Africans’ gross underrepresentation in popular, mostly Western-centric big team science studies (Adetula et al., 2022). When African researchers do participate, they are typically relegated to data collection roles. For Africans to embrace big team science and maximize its benefits, there is a need to develop and nurture required expertise to do the job as well as the inclusion of African thoughts and priorities. These are the central objectives of the ManyLabs Africa initiative.

Building research capacity via the ManyLabs Africa initiative

The ManyLabs Africa initiative consists of two big team science studies, which together aim to address the limitations of previous big team science studies. The first study in the ManyLabs Africa initiative is a preparatory study that familiarizes African collaborators with the structure and aims of a big team science replication study, involves them in explicit capacity-building activities, and enables the team to identify the pitfalls and challenges of such a study on the African continent. This first preparatory study paved the way for the second study in the initiative, a larger, more extensive cross-cultural big team science test of African-origin claims. Together, these studies 1) build the capacity of African collaborators to use available credibility-enhancing research tools and the intellectual and digital infrastructures freely, 2) center more strongly the issues and priorities of Africans and 3) explore the richness of African behavioral science, thereby attempting to improve the participation of Africans.

Our preparatory study was termed CREP Africa after our partner in the study, the Collaborative Replication and Education Project (CREP, https://osf.io/wfc6u/). CREP is an open-science-driven big team science collaborative designed to train users in credibility-enhancing tools and practices. CREP projects rely heavily on experiential learning, whereby learners come to understand credibility-enhancing tools and practices by using them in an actual research project. CREP Africa uses the CREP collaborative and structure to conduct a so-called ‘registered replication report’, an article format hosted by some journals (the full list of which is at https://cos.io/rr) where authors submit a protocol for a replication study prior to collecting data. At Stage 1, the protocol is peer reviewed and revised if necessary, and, if the authors satisfy the reviewers that their protocol is sound, accepted in principle for in principle publication. At Stage 2, after the authors have collected, analyzed, and interpreted the data, the finished article is peer reviewed again to ensure the authors have adhered to their protocol. If it has, the article is accepted for publication – regardless of whether the finished article reports statistically significant results. In CREP Africa, we leveraged this format to conduct a training-focused, Africa-wide replication study to test the replicability and generalizability to Africa of a non-African claim of interest to our African collaborators (our Stage 1 reviewed manuscript is available at https://osf.io/hdrf6). 

To prepare to conduct this study, we consulted with African collaborators on available resources and infrastructure to assess their readiness for the studies and found that although African collaborators are interested and reported that the CREP study is feasible, most labs lack the funds and facilities to conduct the study. We also developed an extensive bank of training materials on the use of open science practices (available for free at https://osf.io/8akz5/ and https://osf.io/b2pz6/) and provided direct training on these practices to twenty-three of our collaborators. To find possible studies to replicate, we adopted a ‘top-down’ study selection process where we, the study leads, found candidate studies that met a list of pre-set criteria. To incorporate the preferences of our African collaborators, we surveyed them as to their preferences for each of the studies on our list. Studies that were judged by our collaborators to be personally interesting, feasible to conduct, applicable and adaptable to their settings, and ethically acceptable were eligible for selection. After conducting our search, we selected Rottman’s & Young’s (2019) studies on moral transgression and replicated these studies in twelve sites across five African countries, specifically Burkina Faso, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, and Tanzania. CREP Africa is being finalized for Stage 2 submission. Overall, CREP Africa has served as a training and preparatory project that familiarized African collaborators with big team science and a wide variety of open science practices, and allowed us to identify pitfalls in order to prepare collaborators for the second study, the ManyLabs Africa study.

ManyLabs Africa study is a transnational multisite online preregistered replication of three effects originally discovered in Africa to determine whether these effects replicate and generalize to European, North American, and African populations. By focusing on African-discovered claims, we can test the generalizability of these claims beyond —not to, as is almost always the case outside of our project— Africa as well as, provide a reference for why and how behavioral sciences should expand African claims via replication. To ensure that the selected studies presented claims that were Africa-discovered, reproducible, feasible, applicable, relevant, ethically acceptable, and of interest to researchers and targeted communities, we first consulted with Global South researchers (these consultations are described in full at https://osf.io/9qjw3) and and subsequently adopted a four-step bottom-up study selection approach that heavily relied on our African colleagues to nominate actual studies or determine a study focus, as opposed to the top-down approach used in our preparatory CREP Africa study. The study selection procedure consisted of the following four steps (see https://osf.io/v6j28 for more details):

Step 1: African collaborators nominated research subjects and specific studies.
Step 2: We searched, evaluated and shortlisted five studies.
Step 3: Both African and non-African collaborators assessed the shortlisted studies.
Step 4: We selected the final three studies from the shortlist based on feasibility and other considerations, strongly prioritizing African-preferred studies.

The claims selected for replication were the following:

1) Mgbokwere et al. (2015) claims of supportive, positive, and negative attitudes towards teenage pregnancy.
2) Teye-Kwadjo et al. (2018) claims that male Ghanaian adolescents held more positive attitudes, greater feelings of control, and a higher number of self-reported condom use than their female counterparts.
3) Vera Cruz (2018) claims that Mozambican women were more willing to forgive a husband involved in a less emotionally involved extramarital affair than a more involved affair, and when regret expressed by a husband is high (versus low). (for full report, see the study preregistered report available at https://osf.io/9m5qw).

Presently, we are collecting data in forty-six sites across Africa (Burkina Faso, Gabon, Morocco, Nigeria, Tanzania, Zambia), Europe (Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey, United Kingdom), and North America (Canada, United States of America). 

How our African collaborators benefitted from the ManyLabs Africa initiative

Across these two studies, our collaborators have attended open science workshops, nominated studies and articles as well as assessed the shortlisted studies for the final selection, culturally adapted and translated the measure from English into five African languages (Arabic, Chichewa, French, Swahili, and Portuguese), obtained local ethics clearances, coordinated their local labs to collect data, read and reviewed the studies’ manuscripts, and managed a page on the Open Science Framework website that curates their site-specific materials. We believe these activities have built capacity among our collaborators and equipped them with appropriate expertise and networks for further contributions. Our local coordinators are now familiar with big team science study demands and operations and have perhaps grown their visibility as big team scientists in coauthoring these studies. They are more confident in using the open science framework and working with the CREP platform which may inspire more CREP projects in Africa. Our African collaborators are better equipped to prepare study materials such as selecting a study for a replication study, reporting preregistered studies and the closely related registered reports, translating and culturally adapting the measures, managing ethics review, and conducting online data collection. Nevertheless, to lead a big team science project would require consistent participation, improved capacity and resources, and a wider network and multiple consultations.

However, throughout conducting these studies, we encountered substantial barriers, including a lot of collaborators dropping out of the project, lengthy time spent on completing tasks as well as uncompleted tasks, such as measure translation, ethics clearance and data collection, inadequate facilities, and lack of funds to pay participants and purchase necessary tools. In the remaining sections, I describe those barriers, our attempts to overcome them, and the lessons learned from these attempts. I conclude with some general recommendations about how best to conduct big team science in Africa.

What to know when conducting big team science in Africa

CREP-Africa was the first rollout of a study from the CREP collaborative in Africa, which provided our African collaborators with the opportunity to improve their research capacity in open science practices. ManyLabs Africa is one of the only studies replicating African claims across Africa, Europe, and North America on the scale of big team science. These studies entailed some characteristics, such as the bottom-up study selection for a replication study that could help improve research workflows. Owing to the challenges and lessons learned from these studies, we recommend a few practical solutions to questions on building research capacity, understanding the variations and methods in African research, and improving African contribution globally.

Know how to navigate African literature

Finding African studies to replicate that met all our search criteria was challenging (see a full report of the study selection at https://osf.io/v6j28). Some notable issues that limited our study search and nomination include a limited access to African literature due to poor visibility of African journals, and the fact that most African researchers’ works are not published in mainstream international journals. Furthermore, most African studies we found used qualitative methods, such as focus groups and interviews, which did not fit well with our predetermined criteria for suitable design and parameters for a large-scale online quantitative replication study. An additional problem we encountered was that many African studies made use of Western-developed measures. Although these measures may apply to African settings, relevance is not something that can be assumed without evidence. We therefore avoided studies that used Western-developed measures, resulting in a smaller pool of studies that used African-developed measures or self-developed designs to consider for nomination. Lastly, non-English publication languages are common practice in Africa. About thirty African countries communicate their scientific publication research to a large extent in Arabic or French, languages that we have not mastered.

However, in order to deal with these limitations, African researchers can take advantage of the open access revolution to improve their visibility and access to their research via preprint servers and open access journals. Researchers interested in African studies can search journals and repositories (for example, the African Journals Online, https://www.ajol.info/index.php/ajol; and African Digital Research Repositories, https://www.internationalafricaninstitute.org/repositories ), and may find it easier to focus on qualitative research.

Mitigate poor online data collection rate

The contributing sites in Africa had difficulties in administering the studies and meeting the targeted sample sizes. It took about six months to attain the minimum sample size per site for the CREP Africa study, and only 1320 out of roughly 4700 respondents had above 85% completion rate to allow us to apply our exclusion criteria. To avoid these poor response rates in ManyLabs Africa, we selected studies with relatively simple procedures with few measures so that participants were required to spend less time to complete the survey.

Also, we required at least a 40% completion rate to include a response. Even so, only 1169 (66%) out of 1785 African participants had a 40% completion rate compared to 4872 (87%) out of 5592 European and North American participants. Some African participants complained about the lengthy survey and the need for an internet subscription to complete the study. The African local leads observed that online data collection barriers could lead to an extended data collection period and a high rate of uncompleted responses. These barriers include intermittent power supply, lack of workspaces, the collection of data without compensation for time spent by participants and local coordinators, and lastly, the internet is unaffordable and the internet quality is poor. Moreover, internet penetration in most countries (Tanzania, 31.9%; Zambia, 31.2%; and Burkina Faso, 19.9%) where our African sites are located is low and even below the African average of 43% (Galal, 2024). Researchers sampling African populations via online survey should thus check for data quality by, for example, excluding participants who spent little time completing the study or failed attention tasks. It would furthermore be good practice to recruit a large sample of participants to accommodate exclusion. We recommend including an additional 35% of a target sample size. The tradeoff of excluding so many participants is that the sample could become unrepresentative of the target population, an issue that must be handled with care (Kennedy, et al., 2020). Lastly, when possible, I recommend providing sufficient compensation to participants, especially for a lengthy study.

Know the realities of your African collaborators for effective collaboration

The expenses of a typical large-scale online replication study include participant compensation, internet access subscription, research assistants, ethics review fees, material translation, and the cost for instruments and tools. Only a few of our African collaborators and labs had the resources and facilities required to shoulder these costs in our studies (see full report at https://osf.io/gds7b). This meant that we were unable to move forward with our two studies with some labs. Our experience with the costs for the ethics review is a case in point here. While our African collaborators paid review fees of $15, $50, and $100 for Nigerian, Kenyan, and Malawian ethics reviews respectively, our collaborators were unable to afford the costs of the Tanzanian ($350) and the South African review fees ($917). Although ethics reviews in a few African countries, such as in Egypt, do not require an application fee, it is ironic that, in some African countries, researchers who are poorly funded are also burdened with high ethics review costs. I would thus recommend that African research-regulating institutions, such as review boards, provide services at little or no cost to African researchers. Governments, NGOs, scientific research funders, and wealthier scientific societies and foreign partners can pay for these subsidized services.

There is also a need for better infrastructure and facilities, such as a computer and access to a stable and affordable internet connection, the lack of which frustrates our African collaborators’ efforts, blocks their access to cutting-edge research tools and reproduces poor working conditions. In addition to a lack of facilities some of our African collaborators struggled with heavy teaching and research project supervision workloads (see also Naidoo-Chetty & du Plessis, 2021). We observed that it takes comparatively longer for African researchers to complete some tasks, such as ethics application, data collection, translation, compared to their European and North American counterparts. For instance, while most sites from the United States and Europe met their data collection target within two weeks, it took many African sites two months. We think that this is partly due to the poor infrastructure and tools available to our African collaborators. Hence we recommend that wealthier partners and funders can provide small grants to purchase needed materials, such as internet subscriptions, pay participant compensation, as well as the project lead or a designated person or support unit for the project to assist African collaborators who might require tools or help to complete a task.

In addition, despite primarily focusing on African populations and giving them a generous six-month period for data collection, we only managed to recruit collaborators from five out of fifty-four African countries for CREP Africa and six out of fifty-four for ManyLabs Africa. Moreover, due to both a lack of funding and the need to access the internet to deliver our study, we were unable to recruit large subsections of the countries we recruited from, such as people from rural areas. Thus, while the ManyLabs Africa initiative substantially improved upon the dismal African participation in much of psychology and big team science (Buchanan et al., 2023; Thalmayer et al., 2021), the heterogeneity among our African samples was low. For big team science interested in African populations, it is important to set feasible target sample sizes and realistic time frames in light of local realities as well as to provide the resources (for example for participant compensation) to recruit diverse samples and increase the participation rates of Africans.

Lastly, managing a big team science study can be challenging and may not be sufficient for an African researcher’s career growth, a barrier not unique to Africans (Forscher et al., 2022). Some researchers we contacted and who were interested in the studies, for instance, told us that they would rather conduct single-authored small-scale studies or contribute to studies co-authored by a few scientists instead of contributing to multi-authored studies that potentially have less positive impact on their careers. Some African research-regulating agencies, such as ethics review boards, as well as potential collaborators questioned the effective management, relevance and benefits of these large-scale online replication investigations.

Unfortunately, big team science as it is currently constituted implicitly imposes these costs and more work on African research labs when they have little or no funding available and limited work time to spare. As individual researchers, we can do little about funding and providing facilities except making aware of the dire conditions we face on the ground. However, understanding these realities helps understand better how to collaborate with African researchers. Big team scientists from the Global North who work with African collaborators should communicate well-specified and feasible tasks and contributions while being acutely aware of and considering the resources available to African labs and researchers.

Conclusion: what actions and changes are needed for big team science in Africa?

The ManyLabs Africa initiative provides an example of how to engage Africans on their own terms while enhancing credibility, improving participation and building research capacity on the continent. Our experience revealed the need for all stakeholders to make efforts to integrate and foster big team science (replication) studies. Researchers should familiarize themselves with big team science to build their capacity and network, access freely available tools and expertise, and advance their theories and impact globally. Beyond data collection that is typical of African labs’ contribution, collaborators should support African collaborators to contribute to the development of measures, the adaptation and translation of materials, the preparation applications to ethical review boards, and the leadership of big team science collaborations.

As the research methods and processes continue to evolve to enhance credibility, African professors should review research methods curricula to include courses and subjects on open science practice and credibility-enhancing tools to nurture African scholars for the future. Because big team science studies are resource-intensive, it is crucial for scientific societies, publishers, and funders to review their policy and legal frameworks to make big team science-enabling structural adjustments for required support and credits to Africans involved in big team science. If at least some of these changes are made, we can continue to equip African researchers with resources and skills to produce quality research for local development and improve global participation.

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