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Estimating Kenya's total expenditures on advancing science and technology

We now wish to estimate the total amounts of money spent in Kenya on the pursuit of science and technology, and to discern any change in these amounts during the course of Structural Adjustment.

Besides the public institution (KIRDI), which we have already described there are six other government R&D organizations for which statistical summaries are available. Published in various public documents are the figures appearing in Table 4.15, in the three categories Recurrent Expenditure, Development Expenditure and foreign contributions ('Foreign Aid'). The figures in the last category, like those in the proceeding two, are of expenditures: funds appropriated by foreign donors are substantially larger, but many have not yet been utilized.

With the data available in Tables 4.12, and 4.15 we can begin to accumulate estimates of the total amount expended in Kenya on R&D. Expenditures by government institutions are summarized in Table 4.16, where the figures are denominated in Kenyan shillings at current prices.

Table 4.15 Kenya: budgets of other public R&D institutions, 1986/7-1990/1 (millions of KSh at current prices)

Sources:
1986/7 to 1989/90: Republic of Kenya, The Appropriation Accounts, Other Public Accounts and the Account of the Funds: Nairobi, Office of the Auditor General, various issues
1990/91: Republic of Kenya, 1990. Programme Review and Forward Budget, 1990/91-1992/93. Nairobi Office of the Vice President and Ministry of Finance

Next we add in R&D expenditures by non-governmental organizations. The one set of figures we have collected, for the Coffee Research Foundation, are reported in Table 4.11; they add roughly 15 per cent to the total of government expenditure. For the other para-statal firms we have no evidence, although their number is substantial, as are their expenditures on science and technology. Many of them - namely the Tea Research Foundation, the Kenya Seed Company, the National Irrigation Board, the Lake Basin and the Kerio Valley Development Authorities, the High Level Research Station and the National Horticultural Station (both at Thika), the Kenya Industrial Training Institute, Kenya Industrial Estates, and the Industrial and Commercial Development Corporation - devote their efforts almost entirely to advancing science and technology. Others, existing within government ministries - the Kenya Bureau of Standards, the Forestry Inspectorate in the Ministry of Labour, a group in the Ministry of Industry, the Kenya Industrial Property Office, and the Kenya-Railway Workshops - are also engaged. Although their expenditures, individually, are considerably less than those of the Coffee Research Foundation, collectively they amount to rather more. If we augment the total figures for governmental R&D institutions (from Table 4.16) by 40 per cent (15 per cent for the Coffee Research Foundation plus 25 per cent for the other para-statal organizations) we can obtain an estimate of the total R&D expenditures of the public sector: these appear in the third row of Table 4.17. In the fourth row are estimates of the expenditures on the pursuit of science and technology by the universities: these are drawn primarily from the figures on the budgets of Faculties of Engineering and Science of the University of Nairobi in Table 4.14 (converted from K£ to KSh), with added allowance for the greater expenditures in agriculture and medicine, and the lesser expenditure of scientific and technical faculties in other universities. The fifth row of the table aggregates all public sector expenditure.

Table 4.16 Kenya: budgets of all public R&D institutions 1986/7-1990/1 (millions of KSh at current prices)

Sources:
Table 4.12 (KIRDI) and Table 4.15 (Other Public Institutions)
Notes:
^a For key, see Table 4.15
^b R&D expenditures of KARI in the 11 years 1972/3-1982/3 appear in Simon and Gitu, 1989 (Table 4, p. 15); in millions K£ they are 1.40, 2.13, 2.40, 2.93, 3.67, 5.73, 6.37, 7.01, 8.95 and 9.40 respectively. As a percentage of GDP originating in agriculture expenditures rise from 0.60% in 1972/73 to 1.03% in 1982/3. In those years personal costs represented half to two-thirds of total recurrent expenditures

There are three further rows in Table 4.17, whose purpose is to put public expenditures on advancing science and technology in perspective. The first of these three gives the percentages of total public sector expenditure devoted to advancing science and technology. (The figures on total government expenditures come from Table 4.8, columns 2 and 4.) The second gives those devoted to reporting foreign contributions to the public R&D institutes, in absolute amounts, and the final row gives those to expressing foreign contributions as a fraction of total expenditures on advancing science and technology.

At this point, we might say a word about the source of statistics on foreign contributions to the pursuit of science and technology. For Ghana, there were no compilations available, but for Kenya and Tanzania there are. In both these countries, UNDP collects statistics on the volume of foreign aid, which it has begun to publish in reports entitled Development Cooperation: Kenya and Development Cooperation: Tanzania. It is from the former of these that we have abstracted the figures in Table 4.18 in this chapter. Notice how rapidly foreign donations rose! The fall since 1990 has been almost equally rapid, as foreign donors have curtailed contributions following the breakdown of negotiations with Kenya in Paris in 1991 (UNDP, 1993: 49).

To the expenditures of the public sector on advancing science and technology we must finally add estimates of concomitant expenditures by the private sector. These have been determined accurately for one year, 1985/6, by B.F. Makau (1988), who compiled a list of 32 private firms with research establishments, employing 90 scientists full-time, 9.1 per cent of the country's total of 986 engaged full-time in R&D. These private firms spent KSh 47,560,000 in that year, 9.5 per cent of the total of about KSh 500 million estimated by Makau as the total for Kenya as a whole.

Assuming that the ratio of private to public sector expenditures has remained the same throughout the period since 1985/6, we can augment the figures in Table 4.17, row 4 by 9.5: 90.5, yielding the totals for the entire country in Table 4.18, row 2. Compared to Kenya's GDP (row 4) these represent between 0.5 and 1 per cent over the years, comparing favourably with UNESCO's estimates for all of Africa of 0.34 per cent in 1970 and 0.36 per cent in 1980 (UNESCO, 1990). Thanks to foreign contributions, the percentages for years after 1988 were substantially higher, reaching a peak of 1.3 per cent in 1990/1 (see Table 4.19).

Table 4.17 Kenya: estimate of total expenditures by the public sector on the pursuit of science and technology, 1986/7-1990/1 (millions of KSh, excepting rows 6 and 8)

Sources:
Row 1: the sum of the final row in Table 4.12 (total expenditures of KIRDI) and the final column in Table 4.15 (total expenditures of other public R&D institutes), less foreign aid
Row 2: see text
Row 3: the sum of rows 1 and 2
Row 4: Recurrent and development expenditures of all universities (Table 4.13, rows 2 and 4) multiplied by 0.10, the fraction of university expenditures devoted to science and technology (1987/8 estimated as 10%; 1988/9 as 9.5%; 1989/90 as 11.6%, the last two percentages calculated from figures in Tables 4.13 and 4.14)
Row 5: the sum of rows 3 and 4
Row 6: Total government expenditures for the earlier of the two (calendar) years are the sum of government current expenditure and capital payments (Table 4.8, columns 2 and 4)
Row 7: 1986/7 and 1987/8; see Tables 4.12 and 4.15 1988/9-1990/1; see Table 4.18; conversion from US dollars to KSh at the exchange rates in Table 4.1
Row 8: row 7 divided by row 5

Table 4.18 Kenya: estimate of total expenditures on the pursuit of science & technology and their percentages of GDP, 1986/7-1990/1 (billions KSh, excepting rows 5 and 8)

Sources:
Row 1: Table 4.17, row 5
Row 2: see text
Row 3: the sum of rows 1 and 2
Row 4: Table 4.1, column 1 (the previous calendar year figures; e.g. GDP in 1988 for 1988/9's expenditures
Row 5: row 3 divided by row 4
Row 6: Table 4.17, row 7
Row 7: row 3 plus row 6
Row 8: row 7 divided by row 4

Table 4.19 Kenya: foreign donations aiding the pursuit of science & technology, 1988-1992 (millions current US dollars)

Source:
UNDP, 1993, Table All, pp. 62-5

5 Tanzania

Introduction
Macro-economic trends in the Tanzanian economy
The structural adjustment programmes
R&D institutions
Education in science and technology
Estimates of the resources devoted to the pursuit of science and technology

Introduction

When it attained its independence in 1961, Tanzania was one of the poorest countries in the developing world, dependent almost entirely on agriculture for its national income. For the first several years of its independent existence, Tanzania lacked any overall direction; but, in 1967, it chose to establish a socialist society. The programme annunciated in the Arusha Declaration decreed that the direction of the economy should be under public control. Agriculture was to be run on a communal basis, but industry, trade and commerce were to be the province of state activities. Some of these activities were to be undertaken within the existing ministries; others were to be the responsibility of new, para-statal bodies, existing outside the narrow confines of government but subject to its overall direction.

During the next decade in Tanzania substantial progress was made in the social sector, in such fields as education, health and infrastructure. Industry advanced relatively rapidly, stimulated by public investment, particularly in the new para-statal firms. But the modest advances were brought nearly to a halt by the dissolution of the East African Community in 1977 and the war in Uganda in 1978-1979: the economy was unable to absorb these adverse forces. Perhaps most damaging was the fall in agricultural output, particularly output destined for exports, which reduced Tanzania's earnings of foreign exchange and resulted in a substantial reduction in imports of capital goods, spares and raw materials. Government revenues, equally dependent upon the maintenance of agricultural output, fell so that the economy was constrained both in the amounts of foreign exchange it could allocate to imports and the amounts of domestic resources it could allocate to maintenance and expansion. Immediate efforts to replenish agricultural exports, aided in 1981 by a loan from the World Bank in the amount of US$50 million, failed to reverse the unfavourable trend. Several years of further deterioration led the country, finally, to embark upon a profound adjustment of its structure, designed at first by the Tanzanian government, but augmented by the World Bank in the course of negotiating its two subsequent loans. These negotiations took place over a few years, and resulted in an allotment of US$96.2 million by the World Bank in 1987 for rehabilitation of the entire economy, and of US$135 million in 1989 for the privatization of industry and the liberalization of trade. These programmes are still in force; compliance has been both difficult and slow. (For extended studies of recent changes in the Tanzanian economy see Ndulu, 1988; Berg-Schlösser and Siegler, 1990.)

In this chapter, we shall follow the same order that we have in the preceding two on Ghana and Kenya: first we shall examine the statistics on the entire Tanzanian economy, concentrating on total output and its division among the different sectors, upon government expenditures, upon borrowings by Tanzanians and the annual service of those borrowings, upon imports and exports, and upon the Structural Adjustment Programmes. After examining the Tanzanian economy in its totality, we shall shift our focus to that of individual R&D institutions. Those institutions engaged in agricultural R&D will be the first to be surveyed, followed by those working in industry, and by those engaged in developing appropriate technologies. Next, we will examine those activities in pursuit of science and technology carried out within colleges and universities, both their teaching and their own R&D. Finally, we shall attempt to aggregate statistics on all expenditures on science and technology in Tanzania, selecting first those that are under government aegis, and subsequently adding foreign donations. At the very end of the chapter, there will be a brief summary.

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