Tousignant writes that while research is needed to advance careers and supervise students, it is not materially supported by the institutions and therefore university toxicologists rely on international support and various consultancy work to help to enable research work to continue. This echoes what my own observations of the Nairobi university structures are. (“The main duties of the small number of toxicologists employed by the university have been to train pharmacy students and to take up additional functions (in education planning, a hospital pharmacy, or the drug control lab, for example). From at least the 1980s, their regular budget could not support research, while their proposal for a national poison control center was put on ice for the next two decades. Research -- needed to advance careers and supervise students (the pharmacy degree in Senegal includes a thesis requirement) -- came to depend on brief, uncertain sources of support such as international projects, “favors” from sympathetic collaborators, and paid analytical contracts (with the exception, again, of Project Locustox).” into chapter)
“The trajectory of toxicology and that of other sciences in Africa follow a broadly shared sequence: from a brief period of growing -- but largely promissory -- investment in science as an African(ized), national, collective, and development-oriented enterprise (circa 1940s-1970s), followed by a generalized drop in public (both national and international) funding for science in Africa from the 1980s, leading to the stagnation of scientific activity and/or to new “entrepreneurial” strategies for capturing foreign, non-governmental, or private resources.” (intro chapter)