Canada’s much-vaunted engagement with Africa is a partnership in name only, a senior Ghanaian jurist has charged, delivering a blistering legal indictment of North-South research relations that strips away decades of diplomatic niceties to expose a relationship of donor and beneficiary.
Justice Dennis Dominic Adjei of Ghana’s Supreme Court and the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights newly conferred with a Professorship by the City Institute of Higher Learning told the 3rd Conference on Economic Growth in Atlantic Canada that the research relationship does not need more money. It needs better instruments.
“The problem is that a beneficiary has no standing. A partner does have good standing,” Justice Adjei declared, opening a legal assault that reframed the equity debate from moral appeal to enforceable right. “A gift creates no enforceable rights, privileges, nor obligations in the recipient. You cannot sue on a gift.”
THE CHARITY TRAP
Drawing on his courtroom experience, the Justice argued that in law, the first question is never what a party deserves but whether they have standing. “A person with a strong case and no standing goes home. A person with a weak case and good standing gets a judgment.”
He applied this directly to the Canada-Africa research dynamic, asserting that a contract “gives both parties a claim, a forum, and a remedy. It converts goodwill into something that survives a change of government, a change of minister, or a change of mood.”
His thesis was delivered with clinical precision: “The research relationship between Canada and Africa does not need more money. It needs better instruments.”
A STRATEGY WITHOUT INSTRUMENTS
Justice Adjei acknowledged that both sides have moved. The African Union Commission published its STISA-2034 strategy in 2025, moving to implementation in Addis Ababa in February 2026. Canada launched its first global Africa Strategy in March 2025. But the jurist identified a critical void.
“There is no research partnership architecture. No instrument. No standing mechanism through which a Canadian university and a Ghanaian or Kenyan or Senegalese university contract with one another as equals.”
His conclusion was withering: “Canada has a strategy without instruments. Africa has instruments without capital.”
FIVE FAULT LINES
The Justice identified five areas where asymmetry is most acute, drawing on hard evidence to substantiate his claims:
Funding Architecture: International research grants are executed in the funder’s jurisdiction and currency. African institutions participate as sub-grantees a status that settles “who sets the research question, who holds the budget, and whose signature appears on the final report.”
Citing a systematic review in BMJ Global Health of 1,182 infectious disease papers on Africa between 1980 and 2016, he noted that while over 90 per cent had an Africa-based author, only 49.8 per cent had an African first author and just 41.3 per cent an African last author. Senior authorship sat predominantly in the US, UK, France, Belgium and Germany.
“Authorship is the currency in which academic careers are paid,” he warned. “A young researcher in Accra who does the fieldwork and appears fourth on the paper has not been mildly slighted. She has been denied the credential that would have let her lead the next study.” The consequence, he argued, has been the systematic “suppression of the formation of a research leadership class on an entire continent,” followed by citing that absence as justification for external leadership.
Data: Data generated on African populations frequently rests on servers outside African jurisdiction, governed by foreign law, and is reused without renewed consent or attribution. He noted the African Union’s Malabo Convention entered into force in June 2023, making it “the only binding regional treaty on data protection outside Europe.” The question for Canadian institutions, he said, is not whether African data law exists it does “but whether your partnership agreements acknowledge it, and whether anyone in your research office has read it.”
Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources: In his most pointed criticism, Justice Adjei noted that Ghana has been a Party to the Nagoya Protocol since November 2019, while Canada has not ratified. The Canadian government’s own environmental department states the Protocol “is not legally binding on Canada.”
Capacity Building: The fifth fault line, he said, “hides inside good intentions.” He posed a single question to distinguish partnership from extraction: “When the grant ends, what remains inside the African institution?” If the answer is a completed dataset in a foreign archive and a line in an annual report, “something else occurred.”
“Capacity building that builds no capacity is extraction with better manners, and the sector has grown fluent at describing the second thing in the language of the first.”
THE REMEDY EXISTS
Justice Adjei acknowledged that normative frameworks the TRUST Code, the Cape Town Statement on fairness in research are “clear” and “correct.” But they lack a remedy.
“A norm becomes law when three things attach to it: a party with standing to invoke it, a forum in which to do so, and a consequence that follows from breach,” he explained. “Take away any one of the three and what remains is an exhortation.”
“No African university has ever recovered anything by pleading a declaration of research integrity, and none ever will, because there is nowhere to plead it and nothing to recover.”
But the Justice offered a surprising conclusion: the remedies already exist, enforceable through data protection statutes, access and benefit-sharing regimes, and the ordinary law of contract. Every asymmetry identified, he argued, “is capable of being cured by a clause.”
He listed the elements: governing law; budget authority; pre-agreed authorship protocols; data custody with repatriation obligations; IP allocation; publication rights; and specification of what capacity remains at close-out.
“None of this is exotic drafting. Any competent commercial lawyer in Halifax or Accra could produce it in an afternoon. The failure here is not a failure of legal capacity. It is a failure to treat the relationship as one that a lawyer should look at in the first place.”
A DOUBLE STANDARD EXPOSED
Justice Adjei exposed a fundamental inconsistency in how African institutions are assessed. “When we say an African university cannot hold a budget, we are usually not making a statement about that university. We are making a statement about the effort we are prepared to spend on the drafting.”
He added: “The same institutions deemed insufficiently accountable to hold a grant are frequently deemed sufficiently accountable to hold the data, obtain the consents, and carry the ethical liability for the fieldwork. Those two positions cannot both be right.”
On the objection that equitable contracts would slow processes, he was unflinching: “Contracts take longer to write than memoranda of understanding. We would simply observe that the sector has been moving quickly for sixty years, and we invite you to examine what the speed has purchased.”
Justice Adjei addressed three constituencies:
To Governments: Canada should complete its Africa Strategy with a research and innovation pillar carrying its own instrument and reporting line, and resolve its position on the Nagoya Protocol. African states must accelerate ratification of the AfCFTA intellectual property protocol and domesticate the Malabo Convention. “A harmonised legal position is the single most valuable thing African governments can bring to this table, and it costs no money at all.”
To Universities: Adopt a standard-form equitable partnership agreement as institutional policy, reversing the burden so departing from it requires justification. Mandate authorship protocols before data collection. Build consortia institution-to-institution with rotating secretariats.
To Funders: Permit direct-award eligibility for African institutions as prime recipients rather than only as sub-grantees. “Of everything we have said this morning, this one reform would change the most.” Fund indirect and overhead costs at African institutions at the same rate as at home. Build on the Science Granting Councils Initiative in sub-Saharan Africa, which “funds the machinery by which Africans decide what African research should be about.”
WHY MONCTON
The Justice explained his choice of venue. Atlantic Canada’s stated challenges demographic renewal, research intensity, retaining skilled graduates could be answered by durable African partnerships. The region’s “modest size” is, he argued, “actually the correct size for reciprocity.”
“Partners treated as principals bring their best questions and their best people, and they come back. Partners treated as subcontractors bring compliance, and they leave when someone offers better terms. Somebody will offer better terms.”
THE MISSING CLAUSE
Justice Adjei concluded with a challenge to the conference’s themes of connection, collaboration and growth.
“We said at the outset that standing is not conferred by generosity. It is constituted by instrument. The declarations are written. The evidence is gathered. The conventions are in force. What is missing is the clause.”
“Canada and Africa have intended goodwill toward one another for seventy years. It is time we write it down as partners.”
