ABSTRACT
Africa is tremendously rich in resources—in natural resources, in minerals, in water, and in youth. The economic and development crisis that gripped Africa during the whole of the 1980s, but which has been discernible since the beginning of the 1970s—barely a decade after the attainment of political independence in most of the continent—has elicited a strong movement toward regional economic and development integration. The roots of a regional approach to a science-led development in Africa were laid down by the then metropolitan powers less than a decade before political independence. The colonial impetus for regional science policy and implementation did not long survive the demise of the colonial era. The scientific community in Africa—small as it is and unsure of itself as it has grown to be over the years—has more responsibility for the future of Africa than any other such community in recent history here or anywhere else.
