ResearchRound

Habeeb Kolade is a product designer and founder of ResearchRound. Since experiencing an underwhelming education in the university in Nigeria, he became dedicated to improving access to quality education in Africa. With Africa experiencing some of the toughest challenges in the world, our poor research output continues to cement our poor fate. He hopes to bridge this through ResearchRound. Habeeb has been the Growth Manager of edtech company, Studylab360, expanding the company's learning analytics products to local secondary schools across Nigeria and teaching educators new digital tools to improve the quality of education delivered in their classrooms. He was the Global Director of Programmes for OneAfricanChild for Creative Learning where he oversaw teams across four African countries in developing effective programs on Education for Sustainable Development with over 10,000 beneficiaries. Habeeb is an alumnus of the Centre for Entrepreneurial Leadership, African Leadership Academy, South Africa. 

Africa produces less than 1% of global research output, yet faces some of the toughest development challenges, most of which can only be tackled through robust, efficient, and innovative research. Yet, millions of African undergraduate and post-graduate students graduate yearly with little or no quality research work, wasting millions of hours on research projects that are poorly done and never published. Insufficient research in Africa translates into data gaps, which are major constraints to the creation and implementation of health, economic or development programs. In the absence of vigorous and high quality research, diseases continue to resurface in Africa, standard of living depreciates, death rates multiply and the African continent will remain under-developed and left behind.

ResearchRound is a platform that publishes works of research by Africans and through its community supports new and established African researchers with the right awareness, training, collaboration and resources to do great research.

A limited supply of professional local researchers exists in Africa, contributing to the less than 2 percent contribution to global research. Africa has only 198 researchers per million people compared to 4,500 per million in the UK and the US or global average of 1,150. As research is a cumulative process whereby authors build on each other’s work, a “critical mass” of scholars is needed for rapid scientific progress to occur. An average 500,000 Nigerians do a research project every year, however majority of these are unpublished and are usually poorly done. This waste, in terms of knowledge, funding and work hours are the result of the gap that exists. Many researchers tend to work in relative isolation. When we ran a survey among researchers across Africa, one of the primary reasons for the gap was many local researchers lack access to high-quality research training and mentoring to attempt cutting-edge scientific research. This shortfall makes development immensely difficult for Africa. Imagine the United States without the consistent contributions of MIT, Stanford, Yale and Harvard etc.

Thus our problem statement is how can we improve the capacity of researchers to do quality research in Africa?

When we completed our research into things that inhibited quality research output in Africa, the most consistent responses were surprisingly also the simplest to solve, of course with the will to do it. We created a publishing platform and a community. Our first step was to create a community to bring interested students and researchers together. Students who are interested in research apply online to join the community. Our communities run offline and online. Chapter leads in different universities handle local programs. Students can join local programmes or start one where one does not exist by applying to start a chapter.

Through our platform, we take a five step approach to solving basic problems that exist especially in capacity development and publishing. We enlighten students on campus on reasons to do quality research, train students in research skills and when they finally have research work to publish, our team of editors help them in the publication process. Through the community, researchers meet one another and can collaborate where necessary. We also intend to build our numbers to the point we can leverage it to get access to key resources like discounted access to journals, free access to research tools etc. 

Our goal is to work with young students who will do research as part of their academic experience. Over 2 million students are present at each time across Nigerian universities (our local community is Nigeria even though we hope to reach the rest of Africa too). Thus, students between 16 and 45, who are enrolled in a university whether as post graduates or undergraduates. At least 500,000 of them do actual research each year. Our engagements with them are enlightenment during faculty activities, about the potential impact they can make with doing quality research, providing capacity development through training and mentoring, and publishing their works on our platform. Our current work improves their capacity and interest in doing quality research. These groups of students, with consistent engagement with our community become better prepared to be professional researchers, which they would not have been without our commitment.

These researchers then raise the quality and quantity of research done and shared in Africa. They are also equipped to work with private and public companies in the areas of research and development, an area which is outrageously lacking in Nigeria. 

Our work elevates opportunities to people left behind in the education sector, but is also foundational in several other areas like health, development, technology etc. Research in academic institutions is fundamental to the development of any society, thus to Africa’s growth. Africa is left behind in terms of development, has huge data and research gaps and is ridden with millions of poorly trained researchers who may change this. Our simple scalable approach will improve the capacity of researchers to produce large volumes of data, solutions and questions required for the private and public sector in Africa to drive development.

In 2019, as part of my commitment to improve access to quality education in Africa, I was working on a new approach to providing mass education. My partner, Olamide Adedeji, who I recruited because of my poor academic research background, was then a graduate of MIT and enrolled into Stanford. As a research requirement, I had to do some literature review and the best place to check was the internet. I searched frantically for a few hundred hours but all that came to nothing. As much as there were education faculties in different universities across Nigeria, with all members producing at least one research work every four years, few of them made it online. Most were inaccessible and poorly done.

My paper was to serve as the foundation of a new company I wanted to start. I imagined several other companies and agencies would benefit from access to key research findings that would guide their approach to implementing solutions that work across the country. I was further shocked when I saw the statistical deficiency of research in Africa. Thus, I took the responsibility to enable more quality research output by Africans, required to ensure the development of the continent. 

My interest in improving access to quality education started in the university where I had a disappointing tertiary education. As a mechanical engineering student, the classes were largely underwhelming and attempts to do innovative work were delimited by the faculty lecturers. During high school, I had high hopes on how I would build important organizations to solve Africa’s problems, and getting admitted to the university was going to help. However, it did not. But rather than simply work hard and travel out of the country, I took responsibility in trying to fix the problem. It did not take long to recognize that education was not only dysfunctional across the universities but across the entire system. In this case, the poor education system, especially in the areas of research, was disabling academic contributions to the development of the continent. I quit my highly rewarding digital marketing job after school, for a much less financially rewarding work closer in the education sector, in order to fully understand what was wrong and what structures ensured it did not improve. ResearchRound is my approach to putting down the monster- Africa’s dysfunctional educational system and fixing informational and innovative gaps required to develop the continent. 

I joined the Centre of Entrepreneurial Leadership, African Leadership Academy, South Africa in 2016, where I underwent training on how to approach and lead change in Africa. This training was specific to educators. In 2018, I was part of a 9-month accelerator programme by the GIZ (German Development Agency) where we were trained on how to build sustainable and scalable African companies. These training solidified my approach to building and leading local solutions for local problems, and seeking simple solutions that work, ahead of complex ones. Before then, I was a cofounder in my first education technology company, Geniuses, which was accepted into the Tim Draper funded SpeedUp Africa. However, after two years, the company folded up as we came to closer realization of the gap that existed in the Nigerian education sector. This made me take a job with another edtech company, Studylab360 as Head of Growth, so I could work further closely with the sector, while having the stability to answer all the questions I had about the sector. I have been here for 2 years. I was also Head of Programmes for nonprofit, OneAfricanChild Foundation for Creative Learning for two years designing programmes around Education for Sustainable Development that addressed over 10,000 beneficiaries across four African countries. My work experience has fully been in the education sector, providing me with the experience, connections and clarity to tackle the problems here. I also have a team made up of professional researchers, who understand the problem first hand. 

Before creating ResearchRound, we had set up the Ibadan Review, a publication for research articles by Africans. While we had the same team as we do now and were trying to solve the same problem, we hit a rough patch not too long after launching. We needed people to share their research works with us, but despite continuous advertising and reaching out to schools, we did not quite get any submissions. We eventually got our first two submissions. We used this opportunity to observe why we had been failing. Even though we had clear submission guidelines, editors were having to handhold the authors of the submissions on how to present their work. Then it hit us that perhaps people were not equipped to do good research. Rather than jump on this assumption, we did a little survey and then a major one. The most consistent response was the lack of skills to do good research or to report it. We changed our strategy, rebranded to ResearchRound and relaunched. Within a few weeks, we have reached over a 100 subscription to our community (limited due to the pandemic), and journals reaching out to work with us. Our growth was over 500%.

In 2016, I was posted to a village for my national service. I joined the Education Development Community Development Service. The convention was to have meetings weekly with only one during the whole year. It was a waste of our time when we could be supporting the community’s schools. After being elected president, I spoke to about 100 fellow graduates on why we should take the chance to contribute immensely to the community as our efforts might be the leg-up some of the kids in the village schools needed. Instead of sitting around, we should teach Introduction to Computer to these students, most of whom had never seen a computer. While I met initial pushback, I enquired what prevented them from doing this. I found several of them needed assistance to take these classes. So I led a small team to develop a simple to understand curriculum, and trained the entire team. We ended up teaching over 5,000 students across 7 schools. At the end of the programme, we raised funds and donated a set of computers to one of the schools. During this process, I employed my communication, empathy, problem solving, team management, project management and fundraising skills.

As highlighted above, we first started our as Ibadan Review before having a major pivot within the organization leading to ResearchRound. Same team, same goal, different approach, different name.

We like to think that innovation for us are simple solutions that make huge differences. There are very few trained researchers which results in low research output, as also supported by our survey. The answer is simple, train more researchers. Our first step is taking responsibility and taking initiative. Our second step is simplicity. In order for us to reach a large number of people, we have made our process simple so people who work with us can easily replicate it in their communities. Our third step is strategic, this is aligning with people who will benefit from our progress but are currently shortchanged. Rather than work with institutions which in Africa are often dysfunctional, we are working directly with students/researchers whose interests are actually the most important but currently unsatisfied. These groups of people are usually motivated to act as your success guarantees their success. We are thus building a reliable platform that helps us deal directly with researchers cutting out the institutions that have often limited their progress. 

When we have trained these researcher, we provide a platform that enables companies, individuals, private initiatives and public agencies hire researchers in simple steps. This currently does not exist and will fill financing gaps that exist in the research community. Our platform will enable people hire or collaborate with sector specific researchers who are required to fill research needs required for impactful work. This innovation will raise the level of collaboration and funding that is almost non-existent in the system.

We did an initial pilot of our idea in January 2020 under the name, The Ibadan Review. Gauging the reaction of our target audience, we launched a survey to understand what hinders them from doing good research and publishing them. The most consistent response from the lack of capacity to do research, ahead of other problems like information, funding etc. Most people felt they were likely to do better research if they were trained and mentored properly before having to embark on that journey. This is why capacity development and community building (to provide support and collaboration) are at the heart of our work. The image below describes our Theory of Change which combines several strategies and shows the direct link between our activities and the ultimate outcome we are targeting. 

If image does not appear, please use this link https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gRF-RcU0cgYt3hYwsBPy2lJzTQDql1h4/view?usp=sharing 

We currently have over 200 people we serve. This number is limited because our relaunch happened during the pandemic while schools were shut. As schools resume and students are more interested in school work, we will deploy our local teams to get more people to join the community and benefit from our work. Our goal is to reach 5,000 members before the year runs out. In 5 years, our lower target will be to reach 500,000 members. However, if we get generous funding, we will serve more than a million people. We would also build a database that profiles people in our community and their areas of research to enable us to attain more collaboration. We are currently present in 5 universities in Nigeria. At the end of the year, we hope this can reach 20 universities. At the end of 5 years, we hope to have built the capacity to reach 200 universities, training an approximate minimum of 1000 students per school. 

There is something called the triple helix. It requires the government, industry and academia to work together to enable innovation and development in a society. Advanced countries usually have the contribution of these three sectors to develop strong socioeconomic systems. Africa is deficient in all three areas. However, industries are beginning to pick up again. There are now more African companies recognized globally. These have raised the wave of Africans interested in building sustainable organizations and companies that create impact. These waves of daring entrepreneurs however continue to face huge obstacles, among which is data and their understanding of how African communities currently work. In addition to these, there are no new ideas that stem from rigorous research that only researchers in academia are able to do. Our success would translate directly into development for Africans who are currently left behind. Supporting academia with training and resources to rise to the challenge of providing scientific backings for ideas, as well as studies that reveal more about African communities will make development in Africa faster and sustained. Rigorous work like ethnographic expeditions, empirical research of ideas, products and approaches, which entrepreneurs and social leaders may be unable to undertake will be provided by our trained researchers. Our work will lead to more independent research and development groups across the continent which has the ability to ensure rapid growth while developing the critical mass for research required to lead to breakthroughs. We are excited about this future, we hope you are too. 

Financial: This is the biggest barrier we could have. Being able to raise the right funding to support our local programs work will play a large role in our success. We need money to train people. We need lots of money to train lots of people. 

Institutions: While we are dealing directly with researchers, we do have to deal with the incumbents who are not doing well to prepare their researchers. We must be able overcome any challenge they might throw our away in a bid to protect their dignities.

Personnel: Our current team has several volunteers who believe in our work. However, we understand that despite this passion, they may have new responsibilities in the coming years. Our ability to attract, reward and retain the right hands is critical to our success.

Technical Challenges: As our community continues to grow, we will need to raise our technical capabilities to manage the numbers and as well, build tools that support the members of this community in their work.

Financial Barriers: Our primary approach was to build a distributed financing model, where each chapter tries to raise funding for their needs while keeping activities cost minimal. Funding is currently provided by the founder. Another way to approach this is through partnerships. These partners will support our work thus reducing the need to pay for them. Finally, we will actually seek to raise funding over the next one year, so we can be more in control of our work. Money raised will go into producing materials for awareness, paying for digital tools, running training programs and events. Etc. as well as remunerating our staff. In addition to these are monies generated from our paid service. This will provide us some needed support. 

Personnel: Good funding will enable us to keep people with us longer. Our ability to provide reasonable compensation for key members raises our ability to keep them. For those not directly paid, we hope to build a rewarding capacity development process that makes the experience valuable, thus attractive to new members.

Institutions: Work directly with researchers, and build strong partnerships with private partners and nonprofit who have built enough social capital we can leverage on. 

Technical Challenges: We hope to build our own software in-house to manage financial costs associated with running communities on third party platforms.

None yet. But we are in talks with Nigeria Economic Summit Group, an organization that provides innovation advisory to university fund commission, TETFUND and the Nigerian University Commission. This organization is heavily invested in the triple helix model of innovation. Our work with them will be to enlighten, support and train young researchers across different universities in the country.

We will also be collaborating with the World Conference Research Integrity in developing research guidelines for our community. 

While we are yet to solidify our business model, this is how we have been thinking about it.

1. Paid Training: While we will do lots of free training and awareness programs, certain trainings will come at a price. This will form a key part of our revenue. We will also train people in the Research and Development sections of private companies as well.

2. Talent Supply and Management: With our database of researchers, we will supply sector specific researchers to private and public companies and agencies for specific periods and charge 20% commission for it. We would also provide research  management services where we manage teams of researchers on behalf of companies.  

2.  Consultancy: We will help manage corporate, public and private investment and collaborations in research in African regions. As we grow, we expect more organizations and companies to be interested in funding research initiatives. In this situation where they are less likely to trust the current institutions, we provide a credible platform to directly invest in researchers and research across the continent. 

 3. Data Management: Through publication of research works and data, on the long term, we will build tools to make it easy for people to use and investigate these data for their work. 

We intend to raise capital through grants and donations at the initial stage. Over time, we will be able to provide the services listed in the previous section, which will provide us a revenue stream. Our model is to operate an independent but connected social and business services. Our social service will continue to support the capacity development of researchers across universities, while our business service would aim to provide services that being able to build our community provide us. These include managing engagement contracts between researchers and companies, selling training, and consulting and managing investments in research.

No funding yet.

We hope to raise initial funding grants of 20,000 dollars within one year, but expect to increase this to over 100,000 dollars to enable us to manage the scale we expect. 

• Logistics- $3,000 

• Programs - $5,000 

• Technology - $3,000 

• Advertising & Marketing  - $3,000

• Salaries - $5,000

The Elevate Prize’s prize money would accelerate our impact. With the prize money, we will be able to support campus programmes and reach out training milestones faster. This can shorten the length of our journey by ensuring we can build the capacity of researchers in a shorter period than we expect. With 250,000 dollars, we guarantee that we can train 100,000 new researchers across Africa who are equipped with adequate research skills whether for academic use or corporate use. Our approach is to provide a scalable digital platform and combine it with offline knowledge transfer overseen by campus leads, due to internet access limitations here. We will be able to provide about 3 physical research-hubs, where researchers can access resources (especially digital) absent in the universities. About $20,000 will help us build the hiring and collaboration platform that will enable researchers get more work opportunities. 

The prize’s connection with MIT provides us with the linkage to one of the world’s most prestigious research institutions- a partnership that would enable us gain more credibility and design better interventions for the research community in Nigeria and the rest of the continent. Our connection with MIT can also help us in building the capacity of our own team in delivering on our promise. This joint collaboration, combining MIT's years of research and development experience in building the best researchers, with our determination to solve research gaps in Africa, is a treasure we would behold if our application is successful. It would be legendary!

MIT MIT is what any world class research institution will want to look like. We aspire to build a research community that aspires to such excellence as MIT. Working under the guidance of interested contributors at MIT will provide us an incredible leverage to deliver value for the people in our community.

Springer Nature Research As a research publication, Springer understands the process of getting research done appropriately. We would like that Springer works with us to help set editorial standards for our local publications as well as support our education of researchers to publish works published by Springer’s journals.

Student Organizations and Research groups in Nigeria
This accelerates our access to students and acceptance as well. Working with our students’ organizations will build our community faster.