Core Programmes

As one of the research programme innovations introduced by CODESRIA within the Council’s Strategic Plan 2002 – 2006, the CRNs are designed to foster and enhance comparative research in Africa at the national, sub-regional and continental levels around a specific theme. The decision to introduce the CRN as a programme vehicle was informed by the huge toll on the capacity for comparative research exacted by the prolonged crises in the African higher education system. In contributing to the revival and sustenance of comparative thinking, it was the hope of the Council to strengthen the African presence in the comparative studies literature on the African experience. To this end, resources were set aside for the establishment of an annual average of four CRNs. Every year since the introduction of the programme framework, CODESRIA issues calls inviting researchers to send in proposals within the parameters of the broad intellectual agenda being pursued by the Council. The proposals are required to include the names of the coordinator(s) and members of the network, the comparative questions which they seek to explore, and the time frame within which they hope to realise their objectives. In general, coordinators of proposals accepted by the Council are encouraged to observe an 18-month time frame for the initiation and completion of their work for submission for consideration for possible publication within the CODESRIA Book Series. 

Since the launching of the programme in 2002 to 2006, a total of 21 CRNs were established by CODESRIA with participants from 27 countries spread across all of the five sub-regions of the African continent. The 21 CRNs have involved the mobilization of some 110 scholars comprising coordinators, members and resource persons. A significant proportion of the researchers mobilized are young scholars in the mid-point of their academic careers. The range of research fields covered by the CRNs that were established was also very broad: Migrations, public transport systems, higher education, religion, law, conflict and health. Four books have already been published and eight manuscripts are currently at various stages of the publication process. In 2005 and 2006, the Council decided to organize joint methodological workshops for each cohort of CRNs as a way of strengthening the theoretical foundations of the networks, and to sharpen the comparative questions they address. External resource persons are invited to the workshops to make presentations on the comparative method and its value, raise the level of the debates in the workshops, and increase the quality of the work of the CRN.

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On-going Projects

Methodological workshop 2007

• Programme

• Participants

• Summary (available only in French

Selected Projects 2006

• Rôle et viabilité du secteur de transport des engins à deux roues en Afrique de l’Ouest : cas de quelques villes du Bénin et du Togo

• La participation communautaire à la gestion des  systèmes de santé en Afrique (Cameroun, Bénin, Tchad)
• Traditional Treatment of Mental Illness in Western Nigeria and Kenya: Its Place, Practice and Strategy

• Comparing the Nature And Implications Of Corporatization Trends In Public Universities In East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda)

Selected Projects 2005

• Strategies and Consequences  of Public Service Reform in Africa

• Etude Comparative de la mobilité et des systèmes de transport dans les villes du Maghreb

• State, Religion and Law: A Comparative Study of Sharia Penal CODES  and the Administration of Criminal Justice in Sudan and Nigeria

• African Perceptions, African Realities – South African capital and sub-imperial expansion in Africa

Selected Projects 2004
Call for proposals

• Terres urbaines en Afrique de l’ouest

• Local poverty, values, and development in a global society

• The Influence of Socio-Political Environment on Primary Health Care – Delivery Pattern in Contempory Sub-Saharan Africa

Selected Projects 2003

• Soutenabilité et déterminants des déficits du secteur public au Maroc, en Tunisie et en Egypte : Approaches analytiques, empiriques et comparatives

• Socio-anthropologie du changement social en Afrique de l'Ouest. Migrations, institutions et accès aux ressources : la mobilité des ressources humaines en postcolonie malienne

• Institutional Transformations and Implications on Access and Quality in Public and Private Universities in Kenya. A comparative study

• Migration Dynamics and Changing Rural-urban Linkages in Nigeria

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Completed Projects

Selected Projects 2002

• Education Supérieure en Afriaue : cirses, réformes et transformation - études comparative entre le Congo, le cameroun, la Côte d'Ivoire, le Burkina Faso (Congo, Cameroun, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso)

• Post War Regimes and State Reconstruction in Liberia and

• The potentiality of Development States in Africa: Botswana and Uganda compared 

• Paths of Transition: constitutions, nationalism and citizenship in the making of democracy in Ethiopia and South Africa

• Youth and higher education in Africa (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Eritrea)

• Globalization, Citizenship, Belonging and Xenophobia in Africa (Botswana)

• Sierra Leone (Nigeria and Sierra Leone)