Research contribution to innovation in infrastructure development in Africa: Assessing the status

After completing the two phases of preliminary research, this paper reports major findings that are directed towards two primary objectives. The first is to assess numerous research findings on the challenges of the African Infrastructure Sector (AIS) that are not currently being employed by various academic and research institutions. The second is to clearly identify the primary factors that contribute to the disconnection between the research findings and the implementation of innovation in the sector. This paper reports that most of the challenges have solutions that have been provided in various documents, while the majority of the challenges that necessitated these research projects continue to negatively affect the AIS. This paper aims to initiate a debate on the need to re-examine the currently existing research findings and convert them to an applied form that is ready for use by practitioners and policy makers. A variety of methods and techniques was used to gather the information contained in the paper, but the primary methods used were reviewing work from researchers across the world regarding the implementation of research findings, reviewing previously published research results on the challenges facing the AIS and semi-structured interviews with senior researchers and policy implementers in randomly selected African countries. The findings of these studies strongly suggest that researchers within these countries continue to present their findings at various forums but that very little of the research is translated for implementation. A number of causes of this situation are identified herein and recommendations for addressing the challenges are given.