Nairobi Alliance: Publications Summary

The Nairobi Alliance is a research-led grouping involving the Universities of Leicester (United Kingdom), Nairobi (Kenya), Rwanda, Malawi and Witwatersrand (South Africa). The Alliance is an initiative that emerged from a workshop hosted by the University of Nairobi and University of Leicester in 2017 to consider ways that research and innovation could contribute to sustainable development in Africa. The outcome of the event included the proposal to establish the Nairobi Alliance which will be formally launched in 2020.

A primary objective of the Alliance is to enhance research collaboration between members. The DevPubMetric system has been used to collate baseline data on academic publications between partners which are seen to go back to the 1970s (Figure 1). The level of joint publication started to increase in 2005 to a plateau between 2015 and 2019 which averaged at 55 publications each year. This level of activity forms a used baseline from which to measure growth in collaborative academic activity following the formal launch of the Alliance in 2020.

Figure 1: Annual count of academic publications involving two or more member institutions of the Nairobi Alliance

The monitoring provided by the DevPubMetric system also allows the collation of monthly data describing the total number of collaborative publications and citations. The first set of data were collected in September 2020 and will now be updated on a monthly basis. The current data are shown below as Figure 1.

Figure 2. Cumulative totals of publications and citations for publications involving two or more member institutions of the Nairobi Alliance.

The system has captured details of all joint publications involving Alliance institutions:

● Full list of publications (since 1977)
● List of recent publications (Over the last month, updated on the first day of each month)
● Map of the contribution of Alliance joint publications to the SDGs.

Data were captured and processed by the DevPubMetric system. The list of publications was extracted using the Scopus using the Scopus system searching for publications linked to institutional affiliations
All records were then processed to collate full bibliographic data downloaded from Scopus.


This list of publications only contains documents from sources that are included in the Scopus database.