The Clause Nobody Negotiated

There is a particular kind of expertise that comes from having been on both sides of a table without fully reckoning with what that means. I spent fourteen years in the international offices of Canadian research universities — institutions that are, in the architecture this essay describes, among the Northern counterparts on the other side of the partnerships. I helped facilitate agreements, create MOUs, and structure collaborations with institutions in the Global South. I saw the contract language around intellectual property and data residency. I worked within those terms and helped make the partnerships function. I did not, during most of those years, think carefully enough about what those clauses meant for the researchers at the other institution after the partnership ended. I am writing this partly to think through what I did not examine then.

The International Association of Universities’ most recent global survey names brain drain as the paramount societal risk of internationalization for Sub-Saharan African institutions. Three quarters of African higher education leaders identify it as the defining threat. The anxiety is real. But the system producing it was not inevitable, and understanding it requires going back further than the current statistics.

The contemporary partnership architecture between African and Northern universities was largely assembled in the 1980s and 1990s, during the structural adjustment era. When the World Bank and the IMF conditioned loans on public expenditure reductions, African university budgets contracted sharply — research infrastructure deteriorated, faculty salaries fell, and the capacity to fund doctoral training domestically collapsed in many countries. Into this gap came externally funded partnerships: Northern governments, foundations, and research councils offering funding, equipment, and training in exchange for access to African research sites, patient populations, field data, and co-authorship. The terms were not designed to be exploitative. Many of the people who designed them were genuinely trying to help. But they were designed by institutions with legal infrastructure and research management offices, for institutions that had none of those things. This is the feedback loop the brain drain conversation almost never traces: the defunding that created the dependency, and the dependency that normalized the terms.

By 2024, over 800,000 students from Africa were enrolled in degree programs outside their home countries. These are overwhelmingly self-funded, self-directed movers — students whose families pooled resources to send someone somewhere with better infrastructure and stronger employment outcomes. Treating their movement as a problem to be solved rather than a choice to be understood has not served African higher education policy well. The framing of brain drain as a border-crossing problem has consistently misdirected attention — toward retention incentives and repatriation programs — and away from the system that shapes what knowledge African researchers produce, and who owns it, regardless of where those researchers are standing.

The contractual story is a different and smaller story. But it is the one that most directly determines the long-term architecture of African knowledge production. Consider the specific weight of this moment. A research director at a mid-sized East African university — someone who has built her career through genuine intellectual effort, who has spent years cultivating the institutional relationships that made this partnership possible — receives a partnership agreement drafted by a legal team that spent weeks on it. She has two weeks to respond. She has three other agreements pending, a grant report due, a faculty meeting she cannot reschedule. She has no budget line for external legal review. She signs. What she has agreed to will govern who publishes the results, where the data resides for the next decade, whose name appears first on the resulting papers, and whether her institution can build on these findings independently after the partnership ends. This is not a failure of her intelligence or her institution’s ambition. It is the end point of a system built, over forty years, to be navigated from one side.

Here an honest reader will object: is it not expected that the funder determines the terms? If a Northern research council is financing the partnership, why should Northern authorship norms not apply? The answer is not that Northern funders have no legitimate claim on the outputs of research they finance. It is that the current terms frequently exceed what legitimate funder interests require — assigning data residency to servers outside the continent, restricting African partners from publishing independently, placing Northern researchers as first authors on research conducted primarily at African institutions. A BMJ Global Health review of 7,100 African health research articles found that 13.5 percent had no local co-author at all. In collaborations with top United States universities, the proportion featuring an African first author fell to 23 percent. The Council on Health Research for Development has traced the cause: most Global South institutions enter these negotiations without specialist legal expertise, structurally unable to propose alternative terms against heavily lawyered counterparts. These statistics are not a story about individual career choices. They are the downstream output of a system whose terms were set in the 1980s and have not fundamentally changed.

The emergence of China as a major host of African students — second only to France — has changed the geometry without resolving the underlying dynamic. More interesting than the student hosting is the Luban Workshop model: vocational training centers established on African soil, financed and designed by Chinese partners, training workers for enterprises operating on the continent. The training does not require the student to leave. Whether the Luban model serves African development interests or Chinese labor supply chains — and the honest answer is probably both, in proportions that vary by sector and country — it addresses a real failure that the Northern partnership model does not: the assumption that the training must happen elsewhere, under Northern terms. The sovereignty questions it raises are different in configuration. Who writes the curriculum, who certifies the credential, who employs the graduate — these are live questions, but they are being asked about training conducted in Africa, for workers who remain in Africa. That is a different register entirely.

What is more tractable than repatriation, and more honest about how academic careers actually work, is the recognition that physical presence and institutional contribution can be separated. Approximately 30,000 Africans holding doctoral degrees currently reside outside the continent. Morocco’s National Center for Scientific and Technical Research has been formalizing agreements with diaspora scientific networks in France and Germany, making expatriate researchers part of the country’s research infrastructure through structured collaboration rather than requiring return. This does not solve the contractual problem. But it challenges the territorial assumption embedded in the brain drain metaphor — that a researcher who has crossed a border is a researcher who has been lost. If the institution has built the relational and legal infrastructure to keep its diaspora contributing, the border becomes less decisive than the contract.

The measure of a research system’s health is not how many of its trained people remain within its borders. It is whether the research conducted in partnership with external funders is attributed honestly, owned in ways that allow institutional knowledge to accumulate, and capable of compounding into capacity rather than disappearing into the citation records of institutions whose legal teams were better prepared for the negotiation. That is the question the retention framing forecloses — because it counts departures when it should be reading contracts. And the contracts, in most cases, were written by one side of the table, under conditions that the other side did not choose and has not yet had the collective infrastructure to change.

I know this because I spent fourteen years helping those partnerships work — facilitating the agreements, building the MOUs, reading the IP clauses — without asking, carefully enough, what they meant for the people on the other side of the table after I left the room.