Aims and Scope

Global Africa is a pan-African, international journal, dedicated to the expression, dissemination and promotion of excellent research in the humanities and social sciences on the African continent and its diaspora. It welcomes reflections on global issues and their challenges apprehended from Africa and its diasporas to show how the transformations of the world are played out from the continent.

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Led by Gaston Berger University of Saint-Louis (UGB) through its Interdisciplinary Laboratory on Social Sciences (LASPAD) in partnership with a consortium of thirteen pan-African, African and European research institutions, the journal aims to contribute to contemporary debates both within and beyond the academic sphere, in which African issues intersect with global issues. It is particularly interested in current and future transitions, whether economic, energy, demographic, digital, health, ecological, technological, urban, based on multi/interdisciplinary approaches.

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​Global Africa Publishes regular and thematic issues four times a year (except for the first two years - 2022 and 2023 - when publication was semi-annual), including expert viewpoints on current event and book recensions.

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​The journal is distributed with articles in HTML and PDF formats. The entire editorial process of the journal is subject to compliance with its Ethical Charter. Each participant in the process (editors, authors, reviewers, translators) is deemed to be aware of it and is required to comply.

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​​The submission of a manuscript to the journal entails, by definition, acceptance by the author of its final publication on Global Africa's website, as well as on the portals with which the journal has entered into agreements. A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number is assigned to each article. This DOI number enables searching, identifying, and citing the articles. 

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Mission

Global Africa proposes to keep an intellectual agenda centered around the current events and the future of the continent, that is to say to think of a continent caught up in globalization, a space grasped in its relationship to the world. It therefore intends to provide a demanding and innovative platform for the voices of African researchers to describe and think about the trajectories, the tensions that can be found in the entanglement of local, national, community and transnational issues.

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Global Africa aims to be the echo of the new voices of African research of excellence in the humanities and social sciences. Its objective is to significantly increase the African contribution to global scientific creation, and to arouse critical reflexivity to strengthen the epistemological, theoretical, methodological and ethical foundations of research in the humanities and social sciences (HSS). To do so, the journal supports young researchers in particular through various mechanisms: the dissemination of their research in the four most spoken languages of the continent (French, English, Arabic, Swahili), co-publication, an editorial process committed to including more than excluding, while maintaining the quality of productions, training and capacity building actions.

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In November 2023, Global Africa signed the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication, initiated by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies, the Committee for Public Information, the Finnish Association for Scholarly Publishing, Universities Norway and the European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Launched in 2019, this initiative aims to promote the importance of multilingualism in research and its dissemination, in a context of internationalization. It is based on three main recommendations: 

1- Support the dissemination of research results for the interest of society. 

2- Protect national infrastructures for the publication of locally relevant research.

3- Promote linguistic diversity in research evaluation and funding systems.

Helsinki has now been signed by hundreds of institutions and researchers around the world. The signing of Helsinki is in line with Global Africa's desire to strengthen its commitment to the defense of bibliodiversity.

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Journal Business Model

 

The program is funded until 2025. The primary financial support comes from the French Development Agency (56%). UGB contributes 12% and provide human resources as well as the headquarters for Global Africa. IRD contributes 11% and covers the editorial secretary position. As for the other members of the consortium, they directly contribute 4% to the program's funding and provide their infrastructures and teams, particularly in the context of the Junior Researchers Institutes.The remaining funding relies predominantly on revenue generated by the online certification courses and a fundraising strategy. The model has been designed to sustain the initiative beyond the initial four years of operation.

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