As the IDEAMAPS Network wraps up its first round of interviews with key stakeholder groups in Lagos, Nigeria, I am mindful of research fatigue, especially among residents of well-known slums and informal settlements. To reduce this burden, the IDEAMAPS Network can participate in the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography know as PECE (https://worldpece.org/), and leverage existing qualitative data from slum dwellers and other stakeholders shared on the Research Data Share platform (https://www.researchdatashare.org/). Both were developed in the same spirit of integration and collaboration as the IDEAMAPS Network.
I came to learn about these platforms in an recent essay by Angela Okune where she outlines the problem of research fatigue at iHub, a leading tech innovation hub in Africa. She writes:
We felt like our time was often wasted by media, researchers, government and non-profit representatives all interested in learning about what made the heart of “Silicon Savannah” tick. Everyone asked similar questions: “How has innovation in Nairobi changed over time? What kinds of innovations have emerged from the iHub?” We grew tired of giving the same responses. The inquirers would of course inevitably want to also talk to iHub entrepreneurs, but I grew wary of making those introductions myself because I knew the entrepreneurs also felt research fatigue. “You can find their contacts easily online and reach out to them directly,” I suggested, knowing full well that those emails would never be answered. But I wasn’t willing to use my own social capital to coax an entrepreneur to take an interview with an academic I didn’t know.
We tried to develop alternative ways to communicate what everyone seemed to want to know. Sending people to news articles that had already been written on us; research papers that we had written about our work and the entrepreneurs in our community; creating videos and multimedia to watch. But because of the privileging of first-hand accounts and “original” research, we were told that each person would have to come themselves and would have to ask us the questions themselves. “Because an economist has a different perspective and set of questions than a political scientist,” I was told when I questioned why a researcher could not just use the outputs that someone else had produced about us. But the questions they all asked did not feel significantly different to me and after taking more than two hours of my day with a European master’s student, I explicitly asked him to “please share the transcript from our interview” so that I could send it along to future research requests that I got. I never received it, nor did I ever hear back about any findings or eventual resulting outputs.
This led me to the Research Data Share platform where I discovered similar sentiments from a interview with residents of Kibera slum in Nairobi:
This excerpt from the report corroborates other stories about research participants feeling used and exploited by research and appears to be more acutely felt in places where multiple research projects take place by different groups in the same geographic and topical area and yet no changes are observed or experienced by residents. The sentiments documented in this report also were expressed in this focus group discussion.
Page 6 - 7: "...if the same people are interviewed over and over again, while not seeing any benefits of their research participation, people stop seeing the use of research altogether. The same academic told us a similar experience: ‘so someone will tell you, ‘you are the 50th person interviewing me, what are you going to do differently?’ [...] So it’s like they’re being used and they are not getting anything out of it’ (Interview 4 June 2019). This eventually leads to a sensation of research fatigue among participants, which tends to appear after long-term or repeated participation in research projects, especially where there are no perceived changes as a result or when changed cannot easily be linked back to the participation in the research (Clark 2008; Mwambari 2019). Eventually research participants might even end up feeling disempowered and instrumentalised by researchers, therefore producing the opposite effect of the social change that is aimed for. An independent researcher we interviewed expressed the effect of this research fatigue, which impacts the participants, but eventually also the capacity for researchers to undertake research:
Right now in the slums when you just say the word research no-one listens to you, she told me... People are tired because they get asked questions but they don’t get any feedback. [...] One of the people asked me why didn’t you sit with us and even develop this research with us and even ask us is sexual violence the issue? (Interview 13 June 2019)."
