African science researchers and policy advisers have agreed to set up a foundation, endorsed by a range of African-based banks, to promote the use of scientific and other forms of knowledge by both public and private decision-makers in the continent.

The body, to be known as the Knowledge Management Africa (KMA) Foundation, will be under the auspices of the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Few participants in the Dakar conference on knowledge management can have had more experience of the challenges facing science in Africa than Amadou-Makhtar M’Bow, a former education minister of Senegal, and director general of UNESCO from 1974 to 1987 — the first black African to head a major UN organisation.

M’Bow reminded his audience that, despite the economic challenges facing the African continent, little had happened over the past 20 years to meet them. “Africa’s share of world trade fell from 5.8 per cent in the early 1960s to 2.8 per cent in 1987,” he pointed out.

It’s relatively rare for a non-African participant to receive a warm round of spontaneous applause from an audience gathered to discuss African solutions to Africa’s problems — a key idea behind the concept of an Africa “renaissance”.

That was the response, however, to a suggestion from Malaysian Lee Yee Cheong that individuals who had lived and worked in Africa should be accepted as honorary members of the African diaspora, even if they do not have blood relations with the continent.

There’s a famous line Moliere’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme where, after a lesson in social style, the lead character expresses both surprise and pleasure at his discovery that he has “been speaking prose all my life, and [I] didn’t even know it!”

At the end of three days of intensive discussions, a significant proportion of the 300 or so delegates attending this week’s meeting in Dakar, Senegal, may well be returning home with the same feeling about the concept of “knowledge management”.