Insights

The Missing Link in Mali's Innovation Strategy

The PSNRI 2025–2034 builds the science system. It does not yet build the path from science to the firm.

Makhan Sacko

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Line drawing of an unfinished bridge over a river, with a laboratory on the left bank and an open workshop on the right, the two spans not meeting.

Mali's National Strategic Plan for Research and Innovation (PSNRI 2025–2034) is an important attempt to make science and technology drivers of development. Like any public policy document, it matters as much for what it sets out as for what it leaves out, and its central gap deserves attention.

The plan is organized around the supply of knowledge: laboratories, researchers, sectoral research agendas, institutional coordination. Its success indicators are scientific outputs: publications, registered varieties, validated techniques, prototypes. What it says little about is what happens next. How does a validated technique reach a cooperative in Ségou, a food processor in Bamako or a herder in Mopti, and change what they produce? Extension services do exist, but their resources are very thin and their methods, which rely on sending agents into the field and running one-off demonstrations, are costly. They can reach only a small share of producers.

That is not a detail. It is the definition of innovation.

Innovation has agents, and they are firms

Schumpeter (1934) defined innovation as the introduction of new combinations into economic practice: new products, processes, ways of organizing, markets. Research can feed that process. But innovation happens when a firm, formal or informal, changes what it does and the market tests the result.

Malian firms already do this. An INSTAT enterprise survey cited in the PSNRI itself found that 40 percent of firms introduced new or improved products between 2017 and 2019, largely independent of the formal research system. The innovators exist. The system is not built around them.

Dan Breznitz (2021) adds a crucial nuance: innovation is not only invention. It also happens in production engineering, in improving and recombining existing products, and in making production more efficient. For most Malian enterprises, this is where the real opportunities lie. A policy that sees only novelty (the startup, the patent, the lab prototype) makes most of the country's actual innovators invisible.

Three questions the strategy must answer

If firms are the agents of innovation, an innovation policy must answer three questions.

How do firms signal what they need? Research priorities are set by ministries, donors and academic incentives. Sectoral coordination bodies bring research institutions together but not enterprises. Without channels for firms to express their technical problems, research drifts toward what earns publications and grants rather than what raises productivity.

How does knowledge reach firms in usable form? Economies that have won their bet on innovation rely on a layer of intermediaries: extension services, technology centres, applied institutes, technical advisers. In Mali this missing link is thin, and years of underfunding and insecurity have eroded what existed. The PSNRI's valorization axis favours incubators and investor matchmaking, which serve the most advanced end of the spectrum. Farmers, artisans and small manufacturers learn through demonstration, peers and traders, not publications.

Can firms use what reaches them? Absorptive capacity cannot be assumed. It includes skills, management practices, finance to experiment, and protection against the cost of failure. The PSNRI builds capacity in research institutions, not in enterprises. And existing funds mostly finance projects led by researchers: the plan does not say how a firm, let alone an informal one, can finance experimenting with a new technique.

This is solvable

Brazil shows what deliberate intermediation can achieve. Recent research by Akerman, Moscona, Pellegrina and Sastry (2025) finds that Embrapa, Brazil's public agricultural research corporation, raised national agricultural productivity by roughly 110 percent. A key driver was its decentralized design: research units embedded in distinct regions, close to the producers they served. Japan's industrial policy rested on the same principle. Knowledge does not diffuse by itself; it must be carried to the firm.

For Mali, complementing the PSNRI could start with three moves:

  • Give firms a voice. Give enterprise associations, interprofessional bodies and cooperatives voting seats on sectoral research committees, and launch "open problem calls" where firms submit technical challenges for research teams to solve.
  • Build the missing link. Create research–enterprise liaison units in applied institutes, evaluated on firm adoption rather than publications alone. Support them with regional demonstration centres, itinerant technical advisers, and content in national languages shared through WhatsApp and community radio, to reach far more producers at lower cost.
  • Invest in absorption. Open innovation finance to firms, with simple grants for incremental innovation in informal and agricultural enterprises and success-contingent co-investment for formal SMEs. Use firm-level diagnostics to match support to what each firm can realistically do next.

Why this matters now

Artificial intelligence makes this argument more urgent, not less. AI sharply lowers the cost of accessing expertise, but expertise only creates value when a firm can act on it. Without channels for demand, intermediaries and absorptive capacity, new technologies, AI included, will benefit the few firms already able to use them and widen the gap with everyone else.

Mali's research strategy has laid a foundation. The next step is to build the path from that foundation to the firms that turn knowledge into jobs and growth. That begins with remembering who innovates.