Triple Helix of university-industry government relationships in West Africa

The West African countries’ scientific publications data are downloaded from Web of Science. Analyses focus on university‑industry‑government collaboration. We compute data on each sector’s production and collaboration among them. Particularly, the industrial production is extracted; the network, it induces is built and its structure analyzed with social network analysis methods and techniques, using Pajek. Results show that the university is the biggest information producer, followed by government; the number of industrial publications is meaningless; even some countries have no industrial output. Consequently, collaboration between the university and government is more visible. Collaboration between the three Triple Helix spheres occurred only in Nigeria. The mutual information between university, industry, and government is weak, illustrating the low level of knowledge flow between innovation actors in the region. These results could explain the negligible share of the developing countries in general and African and West African countries particularly to the World economy, and also the low level of development the region.