Abstract
This study commissioned the narrative literature review methodology to examine the challenges encountered by researchers in sub-Saharan Africa. The study found out that, despite the overwhelming documented evidence that sub-Saharan Africa faces a plethora of problems related to disease management, infrastructure, food insecurity, sanitation, and climate change hazards that can be tackled by research, it lags behind other regions of the globe in terms of research output. The factors that impede research that were gathered and examined were related to gender, chronic low output record, poor funding and infrastructure, role conflict, lack of training and experience, linguicism, epistemicism and knowledge imperialism, starved academic freedom and participation, deficient digital scholarship, digital divide, and predatory publishing. To mitigate these conundrums, the governments in sub-Saharan Africa need to upscale investment in funding, training and infrastructure so as to empower their traditionally disadvantaged academics such as women and early career researchers.