Transnational Research Management Partnership
Strengthening Institutional Health Research Management Capacities: A Transnational Partnership between West Africa and Switzerland
Conference
Format: Fifteen-Minute Discussion Tables
Topic: 7. Transnational Collaborations
Abstract
Strengthening research management capacities has become crucial in the health research sector. As medical and public health research is an international endeavour, both pre- and post-award processes require a coordinated interplay by global partner organisations. We give insight in our tri-national and tri-lingual consortium that aims at creating a framework for a mutual and standardised research management approach.
Funded by the Velux Stiftung, three organisations have formed a translational collaboration to strengthen institutional research management capacity: the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute in Basel, Switzerland, the Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research in Accra, Ghana. All three institutions have established research management entities that are supporting their health scientists in competitive pre- and post-award activities and bring their country-, language-, and local context-specific expertise and best practices into the institutional capacity building approach. While all entities aim at increasing sustained research project portfolios through research governance and strategy, business development, project design, proposal development, and grant management, they suffer from research management capacity gaps.
To sustainably address these gaps, we take measures to enhance capacity in research management on several levels: i) strengthening the research support entities by streamlining, harmonization, and building capacity in order to establish a strong research management alliance and make collaborative research management between the institutions’ researchers more effective; ii) fostering research management capacity transfer to the scientists, allowing lead researchers to collaborate on long-term research project portfolio and exploitation of impactful results; and iii) transfering knowledge of the established research management framework for international collaboration and networking to other institutions.
Currently, with the launch of the project in September 2024, the activities have started with a train-the-trainers approach utilizing the services of research management and administration associations, including the West and South Africa Research & Innovation Management Accosiation (WARIMA and SARIMA) and EARMA to align with best practices. The established research management capacity will be expanded to other interested institutions locally and internationally to sustainably foster collaborative global health research competencies and influence the future of health research management.