Building Knowledge Exchange Capability in Sub-Saharan Africa

People looking at a table covered with learning materials

Aims

RECIRCULATE supports new partnership-based approaches to enable African researchers to grow transformational impact through working with, in and for their communities.

Overview

Project Lead, Ruth Alcock explains:

Lancaster University has developed an award-winning model of ecoinnovation where academics and research students work with a wide range of stakeholders. The Centre for Global Eco-Innovation, established in 2012 brings together diverse research expertise in partnership with businesses and organisations locally, nationally and internationally.

Based on a clear opportunity for changing practice, the RECIRCULATE project was designed to facilitate leading research institutions to work with their local businesses, communities and policy makers to co-create research solutions to support a safe, circular water economy. The focus was transformational ways of designing and delivering research that would allow sub-Saharan Africa to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

At the core of the project is knowledge exchange – the practice of sharing experience, ideas, evidence or expertise between researchers and research-users in ways that are mutually beneficial. Our eight partners in Nigeria, Ghana, Malawi, Botswana, Zambia, Kenya have all benefitted from training in Knowledge Exchange and are now developing their own community-led ,place-based solutions to a wide range of environmental challenges.

Results and Outcomes

Tab Content: For Partners and Engagement

RECIRCULATE is about growing research capacity and capability through engagement with a wide range of science end users. As such, this community-driven research will ultimately be more place-based, locally relevant and be able to create and sustain more positive change.

Ten focussed training workshops in 5 African countries brought together researchers from all participating organisations with the wider community(s) to share challenges and illuminate their different perspectives to possible solutions. These workshops were delivered to 357 participants from 12 African nations (Ghana, Nigeria, Botswana, Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Niger Republic, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda). A total of 68 research staff at African universities and research institutes have been trained in knowledge exchange.

Participants at the Africa-based workshops were given the opportunity to apply for 4-8 week “residences” at the Lancaster University campus. These provided technical support, knowledge exchange mentoring and peer-to-peer support for participants. In total we have welcomed 74 residents to the campus between 2018 and 2019. An important outcome was the co-development of individual “roadmaps” supporting community-driven research with impact.

The impact of COVID-19 has meant moving away from face-to-face participation and a migration towards a new PARTICIPATE programme of activities designed to stimulate virtual discussion and collaboration across our UK and African partner network. Each month we focus on a theme and through events across a range of platforms (including Instagram Live Chat, Facebook, WhatsApp) we address challenges and opportunities in the context of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Over 400 people have participated in this monthly online engagement programme.

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Learning from the process

There’s huge value integrating targeted knowledge exchange capacity building in any international research collaboration. Research without community engagement – connecting know-how, technologies and innovation from all parts of society - cannot create the solutions sub-Saharan Africa needs to meet the SGDs.

Bringing people together in a structured way is essential to build capability in UK research as well as overseas by increasing the pool of researchers and professional staff at all levels, with a real understanding of how their research relates directly to supporting the SDGs. This increased mutual understanding is the basis of expanding and sustaining future partnerships and collaborations.

We’re improving every time but still learning what works best for virtual engagement. Our challenge is to efficiently follow-up and track individuals progress as they change their own practice and grow their own positive outcomes and impacts.

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