DRUSSA Symposium recap
Last week, these member universities had the opportunity to come together in Nairobi, taking part in one of the highlights of the DRUSSA programme – the DRUSSA Champions' Symposium, featuring the drivers of the research uptake agenda at 24 universities across Africa.
Facilitated by the ACU, Organisation Systems Design and CREST at the University of Stellenbosch, the Symposium was a tremendous opportunity for representatives from each university to share their own initiatives in getting research into use, making research outputs more visible, connecting with policymakers, and drawing from development challenges in the design of new research.
The Symposium was channelled into four strands: Promoting Research Uptake within the University; Processes and Systems to Manage Research Uptake; Making Research Visible; and the Strategic Challenge for Research Uptake. These streams of discussion covered most of the questions, and some persuasive answers, as to how universities can get their research into use in the community, amongst industry, and by government policymakers.
DRUSSA’s 24 member universities have been driving forward new institutional plans to build on that aspect of the research cycle – the Symposium served too as a springboard from planning to implementation. Presentations from a range of delegates offered views of ways forward. Cape Peninsula University of Technology spoke of the process of changing research culture, and Obafemi Awolowo University spoke to raising the university’s research profile. The University of Limpopo and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology spoke about developmentally-relevant research, and Kigali Health Institute and Zimbabwe’s National University of Science and Technology spoke to research that aligns with national development goals, especially for smaller universities. The University of Fort Hare and Mbarara University for Science and Technology led our discussion on strategy, pointing to ways research uptake managment needs to involve the whole of the institution – from human resources to processes for curriculum development.
The conversations and group sessions that flowed from these interventions have shed new light on how sometimes quite different universities can each address their common objective – getting cutting-edge research into the public and policymaking domain.
The DRUSSA team looks forward to continuing to working with each member university on these plans – if this Symposium was anything to go by, we’ve got some tremendous momentum so far.
