UK Global Challenges Research Fund: “Growing Research Capability to Meet the Challenges Faced by Developing Countries

The overall aim of this proposal is to develop research capacity and strengthen existing research capabilities in three sub-Saharan countries (Kenya, Malawi, and Ghana) in the related areas of water and food security. Climate variability has an enormous impact on livelihoods across much of SSA, where rain-fed agricultural production characterizes local subsistence and is the mainstay of most national economies. Coupled with rising demand from growing populations, urbanization, and rising incomes, climate change is projected to lead to cuts in GDP of up to 6%, setting the stage for migration and conflict. For these reasons, water security is considered one of the top global risks to development. Water security is also fundamental to attaining many of the Sustainable Development Goals, being a constraint on meeting a range of challenges including food security, access to clean water, and resilience to hydrological hazards. At the same time, attaining food security is a priority of national policy in SSA countries and is a key building block of development. The reasons for insufficient progress in attaining water and food security are complex, but requires fine-scale, locally relevant research and solutions that are best developed and tested by local researchers and practitioners. Although capacity to carry out research in this area in SSA countries is variable, there are a number of fundamental gaps in the required skills and resources. To address these, our project will develop and implement a comprehensive and flexible programme of activities aimed at strengthening research capacity between the UK and SSA countries while addressing the grand challenges around water and food security. We will develop a pipeline of activities that is guided by a set of key research questions and implemented in the context of a collaborative network of researchers and practitioners that can sustain and propagate capacity and knowledge more broadly. Our focus is on three countries in SSA: Kenya, Malawi, and Ghana. These are representative of different geographical, climate, socio-economic, cultural and institutional settings and challenges that will allow for comparative research and exchange of ideas, and the development of a richer collaborative network. These countries are also where we have complementary, ongoing university-level research projects and collaborations focused on various aspects of water/food security with institutions at different levels of capacity development. The programme of capacity building activities will be tailored to each institution and its goals through a process of co-evaluation of needs, co-development of activities and co-implementation, including south-south capacity building and knowledge exchange.