 You know, last joint seminar with Oxford University, but so we've been doing this seminar series between soles and Oxford about past year now. And this particular one is the last in the series and we're wanting to really look at considering how we can try to be better partners and actually look at some of the practical perspectives of working in international research. So, as I said, I've been working at SOAS for about six years and have been responsible really mainly for the sort of research development pre-award side of things, looking at research diligence. And just a few other little sort of housekeeping matters. I also need to sort of let you know that you've all currently been muted. And if you could please remain muted throughout the sort of presentation of the seminar, that would be fantastic. But you know, obviously at the end of the presentation, if you do have any comments or questions, please do let me know through the chat function. And I will ask you to unmute yourself and then speak and ask your question or your suggestion or view, whatever it may be that you'd like to contribute to the discussion. If you don't have, if you don't want to obviously ask the question yourself, feel free to type something in the chat box, and I can read that question out to our panel members as well. If you happen to have any thoughts at the end of the seminar that you'd like to share all things come to mind, we do have a sort of email group list, which is decolonialhe at diskmail.ac.uk. I think Romina's going to maybe type that in the chat box as well. People can subscribe to that list and we're hoping to try and carry on this conversation through that email group as well. So this is, as I say, our last seminar in the series and we wanted to really briefly reflect on the series so far and consider whether or not we've actually achieved some of the main objectives through this sort of seminar series looking at research for development. We also wanted to look more closely at the practical steps about how we can try to be better partners in international research. And then at the end, what we're really hoping for is a more interactive discussion, so please don't be afraid to kind of come forward and share your viewpoints and what you've been doing at your institutions and your own personal experiences. So what I'm also going to do today is I'm going to introduce sort of all of our speakers now give you their biography so that when we actually start the presentations it can sort of hopefully flow a bit more seamlessly technology allowing. And so just to begin, I know to first of all say that I'm delighted to say that we are joined today by two excellent anthropologists and with extensive experience of working internationally and building strong and enduring partnerships through research collaboration. We have Emma Crou, who is a research professor at Saras University of London. She also teaches though I should say postgraduate at the University of Harvard, which is business school and is director of the Global Research Network on Parliaments and People, which is an AHRC GCRF funded project, and the network focuses on researching the relationship between parliaments and people and is currently focusing on Ethiopia and Myanmar. But it's going to soon to expand through funding from the European Research Council to also include Brazil, Ethiopia, Fiji, India, the UK and the US, and I know I'm certainly going to be very interested to find the need to look at the findings from that research project over the coming years. In addition to Emma, we will also be joined by Professor Joe Boyden. Although she is now retired, she is a social anthropologist and has been the former director of the project Young Lives, which is a comparative longitudinal study of childhood poverty, which has been based at the University of Oxford. Young Lives has managed through a partnership structure involving 11 study country organisations, as well as research collaborators at various universities in the UK and the USA. Joe's research has centered on children's education and work, as well as young people's experiences of and responses to poverty, armed conflict and forced migration. Prior to joining Young Lives, Joe worked with diverse stakeholders from governments, INGO, CSOs, research institutes, communities and a vast array of young people in generating research evidence for use in designing policies and programmes for young people living in situations of adversity. So, very much looking forward to hearing both Emma and Joe's experience of working in international research. So, as well as the academic research perspective, part of this series has really been trying to join together the researchers, the research administrators and also the funders' viewpoints and trying to navigate these tensions as we might perceive them. And so today we're also going to be hearing from the co-creators of the series, Romino Strati, who is a GCRF officer at Saras University and also a research fellow, and Maru Mulmina from Oxford University, who is a senior researcher and ethics adviser at the University of Oxford. In addition, we're also fortunate to be joined by Emily Graham as well, who is the ODA due diligence manager at Oxford University, who has eight years experience of working research management and has helped to design, develop and implement the due diligence process for Oxford. In addition to this, she also manages the GCRFQR project from Research England and has co-created the ODA community of practice at the University of Oxford. And Emily and I are both members of the Elm International Working Group REMPRO, and so we're both sort of also working together there to look at supporting research management between UK and African universities as well. So lots of kind of areas of overlap in fact between what you've been doing and what we've been doing at Saras there as well. So really looking forward to hearing how you introduce due diligence, your experiences of due diligence at Oxford. So, before we sort of hear from everybody on a one-to-one basis as such though, I'm going to sort of shortly ask my kind of co-creators of the series to share some of their key reflections of the series so far. And, you know, just to say very briefly, we started this series wanting to challenge that status quo of how international collaborative research was funded, how it was supported, and how it was conducted. And, you know, to sort of create a safe space, if you like, for researchers, research administrations funders to discuss the challenges that we're all facing. And I think just very briefly before I hand over to Romina, just, you know, some of the key points that I've learnt throughout this series and through working at Saras in particular has been the importance to listen to our partners and actually to hear and understand what, you know, people are experiencing in the places that they're working. And then try to reflect upon that and consider how our own institutional policies and procedures, you know, affect perhaps some of those relationships and the development of projects at universities. I think through the series we've tried to raise some of the key issues that have come up over the over the last few years, particularly around safeguarding and ethics and sort of gender equality, sort of publishing issues. We didn't think want to do one on impact and stuff like that, but, you know, with COVID and everything, a few of our sessions got cancelled. But I think the important thing for me personally is that kind of reflection and to actually ask the questions has been really important. And as part of our sort of project at Saras with the QRGCRF strategy, we did undertake an internal review where we were asking our academic colleagues and other professional services outside of research and enterprise, what their experiences were of doing, undertaking international research. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to, I'm going to stop talking now, and I'm going to hand over to my colleague Romina, who's going to share her reflections and also some of the findings from our internal report. So, Mina, for hand over to you. Lovely. Thank you so much. Can you all hear me? Can you see the slide? Yes. Perfect. Okay, lovely. So I have very little time. I'm very conscious of that. And I thought instead of giving some sort of cumulative reflections, I could just speak about the keen size from the internal review. And, you know, highlighting some of the sort of common themes that emerged also in the series so far. And so this, this review, which was actually a research project, it was aimed at facilitating the implementation of sources GCRF strategy, we received your funds obviously to meet those objectives, and we wanted to investigate more systematically what the barriers are in terms of our research development processes and how we build partnerships, but also the good practices that our academics follow and how we might, you know, improve these or leverage on those. It included holding semi-structure interviews with SOA staff, professional services and academics, PIs and project staff, about 27 interviews were conducted between, you know, the months of May and July 2020. So the main, the first sort of insight that I'd like to talk about regards the research development process in relation to research context and LMIC capacity. One of the key themes that emerged was that, again, research environments differ. And so, you know, it's important to understand that different organisations and different partner institutions will have different levels of capacity. We're experienced with research development and grant management, especially international grant management. And it also depends on the career level and the experience of the specific researchers or academic that is a partner to a project. The other important insight was that, again, institutional processes in partner organisations differ, so they can be as bureaucratic or time consuming as they often are in UK HIEs. Approval processes sometimes, you know, need to be made by high ranking individuals who need to be chased and so forth. And it was also quite emphasised that, you know, local partner teams often are implicated in higher keys and power dynamics, so it's important to understand that this will then influence partner engagement and the responsiveness to the project. I won't read through everything, but I'll highlight the most important points. You can read the slides later, you know, more slowly. Another set of key insights related to PIs and how PIs sort of collaborate with their partners. It emerged that, you know, oftentimes PIs tend to favour partners that, you know, as one would expect, that are reliable and responsive. But this should also be assessed in a combination with the comment that oftentimes research partners from a lead or the westernised class are favoured in this project. So some PIs spoke about big names being favoured over lower ranking staff and so forth. The other important insight in terms of PIs practices and norms was cultural competence. So it was highlighted, you know, by many PIs, that it's important for academics from western academics to understand the cultural context very well to know how their positionalities, how their own identities are going to be received in the local context. And the other important insight here is that the majority tended to work in Anglophone context or maybe Francophone context. And so language wasn't that big of an issue for the majority of cases, but there were some countries such as Ethiopia where, you know, speaking local languages was absolutely key. Overall, cultural competence was a really important item that was mentioned throughout. And finally, a final set of insights related to the funders, specifically to UKRI, since we're talking about GCRF. It was sort of discussed quite a bit that the UKRI needs to engage more with LMIC partners and explain to them, you know, the application process, especially how to determine eligibility because that can be quite complex and the terminology is very specific to the UK context. Again, as it emerged in the series throughout, you know, the tight deadline seemed to be quite problematic because it really deterred academics from or hindered academics to engage thoughtfully with their partners and explain the details of the project, not just the budget and the costs and what each one was expected to do, but also, you know, the methodology behind the project and the objectives and so forth. So the current funder guidelines make it very difficult to engage in that process collaboratively. And the very important other observation that was made, which I'd like to mention, is that some PIs felt that certain schemes, especially the ERC, one of beneficiary grants, because they place emphasis on the intellectual exclusivity of the PIs, you know, the project being the intellectual product of the PIs experience, they felt that this deterred actually PIs from getting into partnerships because the application wouldn't be perceived as competitive. So this is something that funders could keep in mind. And I'd like to stand on the concept of equitable partnerships, which I actually explored with PIs and I asked them how they understand it, if they thought that is realistic, and if they had any other alternative approaches to build and collaborative partnerships. Some of them related to the concept and said, you know, they understand equitable as designing, implementing and disseminating the research project. But there were also critiques, you know, essentially many people said, look, the budget is controlled by the UK based PI so, you know, it's ab initio asymmetric and some thought that the PI can more easily work from a partnership so obviously that's a power imbalance. Although others observed that in some cases the PI relies quite substantively on the local partner, so that creates a reverse dependency sort of a situation. And finally, there was a comment that the language can be misused, while the idea of equitable partnerships helps to overcome this attitude and where the researchers know best. It can also be deployed suggest that, you know, invariably knowledge always sits with the global south. So I really liked one PI in film and screen studies who spoke about creative or dialectical partnerships, which they understood as a project that is developed on the basis of their own research and experience and expression of personal creativity, but simultaneously a creative process to bring partners, collaborators and participants into achievers across the team mutual learning. And I'd like to finish with, you know, some key insights for, for, I guess, suggestions or highlights for the three stakeholder groups. I think the main message in terms of the four academics and PIs is to really set out the expectations of the project with their partners in great detail and make sure that those details are included in contracts. And to understand the strength and appreciate the strengths and resourcefulness of partners to make sure that, you know, the team, the whole team can develop their skills with through that process. And I think it emerged, it was actually a PI did mention that, you know, being an interlocutor among equals is actually the best approach one can take. In terms of professional services, it's important to recognize again that, you know, partners, more reciprocal and equitable partnerships can be developed if partners are unable to start their activities timely. So if payments and contracts are in place, and also to understand that, you know, different organizations have different modes of pandyne conditions and context. So it's really important for offices to try and adapt to these as feasible. And finally, for the funders again for UKRI to really work with LMIC partners in terms of the application process. And a really important observation that was made by a PI that, you know, funding bodies need to realize that working to build strong partnerships takes a lot of energy and effort outside of work hours. And there are trade offs, you know, maybe that time could be used for publications, for instance, so it's really important for funders to recognize those trade offs and somehow reward that good behavior of partnerships building. So it's really to really appreciate and trust PIs because over monitoring makes a one feel that they're not being trusted. And so, you know, PIs are discouraged and they also feel that there isn't a clear mechanism to feedback to the funder what works and what doesn't in this monitoring process. And I'll end here and pass the word to my colleague Maru to add her own reflections. Thank you very much. Thank you Romina. I don't want to take any additional time from our speakers, so my reflections are going to be really brief. The series was a product of conversations that we had internally at Oxford, but also with our colleagues that saw us. Oxford has a significant portfolio of research, ODA funded research, and we felt it was important that even this growing portfolio that the emphasis of ethical research was made. The ethics was at the forefront of all we do. And it became very clear right from the beginning that ethics is more than just, you know, being nice to participants and avoiding harm and bringing some good. To do ethical research in this field required us to engage with important questions of power and hierarchies and inequity. And therefore we organised an event in July last year to kind of begin to tease out some of these issues. And from these and similar events that happened that saw us in September, we decided to kind of continue the conversation by exploring more in depth these issues. We, what I've learned personally, I think one of the lessons, one of the key messages that I take from the series is there is a lot of good practice already. There is a lot of awareness in our research community and also in our research offices of the enduring inequalities that kind of impinge on research partnerships. At the same time, I think there's a recognition that we need to, we need not to shy away from these inequalities but acknowledge them and work within and despite them. And the other key message I take from the series is that change requires not only change in our approach and how we researchers or search officers relate to our counterparts in developing countries, but it requires systemic change. It requires challenging some of these structures that kind of prevent truly equitable collaborations and that also prevent research from achieving that social value that is very much at the heart of programmes like GCRF. We hope that this is not the end of the conversation, we hope that we're closing, we're bringing the series to a close, but that somehow we can continue the conversation. And perhaps one of the things that we can discuss at the end is what people feel that they would like to see moving forward. With that, I will hand back to Alex. Thank you very much, Maru and Romina, for those very insightful kind of remarks and then thoughts there. I won't dwell on, dwell on reflecting on right at this moment because I'm keen, as you say, to hear from our speakers. So I shall just hand over now to Emma for you to present. Thank you so much, Alex. I'm going to share my screen. And thank you so much for asking me to talk about partnership. I should say that I'm an anthropologist because I think that helps explain some of the way that I think. And I specialise in the study and the practice of working within organisations, particularly parliaments and society organisations. And I've been thinking about this topic of partnership since the late 1980s when I was working in international development NGOs. And I've always thought of it as a bit of a teddy bear word because it's kind of cuddly and reassuring sounding, unless it actually genuinely comes alive. And like a bear, it then gets quite scary. And the reason for that is I think if you're really serious about partnerships, it's extremely hard work and often very, very challenging. So if you're really open to difference and really open to other people's challenges and interests and opinions, then it makes life much more interesting, but it's also challenging. So my outline is that I'm going to give you a little bit of an overview of the project that I'm working on at the moment. Say something about our approach to partnership, something about how we evaluated it and hopefully have time to get to some some practical suggestions about how to work towards being better partners in a world where it feels like you've got a lot of constraints. So basically the Global Research Network on Parliament's people is a bunch of organisations across the world coordinated by a team in SOAS. And we all share an aspiration, which is to create opportunities for scholars in the global south to do their own research. So what's unusual about this is it's grant making. So it means that all our PIs are scholars who design their own projects. We don't design them. We don't contract people. They come up with their own ideas. And what's interesting is that we had a competitive process, very tough peer-reviewed competitive process. And we gave 42 grants and the people who are eligible were in Myanmar, Ethiopia and the UK. And the UK only won two competitively and both of those PIs were actually diaspora. So it was interesting. And we also were very committed to making sure that the grants got to people outside the capitals, outside the dominant ethnic groups, weren't all women, weren't all people of a certain age like ourselves. And that was hard work. We went up and down the country. When I say we, that wasn't so us. That was our partners, which were critically. They were the Enlightened Myanmar Research Foundation in Myanmar, Forum for Social Studies and Cetuit in Ethiopia. So it was mainly their job, but we also supported. We ran workshops. We had a technical inquiry service. We did mentoring. We answered every email that when people asked us questions, Because we understood that it wasn't very common for scholars in these regions to have their own opportunity to do their own research. And therefore we shouldn't just assume that it's really obvious how to actually make the applications. So I think the first thing to say about how we worked on partnership is that from the very beginning we thought about legacy. Even more than we thought about impact. We thought, what are we all going to be collectively leaving behind? And it meant that we were continually focused on capacity development for all. And we try to think very, very hard about how to work in a way that left sustainable benefit. For example, we knew that we only have one window to give these grants. So from a very early stage, we tried to give information and sometimes with Alex's help, actually, and training about where to get grants from other sources. So that our grantees could go elsewhere. We also did various advocacy campaigns. We've got one going at the moment, which we'd love everyone's support for, which is making the argument to the UK Parliament that despite the DFID FCO merger, there should be a separate aid committee. So I'll give you the details about that later, but any support for that would be brilliant. So the second thing to say about partnership, as Romina explained, is that we try and have a very clear idea about who's doing what and what the responsibilities are, but continually review. So really that's the character of our program, endless discussion, review and adjustment. So our partners were always looking at needs and demands and always coming back to us and we encouraged them to do so to explain that actually adjustments were needed. So there weren't enough women applying for grants in Ethiopia. So at that point, we made a whole extra special windfence program for women scholars just to give an example. So we were unsurprised when two years into this program, we had an explosion of incredible outputs. And so if you look on our website, you can see some of them already. There are books, there are journal articles, there are films, cartoons, animated film, all by our PIs and their teams in Myanmar and Ethiopia. We're not very surprised by that, but it's very gratifying to have all this research by global south scholars as evidence of what is possible. But we're also interested in learning about how we are as partners. So we did this kind of initiative of what we called collaborative ethnography. And the result of it is a policy briefing, so it's in draft at the moment. I think the link has been circulated. If anybody would be prepared to read it, it would be brilliant because we do see it as a very collaborative exercise. So comments, suggestions, what gaps have we got, what we got wrong. Please send as critical comments as you can and we'll try and improve it and finalise it early next year. So that's the result of our evaluation. How did we do it? Well, like any evaluation, with a very complex mix of kind of improvised methods, it's explained in the policy brief. But the one that I was quite surprised by was the survey monkey we just did, which doesn't normally get very good results. But because they know us, our grantees and our partners put very, very honest comments in even in an online survey where people are normally a bit cautious. And the other thing to mention is that because we're interested in very diverse views and we know that everyone's experience of everything is different. Even interpreting all this data has been really fun, but also extremely argumentative. So our little team in SOAS has very, very lively arguments about what's happened and why. And our findings of this ethnography are partly connected to principles. So probably the most important one there is about relationships. So the heart of partnerships is always relationships, which of course anthropology is obsessed about. So actually I think they make better managers than you might think. And I think when thinking about relationships, part of what you're doing is continually asking what impact is this likely to have on other people and other organisations and who is getting left out. We continually had our assumptions challenged. We were continually trying to nurture each other's curiosity. And particularly when doing anything political, we never moved without consulting our partners. I think because I'm running out of time, I'm going to come back to the whole argument about whether or not we're contributing to democratising or decolonising. But we've downgraded our claims, I suppose, as we realise that it's pretty arrogant to make that kind of claim in one programme. But I think that'd be something fun to debate later. So just to finish off, I've got three areas of sort of more practical recommendations arising from this ethnography. The first one is about money. And we took trying to make the kind of financial planning and management as flexible as possible and as tailored as possible to every single different grantee and partner. And this was possible because our finance officer, who I think is in the audience, so she might be able to answer questions later, Bethel Wherku, really negotiated and discussed with every single grantee and gave them training along the way if they weren't used to financial management. So it meant that we could be flexible. We also have a set of recommendations about knowledge, the heart of which is to challenge the often rather racist assumptions about how knowledge is valued. It's still the case that it's assumed expertise is found more easily in the global north, it's not our experience. So these hierarchies, as Maru pointed out, need to be continually challenged. And the last area, probably most important of all, is about communication. Where we failed is, we didn't manage to get away from the dominant languages. We worked primarily in English, in Amparic, in Burmese. But where I think we did develop considerable skill is in improvising communication so that sometimes we were very formal, but sometimes we were able to be very informal. And we tried to respond to the way that other people wanted to communicate. So at all points, our focus was on review, learning and capacity development for everybody, including ourselves. So I'll finish there, but just to say it would be fantastic if you look at our website, we've just upgraded it. It's got this extraordinary amount of outstanding research by our partners on it. If you do have any comments on the policy brief, please do email us. And our Twitter is showcasing our partners' research just in the last few weeks. So please do retweet our partners' research, but also be fantastic if you help with our campaign to keep an aid committee. So thank you very much, and I'll stop there. Thank you Emma, and thank you very much for keeping so nicely to time as well. So in order to keep us on track, I shall hand straight over to Emily, who's going to talk to us now. Thank you very much. So my post really came as due diligence manager in response to the change in the funding landscape and the fact that we had to now comply to a new set of terms and conditions and how we do this through GCRF and ODA funding. So my role is really takes a pragmatic approach to compliance, which is based on the University of Oxford's risk appetite. And through this I support colleagues within Oxford, our international collaborators, and we go through a whole process from cradle to grave. So I enjoy the fact that I'm now able to support people right from application to post award. It's one of the need for ODA compliance. We've seen it straight to application stage, where we kick off our due diligence. And throughout this whole process there has been so many challenges. But this has helped us to shape and develop our due diligence process. And I think from the very start we realized that we have to ensure we don't create a massive lengthy process. It's going to then stop projects from signing contracts. And we didn't want to have a tick box exercise because that's not going to help develop us or our partnerships. So we decided to devise a short questionnaire. But given that we were it was quite broad and sent out to so many different international collaborators. We've kept it in a way that we ask for a lot of evidence when then we assess the evidence again based on our own risk appetite. And then we sort of tell people if they're medium high or low risk. And I think that one of the biggest barriers that we came across straight away, which is obviously the terminology that's flowed down from the funders, very imperialistic and almost embarrassing to ask some of our collaborators, certain things. But the way in which we've worked around this is whenever we send out our questionnaires, we always give a hyperlink to our policies so they can read through them and understand a little bit more about the language. We also offer a translation service and we bear the cost for that and that comes out of our QR funding and that's worked really well so it speed things up so we get the documents we translate them into English and all then the legalities are ticked as well. So that's that's worked really, really well. And I think another big challenge, which has turned into a success story is when we're assessing the financial viabilities of our partners. We found that many organizations are heavily reliant government funding that don't cover the costs of their operations across the organization. And to get over that one, we asked our partners, could you open a separate bank account to posit the project funding from into that bank account and then share the transactions as and when you go through the project. And I was really nervous at first to ask our partners to do that to see what kind of response we would get. It was overwhelmingly supportive and they, I actually received an email from one of the international PI saying thank you for doing this this is the first time we've ever been able to spend the full amount of funding that's come from overseas to our project and we've been able to do everything that we needed to do without worrying about running out of money so that was a really huge success. I think another issue that we come across a lot with due diligence is which I'm sure everybody's aware of is the buzzword safeguarding whistle blowing. And, you know, again, even the terminology in different cultures it you know is difficult to get over so what we're doing here in Oxford and I know we've done with young lives is we made an overarching policy for that project and worked with each partner to shape that that policy so that the terminology was kind of settled at the beginning everybody understood what was meant by the policy everyone signed up to it, and that was then flow down to everybody that participated in the project. So we are then ticking the boxes for the funder compliance, and we're actually helping our partners to develop areas that what they lacked in and it's really helped. I know that we've had loads of positive response from partners saying we didn't know what whistle blowing meant, but we do understand now, and we do see that it is really, really important, and it's helped them to develop project policies for their own organisations. I think, obviously, the other big success story from being in my post is not only supporting international collaborators and colleagues within Oxford, but also colleagues across the sector. As you mentioned, I'm part of the ODA community of practice, which literally came about by Joe Green and I from the University of Nottingham sitting next to each other at conference and saying oh gosh are you having these problems and despite the difference in our organisations we had exactly the same issues. And we went for coffee and we started talking to other people and they had all the same issues so we thought it wouldn't this be a good idea for all of us to get together in one space and actually talk about how we're going to navigate through these hurdles and problems that are being imposed on us with the funders. We're trying to feed back to funders all the time, but I think our efforts are best focused in actually developing a way around this in collaboration with our partners. And again, also with the REMPRO, which I'm part of, hopefully that is now going to feed into the ODA community of practice and hopefully going forward we're having a more of a broader sense of what we're doing, but also across the sector we're starting to help each other. To get through these issues and I think yeah and hopefully the ODA cop will, I mean despite the lockdown and delays and things, we're starting things up again and if anybody's interested in joining, you can drop me an email or my colleague Joanna Green from the University of Nottingham. Excellent, thank you very much Emily, that was really, really interesting to hear the developments at Oxford University and again thank you very much for keeping so nicely to time so. I know, I was going to say, super conscious. Brilliant, so I will now hand over to Jo, if that's here for your presentation please. Thank you very much Alex. So I want to talk a little bit about Young Lives first and then I'll explore some of the issues we've faced in relation to partnership. Young Lives is very unusual because it moved to Oxford in 2005 following a very difficult midterm review and in actual fact the midterm review had found the partners to be excelling and to be very strong and the sort of mother institution was where the problems lay with the study. So we, it's kind of reverse of, you know, what one often thinks about in terms of partnership difficulties and challenges and so on. And so we inherited pre existing partners and they've actually been in the study now for nearly 20 years. So we're talking about people growing up and growing old together. I mean this is talking about relationships. I really would want to emphasise very much Emma's point about relationships, they're fundamental. It's probably worth saying that Young Lives is present in India, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Peru, and those countries were actually selected in part because it was going to be a longitudinal study, and there was a need for strong institutional capacity in those countries. That was an important factor at the very beginning of the study. So there were already institutions locally who had the ability to manage a very long, long term and complex study. I think the situation would be very, very different now if you were starting a long term project at this point in time, you'd have many more countries where the capacity was strong enough. It's a very complex project, and I want to stress that everybody comes to it with a different set of roles, different roles and responsibilities. And I think the most central thing is it's really important to value their different roles and responsibilities. Without the roles and responsibilities of the individual partners, the study would collapse. There's no two ways about it. So, for example, policy engagement is a very strong feature of the study, as is the tracking and data gathering processes involved in the study. We've had five rounds of surveys and rounds also of school-based research and also qualitative research. So the ability to track, in effect, 12,000 children and their families across 20 years is no mean feat. So that's another contribution that's absolutely central. The quality of the data is very much a reflection of the very low levels of attrition in the study. Again, that's a contribution directly from the partners. It's about the relationship for trust that they build with the children and the families in the study. And I think that's absolutely central to the way we work. I think that it's very important at the same time, as others have already said, to recognise the varying capacities of partners. So they may be very strong in some areas, but not so strong in others, and therefore capacity building from the very outset is a crucial element. But it's not about the budget-holding institution building the capacity of the country partners. It's about capacity building across all the different institutions of the study. So we have leadership in the global south, in Peru, for example, we have leadership on a lot of the research substance. And that is capacity building in all directions, and that's a fundamental principle of the study, hopefully making for a slightly less hierarchical and centralised structure to the whole thing. I think the other point, which has already been made, which is very important for us, is that when you're in a study like ours, you're not able to engage with people full time. It would be too expensive, so we're buying into parts of people's time, and that has enormous implications. They're often working to incredible pressures within their institutions that we may not actually be aware of, but also more importantly sometimes they are working within institutional cultures, which may be very different from ours. So one of the examples I would cite here is in some of our partner institutions, there's enormous hierarchy between the PI at the top and say the data manager or the data gatherer, the enumerator and so on at the bottom. That's not an institutional culture that we would want to pursue or to encourage, but it's just the way of things, and we are only a little bit of their total portfolio research, and we can't always change things in the ways that we would want them to be changed. And recognizing those institutional differences and the limitations involved, I think is very important. In coming out of the description of the study, I think some of the really key points, I think power is inherent in the relationships that we all have, even after 20 years, I think it's inherent. I don't think we can get away from it, but we can certainly work with it as best we possibly can to ameliorate some of the difficulties. I see powers residing in the funding, where the funding comes from in the data because data access is absolutely vital and who controls the data and who uses the data and for what purposes has to be defined from the outside and who gets to publish. We invest a great deal in research capacity development, not just in institutional and program development, which are also very, very important for us, but actually the development of research, which means a lot of co-authoring, writing workshops, writing workshops and encouraging people to publish as much as possible internationally. I think that's really important. We've had most recently to revisit the issue of data access, data control and data use. This is very important because it's about the ethical commitment that the study has to the confidentiality and anonymity of the respondents in our research. We can't risk any breaches of any sort, sharing of personal data is really fundamental, and therefore we've had to integrate these kinds of norms and values in the study, which can seem to be rather difficult from the point of view of partners who really feel they've gathered the data it's theirs for the use of and so on, but we need to be able to protect the anonymity and confidentiality of our respondents. We do a lot of support in terms of other aspects of development, encouraging people to do doctorates, encouraging people in their training and so on. Unfortunately, our donor doesn't include that we're not able to offer partners the ability to study through us, through doctorates and so on, which I think is a great shame and I've often tried to push back on that because for me that's a fairly fundamental issue. I think one of the other issues for us, which is important, has already been mentioned, is communication, use of language. Yes, we've struggled a lot with which languages to use. We're dealing in the study itself is in 11 languages, but our partners don't always have the complete grasp of English. We've tried to break down barriers to do with language, including, for example, by developing an intranet for the study. It's been completely hopeless. It's not being used by anybody, including myself. We've tried so many which ways to create structures and mechanisms to include people and also to increase communications between different groups in the study. They don't always work however hard you try, including people in the governance of the study. One of the most important things we did was setting up the position of country directors. They are directly involved in the management of the research, but they also have managerial and coordination roles in relation to the many country partners that they're working with. They're also, by the way, very important in the policy engagement work that we do. So, as much as possible, governance sharing is, I think, a really important point. And then just finally, just to touch on the donor requirements. Our main donor is DFID. They pile on more and more and more requirements of which safeguarding is perhaps one of the most recent. We work to log frames. We've used all the different tools of management and so on over the years. Actually, I have found a lot of this to be quite helpful because at least we all know what we're working to. We know we have deliverables. We all have deliverables. It's not just about partners having deliverables. The Oxford team also has deliverables. And although they can be a bit restrictive at times, it's also quite helpful for everybody to use for their own self-monitoring as much as for the monitoring overall by everybody. I wish all research had an inception year. I think an inception year is absolutely magic for building those relationships, for developing the structures in real time and not just taking the boxes that come from the donor. I do worry about the scrutiny that's involved in safeguarding and some of the other procedures that we've introduced. I think they're incredibly important. And I think Emily made the vital point that it's also about partners learning the value of safeguarding and other procedures for their own purposes, not just for the research that they're involved in with us. I do know financial management safeguarding and some is about scrutinising. You can't get away from that. And I do think that that sometimes doesn't rest terribly well with trying to be more collaborative, more inclusive, more egalitarian in your approach. I think any way that one can find imaginatively to make these sort of scrutinising roles work to everybody's advantage, I think is a really crucial, crucial issue. I'll stop there. Thank you very much, Jo. That was again a really insightful presentation and I think lots for us to talk about at the end. So just to reiterate before I sort of, I feel like, give my presentation. If people do have any questions that they're thinking of, do feel free to start typing them in the chat and we'll bring them into the conversation in the next 10 minutes or so. So I'll just quickly try and do my technical bit and share my screen. Hopefully you can all see my slides, it's any of you. But what I want to do really is maybe take a slightly different look and a bit more of a reflection. As you say, I think one of the messages that's come through from all the speakers is the importance of reflecting and asking questions and actually considering what's been happening before you maybe move forward. So part of this is to just think a little bit about how far we've sort of come along in the last five years and also to then think about what the next steps might be and how we can perhaps continue to try to work towards sort of more equitable partnerships or sort of trying to be better partners and sort of phrasing it now. So one of the key questions from this seminar is such was how has the funding landscape changed over the past five years? And when I think back to when I joined SOAS in sort of 2014, working with international partners on a large scale research projects in the global south was perhaps not hugely common across the sector in the UK. Obviously at SOAS we've been working with international research partners for ever really, but often it was more the UK research going out and studying in country, there wasn't so much I don't think normality around international research collaborations as we're seeing nowadays. And I think there were obviously funders available or funding available to do that work from UN organisations, you know, I think back in 2015 the Newton Fund was starting to be launched. Of course there was DFID and we also had the European Commission that was very heavily involved in international research as well. But they were often sort of fairly opaque to be able to understand the schemes or how to actually be aware of the funding announcements, the opportunities that they came out. And it was, you know, pretty tricky just to secure the funding, shall we say. And so that's what I kind of recall when I was started sort of research development at the University of Sussex before moving to SOAS. And then during that time also there was the research councils started to trial providing opportunities for international co-investigators to have actual funding being channeled directly to them. I remember at this time, I think it was at ESRC that first introduced it, there was lots of kind of discussions and navigating constraints around how the funding should be managed. And I remember in one particular example where it was great that now researchers could go and actually say I'd love to work with you and actually we can provide a budget for you and you can manage that and so on and so forth. But actually one of the sort of unintended consequences that came about through this sort of funding scheme was that we had one particular grant where once we'd worked out what the UK budget was, we then worked out what the 30% available could go to our international collaborators. But for their bit of the research project, it was going to cost more than 30%, so actually we ended up having to bump up the UK budget in order to facilitate enough funding for the international partners. And actually that wouldn't necessarily be the best use of the funder's money, for example, but it was what we had to do in order to fit within the realms of the funder's requirements. So, as I said, these funding constraints that often would come out with all good intentions would often lead to these unexpected consequences, so how do you sort of begin to manage them? And then I think, you know, as the benefits of actually working more collaboratively with international partners was seen, I think that to some extent led to the Newton Fund and the Global Challenges Research Fund. Because we suddenly went from maybe tens of millions of pounds from research England's budget going out to international partners to suddenly looking at potentially hundreds of millions of pounds. And I think obviously then you're considering that, as Jo just mentioned, the scrutiny that goes around that funding obviously increases exponentially as well. And I recall that there was, I think it was earlier on the GCF days went to a talk by UKRI about due diligence. And they were talking about how they suddenly realised that one of their top 20 recipients of funding was outside of the UK, but actually they had very little understanding of how that money was being spent or being utilised. And hence, to some extent, I think that triggered the whole due diligence process and, you know, we've heard some really positive steps that Emily and Oxford University have been implementing. And I think there are always positives to sort of these scrutiny, but it has to be done in a collaborative way and I think being clear on why you're doing it in the first place. And I think the sort of, you know, the due diligence that kind of erupted process that erupted as a result of that, if not handled in the sort of perhaps the correct way, it can instantly put your partners on the back foot. And even if they've got a good working relationship with the researcher, your institution can kind of make a mess of it or kind of have damaging effects on the actual relationship of the partner rights at the very beginning of the project, which is the last thing that you want to do. And I think also with the sudden shift in the amount of money flowing through, for example, the research counsellors with the Global Challenges Research Fund, and not just the research council, I think there's about seven delivery partners that have put calls out using this UK aid money. It also comes with a lot more scrutiny for them. So they have to do things in a much sort of tighter timeframe. So, and they also have to justify the expenditure in a lot more detail than they had to before. So this kind of flow of scrutiny is coming right from the very top and is then being felt right, you know, if you like, you know, by all the researchers on the ground and the people trying to work in research offices or professional services at universities. And so, you know, it's a question of how do we actually balance that between being able to explain why we need this scrutiny, but also kind of enabling the research to be done in a collaborative and sort of positive way. And I think the timeframe issue is also a massive thing. I think we all learn very quickly on when the GCRF calls and the big hubs in particular were being announced that the calls, these massive projects were being put together in the matter of months. Then people were being awarded projects with only a very short turnaround from announcement of award to the actual start date of the project. And I think Joe's point about inception as well is incredibly important because, you know, it's really valuable that and I think if there's one recommendation in terms of practical steps when you're preparing these large international projects is make sure you build in at least a three month window at the start of the project, which allows for you to get all of the HR recruitment processes resolved and the contractual issues sort of around procurement. All resolved in those first three months and actually don't necessarily expect the research as such to really get underway. Right from day one because as I think all of the speakers have said things like data management or publishing on open access. Everybody needs to share that information because these are things we all need to do and all have incredible benefits for doing them. But I think the key thing is to be very transparent about what you're actually trying to achieve through this and why you're doing it. And so I would say, when you're trying to put together these international research projects and trying to sort of tie up what the funders require of you what your institution requires of you and sort of at the same time trying to ensure that not only the research objectives are met but actually there is capacity building on both sides I would say that you know you allow for that realize yourself to be challenged and you allow yourself to kind of challenge back but hopefully in a constructive way. So I would say you know in terms of what can you do in trying to become better partners. The first thing I would say is challenge the policies of your institution actually read them is always a good start to actually look at how they could potentially be impeding. The most efficient and effective way of doing research. You know there are things that I think we have to consider and we have to put ourselves in the position of our partner institutions in the countries that they're working in. Consider time zones we talked about language already, but also climate issues. I'm not just talking about environmental issues in terms of flying from one place to the other although absolutely we should take that into consideration. But actually if you've got funding which is you know has ODA commitments in part BK aid with tight timelines for which it has to be spent in. You know if your projects only a year 18 months long and you can only get to the region that you need to do research for for three to six months of that year. If there are delays on an institutional perspective of getting payment to your partner. Then you can lose that window opportunity and it puts a complete kind of kibosh on the research project right from the very beginning. So then we also and certainly as research administrators have a responsibility to try to articulate that to our other colleagues and other directorates that perhaps don't deal with this on a day to day basis. Because generally I think research transactions are kind of a bit outside of the normal practices of universities if you like when most things without the students for example. So I think raising awareness of this is really is a really important thing. And also to you know be aware at the very beginning that are there any kind of restrictions that are going to happen. Because of the country that with which you're working in you know do people need licenses to undertake research do they need. You know special permission to you know to receive UK aid funding for example. And there are countless other examples of this is issues of these that can really limit working effectively with international partners. And actually always question what are the real risks from my institution when I'm asking all these questions because you know I was asked by one of my colleagues you know well we never we never say we're not going to work somebody we haven't done today. So what's the point of all of this due diligence for example and I think it's not about you know whether or not we're going to work with somebody it's about identifying I think where everybody stands you know the playing field. And actually how we then mitigate for any risks that might arise in order to make sure that there are no one expected sort of consequences if you like that come out of nowhere. And I think the other the key thing is also to think about actually what does the project management look like. You know in the proposal. You know is it is it is it clear and equitable sort of governance over the project you know what is the makeup of advisory boards. You know the communication again that was sort of talked about in terms of having an internet but nobody using it what tools will actually work in terms of communication. And you know what will the success look like so that these ideas of legacy is Emma mentioned as well. I think are all really crucial and important things that we can I guess in research offices ask those questions. And I think if we can do that and sort of undertake research development through that lens then hopefully as institutions ourselves we can start to be better partners. So I think I think that is my time up now as such so I'm going to stop there and we have got some things in the chat so thank you very much. I just like to once again take this opportunity though to thank my fellow sort of panel members if you like for all of their input and I think there's lots of common themes that we've seen through these conversations. And I'd like to now maybe consider what bearing in mind the fact that with all of this influx of research funding into international research now. And I think the improvements that have been made the positive steps that have been made in terms of building capacity, both within the UK institutions and in the sort of global south. What more we can do to continue this because we're certainly not there. So what more can we do now if we're thinking about the next year sort of planning if you like to try to be better research partners. So let me just brief I don't know if anybody from the panel would like to maybe pick up on any of the other the other points just was like quickly read through the chat or if anyone for me know I don't know if you've had a chance to look at the chat but let me see so. Yes, I went through I there aren't any questions to my knowledge. One question, which I. Oh, yes. So Sam Mardo says I would be interested in hearing any stories on how we can move from a new colonial stance of the UK partner capacity building LMC partners to mutual capacity building and truly equitable partnerships. This relates to our well what we hope to have a capacity building session and discuss but maybe someone has thoughts on that. I can I can briefly come up and come on the three cases. It's a topic that's been a spin topic of my research for the last four years when I've been thinking hard about this issue of capacity building and the colonial kind of flavor of capacity. I think the first thing we need to do is change a language and stop calling it capacity building because capacity building implies that we're building something because something is lacking. So the first step is to recognize the capacity exist and that capacity exist and it might exist in a different form to what we can see the capacity. And that brings me to to the question of what we what we understand by research excellence. I think a lot of the capacity building that I see is aimed at, you know, empowering or equipping researchers in the global south to produce good research but to produce good research according to what we in the north think is good research. To publish in international journals to publish in English to, you know, be successful at capturing grants, etc, etc. I think one of the first things that need to happen and need to happen at different levels that above all it needs to happen at the systemic level at the level of institutions is to challenge this conception of excellence and recognize that excellence can take different forms. One of the things that I have discussed with colleagues in Oxford is this idea that the research career involves publishing in top international journals. The purpose of research is to produce knowledge and if that knowledge is a knowledge that needs to advance human development, the SDGs or whatever you like, then you need to also think what is the best way to disseminate that knowledge. That knowledge serves a better purpose by being published as a policy brief, by being published as a blog and not by being published in a peer review journal that is behind a paywall for example. Perhaps challenging all those conceptions of what we understand capacity to mean and recognize that capacity doesn't mean being able to be a top researcher according to modern standards. I don't know if anybody has other thoughts. I think you've hit on a few really key points actually and particularly around sort of challenging the conception of what research excellence is. And I think actually there is an opportunity here at the moment as we come to the end of this ref cycle. I think there is an opportunity to actually challenge and change the way in which we monitor research excellence. And I think you're absolutely right around the publishing aspect. You know, one of the things that came up way back when we did the sort of first event, the first event at SOAS for example. You did one in July beforehand, but was this idea of actually this pressure of academics to publish and the time constraints and actually how are we measuring research excellence. I think it's a really important thing because it is one of these sort of diverse drivers, which might mean that you do certain things just because it will get you that tick box exercise and you think it will help support your institution further down the line. So yeah, I'd be interested to hear maybe views and research excellence might look like Romina. Yes, I just a very quick thought to what Marisa said to add to that. I think it's important to question the definition of capacity because I think we tend to think of structures or policies or processes, mostly in relation to organizations, but if we redefine. Oops. I think Romina, unfortunately you've frozen. Emma, your hand raised that. Yes, shall I fill in just while she's coming back. Yes, I just wanted to very much agree with Mario about building is a bit misleading. I think a lot of development work forgets how much is going on. But I do think capacity is still an interesting aspiration. I think it's moral question of developing capacity knowledge skills experiences and we're all in that. So it's absolutely agree we institutions. I mean we've really struggled in so as with things like timely financial payments for example. So we had to do a huge amount of capacity development, but I, and I do agree about the learning. I also think accountability has to go in all directions. So I think the funders should make for accountable to our partners, for example. But I also wanted to go back to what Joe was saying about power because if we're challenging kind of neocolonial processes, we need to understand who's in control of what. And we are inevitably going to be in control of the money to some extent so you can't make things equitable as Joe was saying if you're giving away money. I think it's much more honest and much easier to have a kind of honest negotiation with people if if you make your very clear that there is that power imbalance about money. On the other hand, you can give away control of things like data, intellectual property rights, et cetera. So, you know, I have made it a kind of principle that I would never use somebody else's data and publish it. I will only put my name on academic outputs if colleagues, you know, really, really try and persuade me to put it on. So my default position is that people are authors of their own data, they publish their own, their own work, and you really have to make contributions something if you can put your name on it. I just pick up. I just want to pick up a little bit on what you've been saying. I think I think the point is not so much this kind of colonial model about the north and the south, but it is about the budget holding institution, as opposed to the partners. And I am seeing more and more research which is now being managed from the global south. I don't think we should assume, and we're talking from the perspective, actually rather UK perspective, both about research excellence and also power relations because in the UK, basically the incentives for academics are all about peer review articles. The problem is within UK academic institutional environment. It's not a generic problem of research, I don't think. It's just that that's the requirement on academics in the UK. And I am seeing more and more research which is being led from the south. The same problems will apply if you're the budget holding institution, if you're in charge of implementing safeguarding and ethical policies and so on, you will have power over your partners. But you can be based in Kenya or Peru or wherever and that is a growing trend. I think it's about challenging some of the assumptions actually made by the donors who seem to, they make the assumption that research should be led, managed from the global north. I wouldn't share that assumption at all. And certainly in young lives, where we've got very strong partners in some cases, they're doing their own fundraising. They're fundraising for young lives to do research on our data that they are leading on. They are getting the money for it. So we have a much more complicated arrangement now where the central fund may be from DFID to Oxford. But actually, there's a lot of bilateral funding going on as well directly from local organisations to local partner institutions. I think that's the future. And I think that that should be encouraged. And we all need to contribute to making it happen actually. And it's as much as anything, it's about challenging the assumptions of donors about where excellence resides and what excellence is and who ought to be taking responsibility for research. I think that's really, actually really important that we should encourage more research funding flowing to the global south partners directly. And as you say, it then leverages further funding maybe more locally as such as well. But I was just thinking though, in terms of, I think this is again where these unintended consequences come in because on one hand you've got that international research development and sustainable development goals and the flow of funding wanting to go out to the global south. But on the other hand, you have UK universities having to secure as much research income as possible and be measured against how their research income comes in. So I think there also needs to be a change in the metrics by which universities are measured as well. It shouldn't just be about the total amount of income that you receive. It should be about actually how much flow through funding is going through your organisation. Or there should be other metrics as well perhaps. I think I don't exactly know which ones, but especially if funding is going to be bypassing UK HEIs entirely, there may be a question of how much research income you're getting as an international co-investigator on these projects as well. Because it would hopefully set you up as a, demonstrate your research environment for example. I just remain conscious that you lost internet for a moment. Oh, it's okay. Can you hear me now? Yes, I think I was trying to say that we really need to take a step back and think of capacity in broader terms. I'm working on a project currently and in our context we're really trying to structure and design the project in a way that knowledge flows from the global south partners. In this case, if you have a new entry up to the UK and actually the knowledge and experience we collect and gather and become exposed to in these contexts can actually help us address challenges in the UK. So the structure and the concept itself is such that allows us to think differently around capacity. So I think it's really becoming a bit radical in how we conceptualise it from the very beginning. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely agree as well. So I think, I think thinking about capacity and research excellence and you know then maybe because part of us said this seminar is also to think about the next steps for the future. I think the other thing we maybe the elephant in the room if you like is obviously the current climate that we're living in obviously there is the pandemic that's that's one thing. But as Emma alluded to earlier as well with the merging of different FTO and the potential removal I think of the International Development Select Committee, you know that scrutiny over ODA funding as well. You know what is going to be the potential implications for us there is yet to be any sort of formal announcement of the next tranche of GCRO funding. So with all of that in mind, I'd be interested to hear, you know, not only from obviously the speakers but if anyone in the audience that's listening up to, I guess, their considerations of this at the moment and also just to chuck it in there as well. The discussions around research culture, there's been huge amount of press recently around the research culture of universities and this bonfire bureaucracy as well. And I think so as I said I think there is an opportunity now to actually put forward some will turn to ways of doing things. So, yeah, anyone got any thoughts on that really silence. There is a question for Krishna. I don't know if you want to. It would be interesting to share experience on a the challenges posed by the government bureaucracies in the partner countries, as well as unfriendly, friendly and friendly policy environment as they relate to the international research and funding and be ethical issues and dilemmas. For example, UK institutions requirements not fitting well with two realities of partner country institutions. So perhaps we can maybe Joe and Emma, if you've got experiences of that. I mean, yes, lots, but in terms of government bureaucracies. I mean, young lives is set up to influence government. That's the whole purpose of the study really is to is to develop more appropriate policies and so on. And we're dealing in very diverse country environments where, you know, government is. Well, you know, some I mean weirdly sometimes the more centralized governments are easier to deal with the ones that are more autocratic in their work than the more democratic ones because often the democratic ones, you just have endless changes in in staff, which means you've just built a relationship. You've just started to share your research evidence and somebody moves on, whereas often in the centralized system, you can really engage with people who are really very much more in control. But I think government environments are getting very tough for research and I noticed the question. The second part of the question is about ethics. One of the things we're just we're seeing is that ethics clearance now in many countries is a business. People getting charged more and more and more to get ethical clearance and you don't really feel as though it's a genuine engagement with your ethical principles at all. It's again it's ticking boxes and it's charging a lot of money and it seems to be a new stream of government funding in some context. It's actually becoming very difficult for researchers. Perhaps some of the most extreme environments is where an ethical a requirement of doing research in a particular country is that you share your data with government automatically. I won't name countries but there are a few countries where that's now the case. Frankly, there's just no way you can do that and so does that mean you don't do research in those countries, or does it mean that you sign up to something that you have no intention in delivering on. I know some of my doctoral students have faced this and particularly difficult if your data are actually in a way a critical of government and government policy and so on. You have no idea what security risks your respondents are going to face if you're forced to share data with them. So I think it's actually a really big issue and I see it as growing as a problem and I see a whole kind of. I don't know whether it's because research is inherently threatening to governments. I think that's part of the problem is seen as an inherent threat and therefore there's an issue of control and ownership of data and of researchers. My experience is irritatingly resonant with that because I do like an argument but I am afraid I agree with Joe the situation that we're in since we study parliaments is that we're very much supporting our partners and our grantees to engage with government and with parliament particularly for example. With regard to the restrictions on civil society organizations and especially restrictions on them receiving foreign funding. So certainly in one country I think actually our partners have had some influence on changing legislation about that. So while we think it's absolutely understandable if governments want to scrutinize or demand some accountability for what exactly is going on within those international partnerships. I suppose our partners very much make a strong argument that civil society needs to have the capacity to do research and not only in universities which comes to the second of Christian's point which is about host organizations. Some of my colleagues I think find it frustrating that funders tend to require that all money has to go through host organizations. That can be very difficult in situations where you've got extreme conflict for example or restrictions on civil society. So I suppose you know endlessly exploring some flexibility about some just having the capacity to make exceptions so that sometimes you might need to fund researchers in peculiar ways in order to fund some very important research. But I would actually say that I think due diligence is sometimes a bit thin. So in fact we went far further than we were required to in terms of due diligence because we didn't believe documents. So the idea that due diligence could just be done by demanding a whole series of documents which are very easily produced in a sort of fantasy way didn't satisfy us at all. So we had conversations we always had conversations about finances you know whether there was proper accountability for who signs what and that kind of thing. You know so we would talk to people and similarly would talk to people about their approach to ethics. You can have a beautiful looking ethical statement but it's no guarantee at all that we feel people have really really really thought hard about doing no harm about their likely impact on informants and that kind of thing. So reducing ethics to consent forms is absolutely not good enough. So actually we did much more due diligence but it was of a much more discursive nature than a documentary kind. I'd actually like to bring in maybe Emily in on that point about the due diligence and that tip boxing exercise and because one of the things I was going to ask actually was around how you also organised people to set up a separate bank account. And just maybe expand a little bit on that as well because in terms of I say the due diligence process having separate bank accounts and what have you you know might look a bit obscure perhaps from one side of things. So it would be interesting just to hear a bit more about that. Yeah so yeah so when we go through we do ask a series of questions and then ask for supporting evidence and obviously the main financial viability is done by looking at their recent audited statements. And one particular organisation showed that basically they were in quite a big deficit due to the lack of governmental funds to cover most of their salaries. And they actually were really upfront and honest about us and we had a big discussion with them. And we said you know obviously they answered the question to say they could receive funds from a foreign source and that they do these monthly checks and everything's kept separately but they told us actually. The person that signed that form wasn't completely truthful because X amount is taken for overheads that is not quite embedded within their financial transactions. So this is why we sort of spoke to them and they we said is there any way you could have opened a separate bank account you know within your organisation for us to put those funds into it and it was and they were happy to do that and it worked really really well. And I just want to highlight as well that our due diligence process doesn't finish at me saying right this person is high risk this is what needs to happen special measures. We make sure that that compliance goes throughout the whole project and that it doesn't just stop and we just you know receive a policy and say yeah we tick that box. We make sure that that is embedded in the project management throughout the whole and and the post award you know we will ask for them you know to set up their contracts in a way that will reflect that monitoring evaluation so using deliverables and payment schedules and asking for evidence along the way so it is a process right till the end as well. I think that's really helpful to understand I think I think as you articulated those words about that communication isn't it I think people feel comfortable to tell you the truth. Then actually you know if you convince them that actually we want to work alongside you in order to you know achieve the objectives of the project and then verbally we can find ways around it I know as so as we had one organisation that didn't have a bank account that could accept international bank transfers. So we had to collaborate with an additional one unfortunately it was another partner in the same country and we have to play funds layer and then internally they transferred the money directly and we again were able to sort of do that through the agreements and stuff as well. So I think you know it highlights that real importance of having that open and sort of transparent dialogue and not being afraid of you know the uncomfortable things but I think we'll only get that if we're actually you know approachable. Approachable as well so I think as institutions we can we can do as much as possible on that area as well. And I do I do think it comes again just to come back to this point around the interest I guess is that that balance between the sort of local UK pressures and you know then conflicting with actually the research that we want to undertake. And I just in the last sort of few minutes, sort of thinking about how, especially as we have Emma and Joe on the panel, and their links into government and sort of ability to influence policy is what what could we do as a community perhaps to influence policymakers and to make these changes now because I do I think we have maybe a year window personally after the ref has gone in. Yeah that's like Lull point not one to put more work on everyone's shoulders but that Lull after the ref has gone in there's actually I think an opportunity to reflect on the process again, because we're going to be stuck with it for the next six seven years and if we don't make change quickly. You know that window opportunity has gone and really that has to come from I guess base now in terms of from the from the UK perspective. So, you know, with Emma and Joe's expertise in terms of influencing parliaments and policymakers. I guess what could we do as a community. Obviously, during the ODA community practice would be good start and feeding into your policy briefing Emma, but anything else that we could do. Emma, go first. Yes. I think we should be making the argument that particularly if it's ODA money like the Global Challenge Research Fund, and it's about research in the global south, then we should take very seriously really prioritised investment in research capacity in the countries of concern. And so there is a tension we need to recognise tension between that and things like the ref and and the pressure that UK institutions are under. So as you say, I think we need to reward the UK universities for being good partners, as much as for doing their own research. I think secondly, I think we need to tell the UK Parliament, particularly its committees at concerned with international development and foreign affairs, that they should take more evidence from the global south. They're actually very keen to do this, but they need our help from UK universities and UK civil society organisations to act as brokers because why should scholars in the global south who are busy trying to influence their own governments do that. So I think we need to try and help that happen. And finally, anybody who's prepared to join our campaign would be so welcome if they agree with the idea that we need to have a separate aid committee because the merger is partly about shifting money from development to foreign affairs issues like security. And that is more difficult if there's a separate strong committee that looks at all government departments and how they spend on ODA. And last night, the Prime Minister agreed with this. So if we could just encourage him, although it's not the government's decision, it's the Parliament's decision of Parliament. So if we could encourage that, I'll put a link in the chat. That would be fantastic. Excellent. Thank you. A very, very briefly, because I would endorse everything that Emma's said, but I would just like to add that I think we're seeing a slippery slope. I think we're seeing the decline of tertiary education as a sector. I think we're seeing the decline of the value of research evidence in policymaking. I think we're seeing more normative policies than ever before. So it's all going in the wrong direction right now. And I think we have to work really hard. I personally think we can build in the UK in particular the fact that the UK is punching well above its weight in terms of research evidence around COVID-19. I think to demonstrate the value of research in itself is an exercise that we have to go through because all of the things that Emma says are valid. People don't think research evidence matters or they don't need to make their policies on the basis of evidence or that the evidence is inconvenient and therefore they'll oppose it, then we're in real trouble. And I do think now is a good moment because we've shown just how important universities and research and education centres are. And also because this pandemic is a global pandemic and we need healthy populations across the globe, we can also make the case for the funding to research and the support for researchers in other countries. I'm not just saying I'm not trying to say that everything should be focused on on the pandemic but just that this is an opportunity that we ought to be building on because the direction of travel recently with our current government and not just this government but in many other parts of the world has been all in the wrong direction. The devaluing of knowledge of evidence and evidence based policy is a real real challenge that we face, I think. Thank you. I couldn't agree with what you and Emma have just said more to be honest with you and I think we do need to. I think part of it is that research communication again but actually more locally, not just internationally but obviously also with the international government as well. And if we had more time I'd be asking you more about how to influence international governments as well. But before we do wrap up, I hope you've all really enjoyed this session. I know I certainly have but before we do close up we've got maybe one minute. Emma, do you have anything else to add, Romina? I wonder if we want to go around and for everyone to say a word or a last sentence. Go on then, Romina, you start. Then I will have to start. I should have not suggested. Okay. Well, I mean, I think it's a continuous learning experience and we just need to be open to learning and as we emphasised many times before, it's not what we can do. It's practically doing what we should be doing. And I think this point was made many times before continuing being respectful, you know, being open, being transparent and embodying those human values and bringing those into our project. So I think it's this comprehensive attitudinal change that we need to persist with and cultivate. Thank you, Murray. I don't have much more to add but in response to your question what more can we do to bring about change. I think perhaps one thing that we need to perhaps bring together is the, which you mentioned as well, Alex, the kind of movement around changing research cultures with together with the growing movement of, you know, ODA partnerships, because a lot of the bad behaviour that I see is due to the wrong incentives. So people are incentivised to play dirty because the institutions place demands upon them that kind of corners them into kind of difficult situations. So, you know, we can't begin to think about equitable partnership until and unless the research culture changes. And I don't want to say that the research culture needs to be completely changed. There are lots of good things about the way we do research in the UK. But there are perverse incentives that need to change and they need to change. Unfortunately, they need to change from the top. Reward mechanism, promotion mechanisms, the kind of monetisation of academics as, you know, grant-making machines. All that needs to change and we need to recognise that those demands that will place in academics force certain behaviours that then weaken them. Thank you. Stop here before I get into it. Thank you. Emily, any final thoughts? I think we've mentioned so many times today communication is key and I am lucky enough to be able to communicate from the very beginning to the end. And I think that sometimes don't worry about asking those difficult questions to your partners because actually they want you to. But they want your support in helping them to change the attitudes of even their own organisations. I think that's what we've already learned recently that, you know, sometimes the people that are filling the forms provide me with evidence aren't the best people to talk to. Actually, the researchers that are carrying out the projects and have the experience of being the ones that actually write the policies for the projects really appreciate our support. And there's seen that we're working together to create a policy that benefits both of us because actually Oxford, we don't tick all the boxes for Difford, you know, with compliance. So I always say that to the partners, you know, we are non-compliant. So therefore, this is why we think that working together and creating a policy together, we will then tick their boxes. I think just having that communication and trying not to impose, you know, this is what we're telling you to do. I was on the front of that. So it's like the best way forward. Excellent. Thank you very much. And Emma, if you want your final thoughts. Yes, I just want to kind of echo the collaborative spirit, including of this event, actually, because, you know, in a way, universities are set up in competition against each other, as Myra was saying, just as academics are as well. But despite that, you've created something which is really, really collaborative. And you didn't need to do that. And so actually, I find it really, really inspiring and exciting. And I do think we all gain. So I so profoundly believe that we all gain if we collaborate and we kind of resist the temptation to fragment because of the competition. But Alex did challenge me the other day. OK, that's fine. But what about the organisations or the people who aren't inclined to be that collaborative? I think that's the next challenge for me. OK. So how do you define and create the incentives for collaboration, including in the funders? So that's the challenge I'm going to be working on. Excellent. Thank you very much. And Joe. Well, actually, I was going to pick up on that same point that we. I don't think we can assume that the reflexivity that we're all talking about here in this group is shared across all research collaborations and research partnerships. And I'm still really shocked sometimes by the hierarchies and things that I see in some in some research programmes that work across the global south. So I do think that the onus is on this group, this network to actually keep. I mean, I know you're recording the session, but actually to keep disseminating these. I think to break down the barriers, you've got to show that it can be done differently and it can be quite successful when it's done differently. It's not a threat. There is a need for institutional and cultural change in the research environment. And I think just to keep on plugging those arguments and using as many concrete examples of ways in which this is really turned out to be very effective and successful so that people can feel less threatened by this kind of reflexivity and change than they currently seem to be. Excellent. Thank you very much. Yeah, I think I think absolutely would agree with you is my final thoughts that, you know, it's so much better to work together, I think, than to work apart. And I think this whole event series was born out of the realisation that we were all going to be doing the same sorts of events. So let's try and join it all up and actually share our experiences and not make every single UK University repeat and put in the same amount of energy in sort of identify what the issues are and discussing them. So I think the reflexivity and collaboration has been fantastic throughout this experience for me personally. I've learnt a huge amount. And I think also, as Emma says, that our next thing is to how to manage those people and organisations that perhaps aren't so willing to engage in this sort of process. How do we affect change in that and perhaps that's something we can think about in the coming year as wanting to move forward. So just leaves me again to thank everybody. I'm afraid I have one a little over time, but I hope it's been worth it. And yeah, thank you so much everybody for your input and enthusiasm in this discussion. Thank you for sharing. We'll miss you at Suwaz. Hi everyone. Thank you. Bye.