 My name is Alan Davies and I'm the lead of the School Engagement Programme at the Cymru Welcom Trust Research Programme here in Kilifee in Kenya. Over the past 10 years, me and my team have been establishing a set of activities which bring local school students and also schools from Nairobi into contact with health researchers. The aim of that is or the objectives of those activities are to raise awareness of health research among school students, also to raise an interest in science and science related careers amongst students and thirdly to raise awareness of community issues and perspectives amongst researchers. It started off from the community actually that when we had community meetings with community representatives, chiefs for example they would tell us what are you doing to raise awareness of possible careers in science amongst our schools and so we responded to that challenge. We started off in a modest way with three schools and then by now over the last 10 years we've expanded out to activities going on in about 50 schools both here in Kilifee but also in Nairobi as well. We have a range of different activities, we have an attachment scheme for very talented students in which we invite nine students to come and stay here with us to experience different aspects of research and we also have schools activities for example we have between 500 and 1000 students every year coming to the laboratories to learn about research, learn about science and talk to researchers. Well I think what we were keen on being a fairly wealthy research institution based in a resource poor setting like Kilifee. We were keen on drawing from the research centres resources available for research towards strengthening science education in the area. We felt at the time that science being our core business that we were kind of well placed to possibly inspire young people in science and so we set that about through talking to teachers and taking the advice of the local education office and teachers on how best we could do this with the resources that we had and that involved a participatory action research approach to design engagement activities with researchers and schools. Another aspect of the school engagement work that we take seriously is the evaluation of our activities. We do this using mixed methods, we've had a quantitative component surveys across 15 schools, some control, some intervention arms and the comparison between those two. We've had qualitative interviews and focus group discussions with parents, with teachers and with students and participating researchers and also we've worked in participatory video where we hand over the camera to students and ask them to make films about their experiences and we find that that's a particularly powerful way of enabling students to have a voice in the engagement process. I think there's several reasons for engaging school students. Students or children will be the parents in the future and we depend on their participation in research in the future. There's also a growing need for research amongst adolescents and children and I think it's important that we try and tap into some of these unique insights that they have and use that information or work with that information in order to inform the research that we do. Engaging schools offers a platform to be able to draw from those unique insights to feed into the way research is being implemented. There's several reasons why we should invest in engaging school students. The first one is that in the future we will need scientists to conduct our health research so it makes sense to start early with young people to inspire talented people to go into research. We've shown this in the past in Kilifi that you are able to identify very talented people and nurture them through from school leavers age through to a career to becoming scientists who fully understand the context here in Kilifi and so are able to design research studies that fit well into the context. Secondly, children will be the future research participants, the future parents who will make decisions on whether they want their children to participate in research or not and I think engaging school students at an early age gives them an opportunity to understand the research process in a better way which will give them more of a chance to make an informed decision of whether they want their children to participate in research in the future.