 Rwy'n dweud. Felly mae'n ddweud, jfodd? Fy nid, dywed i. E wedi'i ddweud – mae'n fawr ddweud. Rydw i wedi'u ddweud. Mae'n oedd i'n ddweud i'n ddweud. Rydw i'n ddweud. Rydw i'n ddweud i'n ddweud i weithio ymddangos ystod i'w ddweud, mynd i'n ddweud i'n ddweud. Fe rydym wedi'n ddweud. er mwynhau ba? Rydywb yn lle? Mae gennym mwynhau'n ddweud fenydag. Felly mae'n ddweud i'n gw lle, y gallwn ystod a ddechrau'n gwneud efallai mae'n hyn sy'n ddim yn wneud wrth gwrs yma un gweithio'n gwleidio i yddechrau? Dweud i chi'r ei dda. Gweld ein bod gennym. Mae'r dyfodol iawn yma arall o gydag ystod yma, gyda ni'n bオ oedd yng nghylch Rydyn ni'n ddweud i'r pethau i wneud ei wneud i'r hollu i wneud i'r hollu ar y ei phaith. Rydyn ni'n ddweud cyfnodd yn ei bod yn ysgrifiannig, ac rydyn ni'n ddweud i'r hollu i'r hollu yn ysgrifiannig. Rydyn ni'n ddweud yn gwybod, Because I've been involved in some of the thinking around GCRF almost from its beginning. And I think it has such a potential to be transformational. I hope that today will help everyone to think in much broader terms of how what is a substantial amount of resources can really be used to make transformational change. We're talking about 115 billion in a fund that supports research which addresses the global issues faced by developing countries. 225 million has been invested from the GCRF across 37 interdisciplinary projects to address challenges in fields such as health, humanitarian crises, conflict, the environment, the economy, domestic violence, looking much more broadly at society and technology. And I think it really speaks to the importance of universities in today's climate. We all know that universities are operating in a very challenging environment. The outcome of the EU referendum presents, I think, a particular challenge to us working within a global system and cooperating within that system. And we know how important collaboration is to research. We need to demonstrate the essential impact of what we do. And it's not just economic impact, it's societal impact, but I think we also need to strongly defend the importance of scholarship. The newly appointed UK chief executive, Alistair Jarvis, described universities as this summer's scapegoat of choice. Never before, I think, has it been so important to defend the impact that our universities and the research that we do can have on society. Our own Tibetan language research here at SOAS funded via the GCRF, which helps foster understanding between Tibetan speakers and English speakers, and is vital for effective social development and indeed contributes to better understanding of how aid should best be deployed, was derided by the telegraph recently, seemingly on the basis of the project title alone, not even thinking about what the research was intended to do and the impact that it was intended to have. And I saw myself when I was at the United Nations, the way that a lack of commitment to really looking at policy solutions that joined up different areas had a negative impact on the kinds of policies that were being promoted. Indeed it led sometimes to a kind of paralysis of action which was not at all helpful. From the work that we do here at SOAS and indeed from the work that's being done at other universities, I'm confident that many of the challenges that we face in the world today have their solutions or elements of their solutions in that work. And that's why it's encouraging to see that projects range from addressing issues around agriculture, food security, environment and health, being supported by the fund. But I am a really strong advocate of not just trying to make connections, but really pushing for greater collaboration. We all know that in higher education there can sometimes be a push to the importance of one channel of research, the impact that your particular individual's research is going to have. I think that the transformational impact of GCRF is really about working in teams and working across different regions around the world. And I know that this is some of what you're going to talk about today. And I'm very pleased that one of SOAS's own professors, Jonathan Goodhand, had a major research project agreed in the last round. And Jonathan, I think, will be speaking to all of you later today. I'd now like to pass over to Dr Mark Clayden-Smith. We worked earlier together on some of these projects, who's the RCUK Associate Director for International Development, to take you through the day and to take you through some of the issues. But I'd also particularly like to thank the SOAS research team who've helped to organise today. And particularly Sonia, where are you? Stand up, because we're going to thank you. Have a great day. Over to you. And good morning. My name's Mark Clayden-Smith from Research Councils UK. And as she departs, I would like to just pay credit to Baroness Amos. I'd like to thank her for today, which I see as a very visible commitment. And actually the whole event, the support she's given to that, which I think is significant. But something she alluded to in her speech, which is probably more significant, is the support she's given us in not so much in the background, but in advising the development of the GCRF, and in particular in setting the tone and the language. And sometimes it's not just about what you do. It's the language and the flavour and the sense of purpose that you have. And I really would like to highlight the help she's given us in that regard. And so in terms of today, turn to today, as Baroness Amos mentioned, my name's Mark Clayden-Smith from the UK Research Councils. We're going to, through the day, try and enter into a bit of a dialogue with the research community about Global Challenges Research Fund and where it's going. And it's very much an opportunity to understand the opportunities that are there in terms of funding, but also in terms of your own ideas and your own aspirations and inclinations. So about a year and a half ago, we started on a major programme of engagement, had some quite large, significant events which were critical in forming our strategy. What we're trying to do at the moment is, rather than repeat those large, major showcase events, is to actually have a number of smaller occasions, although this is fairly large, where we can have a much richer dialogue. The other thing we want to do today, and it really reflects where we are in the cycle of GCRF, is to give more of a platform for the research that we're supporting, because that's where we go from the theory and the concept and you start to get the pithy reality of the individual research projects. And that's both to celebrate the research, but critically it's also about learning from the practices and the experiences that people have had to date and how that could be of general use or of general benefit to other members of the community. So I've just been reminded the event's been filmed and streamed, but in addition there's a Twitter feed which is referenced around the room. Please feel free to use whatever social media so it's your pleasure. So to begin, I was involved in Global Challenge Research Fund from the outset and that means through the spending review and through its early development and now through into the delivery phase. And it's pretty good in any job to be involved in concept turning into reality. I have to say in terms of GCRF, and you'll see this with some of the projects, it's actually kind of beyond satisfying, it's always humbling to start to see the sort of projects that people are doing and how they are really addressing real issues around the world and within the UK. So I think I've covered most of that to date. As part of our exercise we are, as I said, going round the UK with a number of these regional events. And it's a mixture of the team at different events. So I'm here today leading this one. My boss Stuart Tabernaux is involved in a number of the other meetings. Stuart's actually a professor at the University of Leeds in German Studies. So you can take your pick on which event you'll get a different team. But we've got three of us here today and it's very much giving different perspectives on the activity. I mentioned that the GCRF is starting to become a reality. And just to give you a sense of some of the projects local to yourselves really. And as Baroness Amos said, we have a huge and rich diversity already starting to emerge in the portfolio. So from conflict, from infrastructure, health, food, all aspects of development challenges are starting to be manifest. And you see that here within the London region. But also across the wider portfolio. Just to kind of go back over a little bit of history and I'll try not to dwell on these to catch a bit of time. GCRF sits in a number of very important contexts. Probably the most significant is the sustainable development goals which I imagine most of you will be aware of. And the significance of the SDGs are that these are a multinational, an international commitment to change. So that's absolutely critical because that's almost the driving emphasis behind the GCRF. It does have a few critical limitations though. The first thing is that it's a truly global agenda. So it applies to the whole world, both developed countries and developing countries. And it's also fair to say that it's an agenda for change as opposed to an agenda for research. So it's probably the most important context within those constraints. The second most important context is really the UK aid strategy. And as part of the aid strategy, we had David Cameron's commitment to 0.7% gross national income to be committed as official development assistance. That was the headline, probably more significant or rather a consequence of that, is the fact that ODA and development changed from being a departmental responsibility for the UK to a governmental responsibility. And that ultimately led to the GCRF because we started to see development becoming an issue and a responsibility of departments other than the Department for International Development. Some of the other important features of the aid strategy are its emphasis on, if you like, the poorest and the most fragile countries and people around the world. So that emphasis on poverty, very much a driving theme. I mentioned that we now have development programmes across government and a number of those are research-related and in the same context as GCRF. The two that are particularly relevant to us as research councils in the Newton Fund and the GCRF because we are delivery partners for both of those funds. Just to introduce the Newton Fund, it predates the GCRF by a few years and it in many ways has similar characteristics but it also has some very important differences and it's worth appreciating those differences in practical terms when you're thinking about the opportunities that you might have. So the Newton Fund is an intergovernmental initiative. So it involves a partnership between the UK Government and an overseas government where they jointly identify areas of promising research opportunity. So it has that very strong bilateral element and that has some really powerful features. It means there is intrinsic balance, there is equity and it means that each country takes responsibility for its own jurisdiction. So it has all those advantages but it also has some limitations and as always the strengths are often very close to the weaknesses. So probably its biggest weakness is that the integration challenge that you need it's very easy to get projects, two projects rather than a single one but it's also because the partners are developing countries it's constrained by the resources that those countries have. So there's a degree of limitation. The other limitation I suppose with Newton is the fact that because it's a bilateral initiative it is very much defined by those countries and those relationships whereas in practice many research questions sit across multiple countries, sit across multiple regions not really defined by single countries. So Newton very strongly in that bilateral country space GCRF has different characteristics. It's a UK funded, UK led initiative which means that it has the advantage potentially for greater integration and it's not resource constrained other than the budget that the UK provides. It also has the potential to cover a wider geographic reach and potentially a broader range of issues and topics. So those are the two main differences but there are both opportunities that you ought to keep in your sights and Newton can lead to GCRF and vice versa but you should be exploiting the advantages in both that's probably the key message. So GCRF came through the spending review under the last government and continues and it's focused on global challenges with both disciplinary and increasingly an interdisciplinary perspective as Baronas Amos mentioned. It also has this requirement to focus on capacity to address global challenges and that's both here within the UK but also within development countries and it has a third objective around providing an agile response to emergencies and we won't dwell on that third category today but I'm happy to talk about that if people are interested. GCRF is a fund, it's not a programme and what that means is that it's a fund that is supported and delivered by a number of organisations and each organisation is involved in the area that best reflects its competence. So in particular we have the academies and their strength is really about identifying and supporting talented individuals. So their concentration is around fellowship schemes, mobility schemes and so on. The research councils, our competence is really about supporting collaborative programmes and that is the, if you like, the core programme that we deliver but alongside that we have involvement from the funding councils, strengthening capacity of the universities, UK space agency and at some stage I imagine there will be new delivery partners coming and stream. So the strategy for GCRF was published a couple of months ago now and it really drew on the points that I made earlier particularly on the SDGs and from it looked at the areas where research could really make some traction and it had three main themes that are outlined here. The first is essentially about the provision of basic needs so it's research which is designed or aimed or intended to help people have everything they need in which to thrive and prosper. Food, education, health, energy, water, sanitation, so on. The second broad area of opportunity is really thinking about how we live together in societies and communities and in particular how we live together in a way which doesn't destroy the environment or the world around us or conversely in societies that are not themselves threatened by the changes that are going on in the world around us and the broader environment. And the third area of focus is very much thinking about the dark side of the human condition to do with human rights, conflict, migration and so on. So what we have there is a broad space, a broad agenda which has the potential to draw on the expertise across the full faculty. So this is not an agenda for the scientists or the humanities or social sciences or life sciences. It's an opportunity for all of those disciplinary expertise both on themselves but critically how they can come together to think about problems in new ways and that is very much the theme of Rob's presentation later. These are intended to be a broad sense of direction. The themes themselves shouldn't be regarded as silos or an inclusive agenda. Individual research projects can quite easily address multiple aspects of these and we would regard that as a desirable feature, not a weakness. The other key feature of the strategy is it identifies some criteria that all the delivery partners will use. They're not necessarily all of the criteria that will be used all of the time, but they will provide an overlay across everything that we do. First one is research excellence and it's fair to say that that's part of the DNA of both research councils and the academies. Our purpose is not to move away from our core mission of the pursuit of knowledge, it's actually to use excellent research to deliver development benefit. The second key criteria is probably worth dwelling on and that's ODA compliance and the language is perhaps a little bit unhelpful because it has a sense of being an administrative requirement. It's not, it's much more than that. It's a philosophical focus on actually delivering against ODA requirements, delivering benefit and impact. The third area I think we'll come up a couple of times today is the concept of equity and partnership and mutuality and this is kind of in line with the point that Baroness Amos made about the tone that people have, the tone and the language and it's ensuring that the research we support is not extractive, it is of mutual benefit and that the partnerships that we support reflect that. And then finally or in many ways firstly because in practical terms this should be the driving theme behind the challenge leg research is that the research that GCRF supports should be very unambiguously problem focused. So it's focused on the problems, global problems, particularly those global problems manifesting developing countries. Because this is an ODA fund that means it has to comply with the OECD requirements and geographically that's represented on the diagram here by the countries of focus and what you have at the purple countries which are the middle income countries and then the low income countries particularly concentrated in Southern Africa. So what we are looking to support through the GCRF are projects which will unambiguously look to make a difference within those jurisdictions. And just to kind of reiterate, I went dwell on these the challenge and impact focus it's still excellent research but it's what's driving the research and one thing to think about in terms of the impact focus potential for scaling up potential for making a difference trying to quantify the size and potential breadth of the problem that you're looking to address. Second kind of theme of the day really and again something to think about and reflect in your own space is the need for interdisciplinary research excellence which sounds a bit glib in practice interdisciplinary research is incredibly challenging and the observation I'd leave with you is that in my experience across multiple domains experts tend to compute interdisciplinary within their own frame of reference so a chemist's view of interdisciplinarity versus German study's view of interdisciplinarity for instance in approaching this problem and GCRF I'd ask you to very much try to reach into somebody else's frame of reference and try and understand their philosophy of research because the cultures of research are much much more complicated than people necessarily appreciate particularly when you're looking at cultures of research in global terms. The other dimension that's absolutely critical to GCRF is the idea of partnership in global terms and the need for equitable, meaningful, useful collaboration. Don't approach projects as an exercise in gathering together as many names as possible think seriously about why you're partnering with people both in disciplinary expert terms but also in country terms and make sure that mutuality is real and thought through right from the outset co-design is probably the most significant positive thing that you can do. I mentioned that we were moving from concept through into reality and this is just to give you a sense of progress to date so earlier on I showed you the DAC list this was taken from the RCUK website last week so all of our projects are now in the public domain and you can see both thematically and here geographically how the portfolio of the research councils is developing and what's been interesting is a lot of the early projects that we supported were very much building on the collaborations that we had already established and so the research councils had a strong presence in India and in China and had a decade of supporting collaborative programs in those regions so we had a lot of early activity around Asia increasingly we're seeing our portfolio spread around the world and people talk about the global south we've got some very interesting programs in the northern hemisphere it's not just about south Africa is probably the most interesting area and the way that's starting to take shape because as well as the dynamic between the middle income countries and the low income countries probably more significant is what's starting to emerge in terms of anglophone versus francophone countries so we can see the patterns of collaboration starting to take shape and I think this will be one of the interesting features of GCRF looking forward how it's starting to develop around the world I was always told you should tell them what's important tell them again and then tell them again we will repeat this theme of equitable partnership throughout the day so please do take it seriously in developing the Global Challenge Research Fund what we've sought to do and we've been doing this progressively over the last year and a bit is move our reach beyond the UK and step by step changing the policies that we do in terms of how we can fund activities around the world so most of the research councils traditionally concentrate on the UK not all of them but that's our core jurisdiction increasingly we're funding research organisations around the world and we're also looking to support partnerships with other organisations around the world some key organisations that are already very strongly represented in the portfolio and probably will going forward other role of NGOs, civil society organisations government agencies and multinationals so as well as thinking about your partners in research terms it's also worse thinking about the other organisations that can bring something to the research that you do but in addition can help ensure that research has impact and benefit so it's not just about research one of the other key features of GCRF is that the project are complicated it's not like your loan scholar model of research that can be managed within its own context often projects are complicated over distance, time, culture and language and our observation is that projects of that nature requires a serious consideration of how it all works the pithy reality around project management around governance and around management and there's a lot of money, there's a lot of risk and there's a lot of opportunity and it does require a sensible approach so what I'd like to do now is just to give you again an update on where we are and this was something that Baroness Amos really helped us pull together in the end and we finished our first collective call this is something that the research councils have never done before to this sort of scale so this is a funding opportunity that was open to the whole of the UK research base for collaboration across the whole of the OECD duct list and it was very much focused on building global partnerships and the exercise as well was a strong partnership with the university sector because we asked the university sector to put forward their strongest proposals from their own institutions so it was very interesting competition in many many ways and through that we've supported 37 programmes we'll hear about some later across a huge range of space and disciplinary this gives you a sense of the diversity the significant feature of the competition is we were completely open in terms of the outcomes so there was no predetermined strategy to favour food, health, poverty and gender or whatever so this is the outcomes of the if you like consideration on merit and we do have across that span a huge range of challenges interestingly project 38 was addressing sustainable production which is unfortunate but nonetheless we've got the breadth that we were hoping for and some of the booklets are available online we've actually had a run on them and they all disappeared before we got here but it was a booklet we produced for Joe Johnson and I do think it warrants wider use actually cos as well as describing the projects in lay terms probably the most interesting part of this is the support we've got for individual projects from people, particularly those from outside the UK in terms of why this research is important and useful important message actually that I'm pretty sure there will be some people here who will be thinking of GCRF as the research councils with a badge on and if you're thinking that way it's unhelpful and will probably not help you it's important to appreciate that the GCRF is an ODA programme and that means it is part of the UK's commitment to official development assistance part of the aid programme and it must be thought of in those terms alongside all of the other things that the UK government does in support of development it's important to think that way because that's the driving purpose behind it in terms of impact and benefit we're not trying to replicate DFID we're not trying to out DFID DFID because there are world class development agency and what they're doing what we're looking to do is to operate within the norms of the research councils but deliver against the objectives of the UK aid so don't lose sight of that and it's important that everybody involved understands that there will be requirements as a result of that and consequences there will also be challenges there are if you like pressures on the UK's aid programme and as a GCRF grant holder you will be subject to those pressures those scrutiny there will be people looking to misrepresent what you do for instance as Baroness Amos said earlier so keep that thought keep clear in your mind why is that what you're doing warrants being part of that aid programme in addition because it's in that space there is legitimate public scrutiny around what you're doing and what we're doing over the last year we've had internal audits in the research councils of both Newton and GCRF the national audit office have taken interest in the BAES ODA programmes and the independent commission for aid impact which is a parliamentary body has just completed a review of GCRF the international development committee in parliament before the general election we're doing a review of non-DFID ODA so there is huge public scrutiny around these programmes and it's important that you're aware of that and you operate in a way which is consistent with the ethical practices that I talked about earlier that's kind of very much the context for GCRF what I thought I'd do now is give you a sense of the things that are in play at the moment probably the most interesting opportunity is it really reflects what's happened to GCRF because the GCRF programme has been introduced at pace and as part of that the portfolios have developed very rapidly so both within the research councils within the academies and the other delivery partners we now have quite a substantial programme of research that's been developed and the risk is that that goes off all over the place becomes quite scattergun and we see that risk and one of the things that we're keen to do is actually to get some research leadership into those portfolios particularly to improve co-ordination between projects make people aware of the opportunities think about in-country activity that has some resonance together maybe and critically to think about how portfolios of research relate to some key stakeholders so we're currently advertising for a number of posts to address some of these portfolios and these are the first six and they represent areas that have emerged to date so this is not a complete or an exclusive set but it's where we are at the moment so if people are interested in those sort of roles they should have a look on the RCUK website and follow through because it is actually essentially a recruitment process and we are looking for people who have if you like, the commitment to the things we're trying to achieve in those portfolios a number of other developments that people might be interested in firstly, one of the consequences of all these different funds across government is that there is huge potential for mischief and waste and the Treasury recognised that and one of the things that the Treasury in particular have been driving for is this strategic coordination for ODA research and this is an activity which will oversee all the government ODA funds and try to ensure that there is complementarity and integration where needed and that's in play the chair of the board has been identified and should be announced next week that is quite a positive step in terms of again trying to get this coherence going so that if you like is the governmental layer within the research councils our focus this week and next week is very much on the UK engagement these sort of events looking beyond that and through the year ahead and the year beyond that probably our focus is very much on engagement outside the UK and in particular thinking at a regional level about engagement in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia bringing together experts from the UK with experts from developing countries and key regional stakeholders and these are really to help us develop our agenda to help partnerships for on to strengthen networking and critically to take the generation of future strategy into a global context we don't want our future to be defined by the UK necessarily the other development that will come is that the reformation of the higher education system is in the way the research councils will come together by the second of April under a new organisation called UK Research and Innovation as part of that research councils UK will disappear although it never really existed and just to reassure you that in that transition the global challenges research fund and Newton fund will continue and probably more usefully the team that are currently supporting it that I showed at the start are part of the continuity so the organisation changes but the function continues so that was me giving you a quick canter through GCRF how we've got to where we are and more importantly where we see the future going what I'd like to do now if that's okay is take a few questions and maybe get a reaction from people where appropriate somebody's got a microphone Thank you My name is Ghassan Abseta I'm the director for the conflict medicine programme at American University in Beirut We have an issue with bodies like yours and other bodies still classifying Libya, Syria, Iraq as middle income countries that affects our ability to access research but it is so flagrantly completely has nothing to do with the real circumstances of these countries the other issue that we have in this old classification is it fails to understand that there is now complete regionalisation in the area that there are 11 million people living in countries where they don't originate and our geography in terms of health seeking behaviour has completely changed and so whereas a place like Beirut is high middle income we actually in our institutions see patients from Libya, Yemen, Iraq and Syria because their health systems have collapsed and so there is a need to try to kind of further either update or delineate these new changes Thank you I understand the issue I understand it very well actually we are obliged to operate within the OECD framework although the British government does input to the refinement of that and that's in play at the moment but that's a different issue when we developed the GCRF strategy we actually went through the cycle of how geographically focused we wanted to be and in particular this balance between low income and middle income countries and at the outset we decided that we wanted to be as open as possible but give a focus on the problems of poverty and part of the rationale for that is not so much in your own region but thinking about India and China in particular India in particular but also China where you have huge regional and income disparities so in some ways the hard delineation at a country level doesn't necessarily mean anything if you're actually focusing on the problems in reality so for the fund itself it is mostly flat in terms of geography within the constraints but I'm not saying that that's necessarily a question that's closed forever one of the things that we are mindful of is that we need to ensure that there is a distinction between GCRF and Newton in particular and if the GCRF became too like Newton then we would probably have to do something but in general we're looking at questions that are manifest it's where the question sits rather than following slavishly somebody else's classification of countries any other questions or? sorry I don't know if this works my name is Lamia Shahata and I'm from an NGO called INASP first of all I wanted to thank you for outlining the GCRF fund and particularly for stressing the equitable partnerships and capacity strengthening theme so we are a non-research NGO that does capacity strengthening and we'd very much like to be involved in supporting academic partners in doing that however there is a restriction on the amount of funding that we ourselves can access so it's quite hard to reconcile both so it'd be quite helpful to hear from you why there is that funding restriction and how we could be involved while covering our costs thank you I'm not going to completely doubt the issue but I think eligibility will be covered in a lot more detail under Rob's presentation in a minute but just to give you a general sense funding eligibility is a fluid and developing issue for the research councils because we've moved from a position where each research council had very different facilities mostly were quite limited with the exception perhaps of the MRC and the ESRC and we're moving towards a more open and permissive arrangement across all of the research councils but I don't think we're at the end goal yet but just to give you a sense of the philosophy what we want to do is to fund overseas research organisations and the same principles that we would apply to the UK by which I mean fully funding the costs of research including a contribution to the research environment and the indirect costs now obviously we're not going to impose track on developing countries because that will be brutal so but our first focus is very much thinking about how to support the research organisations the second dimension is obviously if you like other organisations particularly those that could help into supportive impact and the NGOs and so on and then there's a space where we won't go in terms of private sector and government but the boundaries between those are actually they're kind of in play and developing at the moment we also need to be mindful of our own requirements around governance and assurance as well which is okay I'm aware of time and Jonathan and what I'd like to do now is to as I mentioned earlier to introduce some of the research that we're supporting and so Jonathan Goodhand I believe is probably quite well known to the audience and has practical experience of many of the issues around conflict and NGO support around the world particularly Afghanistan's Sri Lanka I understand but anyway over to you Jonathan Morning everybody so my name is Jonathan Goodhand I'm the PI for one of the 37 projects that have recently been funded that Mark just mentioned and it's a project called drugs and disorder building sustainable peace time economies in the aftermath of the war now the project hasn't started it should be starting in October we're going to get the letter of agreement any day now I think so what I can't tell you anything about my experience of the project itself of course but what I can talk about is my experience of trying to put one of these things together and I know there must be many people in the room who are thinking of this so I hope I can give you a bit of a few reflections on what we've learnt from the process as you'll know from these big research bids when you go to the interview stage you're asked to give a kind of like a five minute spiel what is this research about so what I thought I'd do is I'd give you my five minute spiel that we presented in the interview just to give you an idea of what this project is about in a nutshell and then I'd kind of step back and tell you a bit of the back story and I think we haven't got a lot of time so I'll be about no more than 15 minutes to give some time for questions so okay, I'm going to step into salesman mode now and this is the spiel that we gave so our overarching question is how can war economies be transformed into peace economies and regions experiencing or recovering from armed conflict now one of the keys to ending conflict and addressing state fragility is to better understand the sick economies and their impacts and we aim to find answers to the question of how war economies become peace economies and one of the key resources driving such economies is illegal drugs trillions of dollars have been spent on the war on drugs but the securitised approaches have manifestly failed often increasing state fragility and have adversely affected the health and livelihoods of communities and households in drug producing countries but we think now there's a major and new opportunity to address this issue there's a policy consensus the policy consensus on the war on drugs is breaking down and there's a growing recognition of the need for drug policies to be more pro-poor and aligned to the sustainable development goals so there's an opportunity but there's also an impasse and there are three major reasons for this how do you reconcile these fundamentally opposed policy fields drugs and developments we think there are three major barriers first there's a lack of robust empirically grounded evidence to inform policy base in fact you can think of few other policy areas where there is such a mismatch between the evidence base and the dominant policy paradigm secondly there's been a lack of sustained investment in methodologically robust research conducted by researchers from drug affected countries and then thirdly we think that southern voices have been marginalised in international drugs debates the perspective of communities and governments from drug producing countries needs to be far more central so that policies are more contextually attuned in a nutshell we aim to bridge this policy impasse and address these barriers and we intend to do research in three of the biggest drug producing countries in the world Afghanistan and Myanmar are responsible for over 90% of global heroin production Colombia more than 50% of global cocaine production drugs are central to the development challenges in these three countries and also there are a few other policy arenas in which there is such a geographical concentration of the problem and yet the effects are truly global we put together a team to address this which includes a number of UK based aid institutions academic civil society, private sector as well as research partners in the three countries we've worked together in smaller combinations for many years on drugs and development problems we now feel ready to take on a project of this size and to extend upon and amplify our existing collaborations we see this as a window of opportunity to build our capacities in order to exploit this transformational moment in drug policy debates what we intend to do is to deliver on three key outcomes in this project and I'm going to praise you very so I get to the end of my talk more quickly but first of all we want to build a new evidence space through sustained empirical research in these three drug producing countries we're particularly excited in this project about how we've developed mixed methods and produced what we think are innovative approaches to studying this problem that hasn't been done before so for example we are working with ALSIS who specialise in GIS spatial imagery in order to capture shifts in time of drug production of shifts in infrastructure in these borderland regions where drug production is taking place and combining with that with deep ethnographic research and also working with positive negatives in comic strips and augmented reality in order to humanise the narratives around drug production trafficking and consumption the second key output is to grow research capacity where it's most needed in the drug producing countries themselves and there's a whole range of customised trainings the developments of a massive open access online course and the intention here is to help our research partners become research hubs for methodological experimentation capacity building policy innovation within the regions within these drug producing areas and finally we want to engage with and transform drugs policy what works and what doesn't work we want to engage with the policy community we have got plans to develop a policy lab which tries to seed new approaches to develop which brings together the developments and the drugs communities we're working with Christian Aid who are engaging with civil society in the three countries and internationally and our intention the legacy of the project is to develop what we call the research consortium for the transformation of illicit economies and that will be launched in year three of the project and this will go beyond drugs and to sort more broadly at the transformation of illicit economies in these countries ok so that's my spiel I don't know if I asked five minutes but that's just to give you an idea what we chose to focus on in how we presented the project as you'll know with these kinds of research bids you never quite know what were the key determining factors that helped you to win it and you may have really good ideas that don't get funded and ones which you think are not quite as strong that do are difficult to kind of second guess and what I'm not going to do here is to try and give you a just so story about this is how we won the research when a research bid but these are some reflections about the process and how we went about it so first of all developing the idea and if you know Steven Johnson's idea of the slow hunch well we had in a way is a very slow hunch it wasn't this kind of eureka moment where someone individual decided this was a brilliant idea it was something that actually took place over more than ten years of working in different combinations and developing ideas collectively based on field work in the countries themselves so several of us have been working for more than two decades in drug producing countries and so it's been a process of gradual learning and experimentation to get us to the position where we felt ready to actually take on a bit of this magnitude I think that Mark emphasised the policy side of this and I think all of us are working on policy in different ways but we very explicitly try to position ourselves in what is a very highly contested field I mean there are the kind of the prohibitionist and the legalisers and it's a very, I can't think of a field in which policy based evidence is so rife it's a very kind of ideologically charged kind of space and so we try to position ourselves as being policy engaged but critical and not policy driven I think going ahead this is going to be really important in the project thinking about how we position ourselves in relation to these constellations of kind of power of policy engagement we've our team that we developed was one which again Mark emphasised this and we all say this and it's quite difficult in practice about interdisciplinary conversations interdisciplinary approaches particularly with drugs it's a field that's been dominated by the criminologists by the drugs experts by the security experts and we've purposely brought a team of people together who are historians anthropologists health experts, political economists to kind of bring in new perspectives to this field and to bring about kind of more methodologically innovative approaches finally I think it's important to emphasise here that we had several failed attempts at getting this idea funded I think the first time was seven years ago and I think this is the sixth time and each time we have adapted it and changed it and added to it if you don't the Samuel Beckett try again, fail again, fail better captures what's happened with this proposal we didn't kind of just suddenly deliver it it came out of a very long process of failure of learning and then submitting something that we thought was really coherent and robust building a team the teams really are coming out our field work we've been working at the coal face in these countries for many years particularly Myanmar and Afghanistan more than two decades in some cases we know our research partners we know each other's strengths and weaknesses a lot of it is based on friendships a lot of it is based on respect and trust and really for a subject like drugs and in highly conflicted environments you need to know your research partners very very well building up trust and knowing how we work together is absolutely central in terms of this bit in particular so our partnerships we all say this but they are genuine partnerships I know OSTR and AREU in Afghanistan I've known them for over a decade similarly Mandisadana and Pachitmigin are working in Myanmar I know their partners and have been working for more than a decade as well so the ideas for this came it wasn't just a UK based consortium who were desperately looking for partners it's been a part of a collective conversation I've talked a little bit about the complementarity in disciplinary methodological terms the team is also including senior and junior academics and I think that brings a kind of quite creative energy to the team and we have very diverse geographical experience so we have very deep experience but we are able to think comparatively because we have people who are working simultaneously in more than one of these contexts finally writing the proposal and I suppose that the first thing is that these you know we saw this as a huge opportunity that the magnets is a 7 million pound project so we could never have done what we've put together in a much smaller project so it's a huge opportunity of course though there are costs and there's something you need to be really aware of and this is very obvious I'm sure to most of you that you need to put in time to preparing this it really you need to clear the decks I actually had research leave when the bid was announced if I had a heavy teaching term I just wouldn't have been able to do this and the other thing is drawing on a committed team who can help you with the process and I think probably we were working very late nights for a long long time probably there was too much pressure on a small number of individuals so the more you can kind of spread that load in putting this together the better another thing that's very much at the forefront of our mind at the moment because we're recruiting a project manager so if you know anyone who wants to be involved in a credibly exciting innovative project over the next four years as a project manager spread the word but for people who are potential PIs you obviously need to think very carefully here because with this kind of project there are costs there is a danger you're going to spend all your time managing research rather than doing research and how is this going to have an impact on publications and your ability to do field research so I think thinking about the governance thinking about the project management management side of it is really really key and I know that's not my forte so getting a strong project management team together is really important we produced this research proposal collectively I mean there are about four of us who did most of the drafting but all of it all drafts were sent out to the whole team and everyone got an opportunity to to kind of feed into the process to the extent possible we had face to face meetings where it wasn't possible we had Skype meetings so it really was a kind of an extended process of revisions and getting everyone to feed into the process and it was actually quite noticeable that excitement developed through doing that so there was a very positive energy that came out of it obvious thing is keep to the brief and Mark has emphasised the things that you need to be thinking about here but you know the challenge keep to the what the global challenges are and how are you going to address them in our case the capacity building side was key and had to be highlighted in the proposal finally the interview and presentation I don't think we practice beforehand so I think preparing and practicing for that is really important the dynamics of the interview I think it was really important I don't know if this was crucial to the final decision but two of our partners were there at the interview and one of our partners from Afghanistan and one from Colombia so I think we had a genuinely inclusive kind of team with expertise from the three countries people from from them has worked from these countries and also different thematic expertise within the interview team and we all handled the questions between us so you know it was I think it really was a genuinely genuine team effort so I think those are just a few insights I'm sure most of them are pretty obvious to anyone who's got experience of developing research bids but I think we're going to go on to the next presentation now and then I'm happy to answer questions after that. Thank you that was for me because I was on the other side of that that was Deja Vu so thank you very much Jonathan and can I just introduce Camilo from UCL who has an interesting background because your main is very much on urban design and cities and that's one of the one of the largest growing portfolios within GCR well not largest but one of the the more dynamic portfolios within GCRF but your other area of interest is around migration and that really is an active area for research at the moment so over to you Thank you Jonathan Alright good morning everyone I'll try to be quick and fast so I'm going to present very quickly a project on which I'm a co-high so I'm working and speaking on behalf of a wider and bigger team and the project that I'm I'm presenting to you is titled Relief which stands for refugees education, learning, information technology and entrepreneurship for the future. It's a long title It's led by Professor Henrietta Moore the director of the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity sits at the Bartlett at the Faculty of Build Environment at UCL and he's organized and managed around and in partnerships with the University College of London, the AUB in Beirut and the Centre for Lebanese Studies there I'll try to outline the basics of the project and I'll try to complement what's very interesting Jonathan was saying and I'll focus mainly on two three elements relevance and partnerships the issue about trans-disciplinarity and the impact that were mentioned before and of course we can continue the conversation later on Of course I put a very brief into the baseline but in order to see the global challenges that we were discussing before the Relief Centre takes up one of the most pressuring contemporary global challenge which is mass displacement the large scale displacement and its multi-faceted socio-political economic cultural and spatial dimension are inevitably the global challenge so while both the media in Europe and North America are focusing on the arrival in Europe and in different forms of emergency and assistance often there is a violent relationship and reaction in urban area mainly what is often overlooked is that the majority of refugees about 86% are hosted in low and middle-income countries so we are speaking about a number an economy of one that every 122% in the world is a displaced, forcibly displaced person so the relevance of the challenge is there what is quite important is that the hosting population the burden of the displacement is definitely not shared equally so poor countries are hosting the majority of the displaced population so those are the two fundamental challenges that the Relief Centre is trying to address the basic question the central that Relief has is to address the challenge of displacement through the theoretical lenses of prosperity so the starting point is that although the challenging question are linked with the erosion of services the insufficient funding services and slow economic growth solution are and must not be narrowly focus on economic growth only so prosperity became the central element that is more about just economy wealth and it includes non-monetary forms of value and skills and knowledge and well-being social capital and all those dimension that ffosters entrepreneurship at different level so the quality of life so prosperity became the entry point around which the challenge would be somehow constructed so the Relief Centre seeks to have the entry point of the conceptual and policy level impact by reframing the debate on forced migration around four key elements of mass displacement one is around this idea of sustainable city broadly speaking the second one is fundamentally around education and capacity building the third is the idea of technologies to deliver education on the move so the specific situation and the fourth are the development of the metrics around which communities, NGOs CBOs and academics and government can measure and foster this idea of well-being and prosperity so to a certain extent the idea is continuously looking at entering from inclusive growth prosperity developing at the centre technologies and innovation in collaboration and education and reframing the idea of an impact now the Relief Centre is focusing only in Lebanon is which I mean there are a colleague from here so we can debate that more specifically is the one country that has one of the highest per capita refugees and displaced population in the world and is a paradigmatic case in which multiple overlapping displacement are happening in the shared space of both urban and very urban Lebanese territory so Lebanon is inhabited approximately by 1.5 million refugees and over of which 1 million are mainly fleeing from Syria but of course there is others communities of former established refugees and IDPs that belong to different national and ethnic community so for a smaller country as Lebanon with a population of 6 million the influence of people poses a number of challenges with strains of resources, public services job it creates social tension and hostility between host and refugees in a sort of dichotomical category but opens also the possibility to reflect the relationality between refugees and in which the shared space physical, social, educational and emotional with other can reconfigure the relationship host versus displacement so the idea is that can we treat differently refugees by and from passive victim in need and moving through the lenses of prosperity to something that is more outside and simply a passive landscape so in a way it can be built a shared space around this so relief somehow play at the centre policy maker and practitioners to actively explore the potential to support the development the maintenance and the welcoming community and the community of welcome reciprocally the focus is on the overlapping this basement and provide an entry point to recognize the meaning fully engage with the agency of refugees and displacement so embrace the messiness if you want and try to look at different spheres of livability of different spheres of politics in powers of course so the the central dimension is the role of university the role of university became the hub if you want the centres around which multiplicities of resources are mobilized in develop around the creation of different data and different values towards the prosperity to go to the first the research question there are four key research questions at the centre into this structure the first one is what does inclusive growth and sustainable prosperity looks like in the context of displacement how can we improve the quality of life in urban environments in Lebanon specifically and how we drive innovation and measure value creation in the context of the same country and how we can research and knowledge transfer capabilities to university to be reconfigured to develop an innovative response to those challenges so there is a there are four different areas around which the research is conducted but what is important is that to a certain extent the methodology is very much around the involvement of a network of stakeholders around university both private civil society and the academic to develop a series of initiatives that mobilize continuously different sets of capital and one of that is around education specifically and the mocks are certainly there to address the specificity of the move a point about the partnerships and the partnership was a starting point but was also the end so the idea of the relief is that the program was built on an extensive network of partnerships already in place before in within UCL and outside UCL and the network was already constructed and was possible to be maintain and develop thanks to two interdisciplinary experiences that were happening already at the moment of the writing of the proposal in UCL through the the Institute of Advanced Studies in the School of Geography specifically a network of people in academics and civil society concerned with refugee issues so it was called people on the move and this network developed the possibility to engage together with different colleagues and starting the relationship with other colleagues the impact in this relief works begin of course with the focus on people needs in the specific context of Lebanon but the project is designed to mobilize resources available to specifically university in mobilization of research innovation and education in order to address the needs into this sustainable and inclusive fashion the four area the four streams of sustainable city, the value prosperity and education are all four built together to mobilize resources the partnership was as mentioned was entered into a wider existing network strong partnerships as was mentioned by Jonathan before there was an absolute great connection with the activist group and civil society across different regions and not only in Lebanon there was the possibility of having small funds to activate preparatory meeting and event both in London and in Beirut crucial there was this idea of balancing international staff or skills colleague with the framework that Jonathan mentioned is certainly very valid also for us and UK based staff central into that was the idea of balancing the different expertise that a global university like UCF already has in place so working across the faculty of engineer, the development planning unit, the institute of prosperity, the school of geography and the institute of education was already fundamental to the alliances around the structure of course the complex governance that require this big program was absolutely central and so the idea was to develop a center that is a center in Beirut so there is an absolute center in collection and chair of an management committee fundamentally their advisory board at most of the other process but and specifically in order to increase the impact a public engagement committee and the public engagement committee is a a role into the institution that continuously engage with different stakeholder not only in Lebanon but also in other countries that will be touched by the program there will be an impact in terms of geographical impact and quantifying the impact is very very important there are two interesting elements one is that the program is designed to the impact into the research project so the impact is not seen at the end of the research project but is while doing the research per se that's why the engagement that's why the engagement with governance policy maker at the municipal level at the community level at regional level two concrete examples into that is there are already other funds through British academies for example that has been put together to complement element of the relief funds that serves to move away into a more regional network there are three workshops that are planned outside Lebanon in order to drain and learn the experience from Lebanon in other countries about Greece specifically but there is an element of the fluidification of impact and the regional level there of course so in a way there are both a replication of network outside and inside so the idea is to aim of the program is to ensure that relief work is carried out collaboratively with community in Lebanon and outside it's based in London outside it's the engagement is in the range of stakeholders there is a public engagement committee chaired by Dr Henry Fyldes there is a center to develop the capacity not as an end result and is designed to mobilize resource available to universities specifically so the center built and this is absolutely central and probably is my last message into the co-production of the co-design on a network of resources and connection that was already in place while before the call and this was the very central capitalization of the call so this was not a project that was done in two days with ideas that were developed over a couple of meetings but were based on a fundamental deep network of engagement as research across the impact of a project like that and continuity is embedded into the fact that there is a strong partnerships institution in there but the aim is to learning beyond the network and beyond the into the whole region specifically of the Middle East of course all the other element that Jonathan was mentioning are absolutely still valid just the timing issue the project started in April late April beginning of May and so we are at the very beginning of that period of an official launch and set up being exactly all this very complex though very challenging mechanism of governance of an ambitious programme that put at the centre the mobility of people and the capital that can be developed at the local level that's it, thank you Thank you to our two presenters I think the problem focus is pretty obvious in those actually we've got an opportunity to take some questions but I'm going to take the opportunity of us mine first if that's okay and it's really to both of you and one of the consequences of GCRF in the early days was the need to move quickly and both of you effectively have built projects based on existing partnerships I just wondered if you thought to both of you really the scope to grow that partnership within your current ambitions or whether the complexity of the project is going to make that really difficult so I suppose Jonathan first 7 million it's a big project and I think there's a common message that has come out of this you can't just cobble this together the time frames were really short so if you wanted to be credible you had to have an existing set of relationships and an idea to build upon we built into our project is this idea of the research centre for the transformation of the listed economies so that is actually based on the goal of building that up and getting additional funding to extend into the future so we said in our bid that five years was the beginning but we saw this as a longer-term commitment so that's we've got it factored into our programme the beginnings of conversations in year one and two about expanding this into this research centre and then seeking funding to grow it it's pretty much the same I think the point I wanted to make is that yes it's built on previous partnerships but as the more conversations you have the more people you meet the more those resources will become available and for us relief is really much a dynamic reflections is a dynamic hub where the mobilisation of resources not only financially of course are happening exactly because there is a dynamism in and embedded in this very specific case on a country bound on a region and across UCL in this case as the main hub and the Lebanese in the regional country so it's the dynamic of the relationship that I think is very important to highlight thank you now over to you hello my name is Tony Friedler from the Institute of Public Health at the University of Cambridge it follows on very much from what you just asked but now looking at the funder side of things I can see it's tempting to fund people have already got things up and running but if you want to be really transformative where do you think the balance should be between things that are up and running and things that are new or combinatorial I think this is a segue into Rob who's coming next to be honest but the I think the initial activities and the initial calls by necessity built on what was around for the activity that we're looking at now we've consciously tried to squeeze as much time as possible upfront to allow greater opportunity for people to form new relationships it's almost certainly not enough but to be honest we've squeezed elsewhere deliberately so we can maximise the front-end time the formation, the ideation space what I would say observation from the regional activity we've done so far is there is too much lone scholar thinking out there there is too much people being defined by their existing friends and family and actually if people are serious about doing things at a grand scale something really special then they do need to be pushing themselves to new partnerships and putting some effort into cultivating those relationships because I know it's not easy thank you there's a question there's two on this side Gaspel Institute of Cancer Research here in London as we all know air travel is a large and growing contributor to climate change and climate change affects developing countries in the vulnerable communities within them disproportionately I wonder if either of the projects we heard from today or any of the funded projects managed to build in measures to mitigate the obviously inevitable flying back and forth that is involved in these worldwide collaborations the honest answer is we haven't given that has not been the forefront of our thinking on this but I think we certainly we're looking at ways of not ending up traveling all over the world unnecessarily a lot of the things that we're doing can be done by Skype and conference calls or whatever there is a kind of climate our project is not explicitly about climate change but there's a climate change dimension because the kinds of people we're working with their livelihoods are being profoundly affected by climate change this is one of the reasons actually why drug cultivation is so central it's become more central in many of these pre-credits countries but we're not so we probably need to consider it more it's certainly a very important point for us we haven't framed it as such such reason but I think that the the volume, the density the amount of the funds, activities and partnership that happens in our case in Lebanon is way more of the one that happened outside so there is an investment into reducing the mobility if you want and investing into the local mobility of both resources and engagement this is inevitable in the way the project is constructed technically and mechanically but it's certainly very important I do think that this question goes also in other element of the discussion not only at the level of funding and reducing the cost but how we are absolutely quotient of the vulnerabilities that are created but those economies that are developing there and that's for example in our case where the resources are already reduced and erode will be definitely an element that will be taken into consideration and the second answer is the emphasis on technology and mobility and innovation mocs in your case, mocs in our case and the research around innovative way in which X numbers of activity and thinking about agriculture in the case of Lebanon could be definitely benefiting that discussion certainly Troy Sturmbur geography at Oxford and particularly for Jonathan we would also like to include an Afghan component how did you pitch this because we're told it's unsafe our partners could work there but we couldn't and how do you address the FCO and these other issues thank you with great difficulty SARS is actually pretty good we have a number of researchers at SARS who are going to Afghanistan so we're able to do research there the obvious point is that we have a whole set of ethical and security protocols that we consider in great detail in conversation with our partners the two partners that we work in Afghanistan, OSDR and AREU has been working with many years and they it's because we have a close relationship with them we can have an honest discussion about where the security risks are and how to mitigate those and the GIS imagery is also another dimension of our research it gives us another kind of looking at non-communicable diseases and that's been used as a platform around a number of the ODA activities in other areas you think about energy technologies which is another major development issue you need to be thinking about the commercialisation opportunities around that looking forward I think one of the developments that will probably happen to the fund is that Innovate UK will take on a role similar to the one that the UK space agency has which is to bring private sector interests to a lot of these challenges so it's really actually it's a question for yourself and for Dr Camilo is there mechanisms by which you want to turn knowledge into policy in terms of asking for institution or providing conduits for lobbying both within the UK and abroad one of the issues that Dr Camilo highlighted is e-learning e-learning is one of the biggest problems we face and ironically it's one of the biggest strengths of British universities in my field provide over 55 degrees in clinical sciences yet across the whole region they're not recognised by any of the governments and so let's say one of the issues that comes out of the research is around e-learning and recognition of e-learning are you going to be able to push for a mechanism by which this knowledge is transformed into some kind of policy is that one for me to start with I think it's impact's always a challenging issue in every domain particularly in the policy practice space it's the extent to which you're looking at the project level activity where often if you like it's there are kind of routes but to some extent limited or you're looking at a body of activity and I think the way we are developing our thinking is to look for impact at the project level and see that as the mandate of the people leading the individual projects but then in addition through thinking about the research portfolio as a whole to see where are the opportunities to take research forward through into policy and practice and that's part of the rationale for recruiting academic leaders into some of these portfolios who can translate that policy practice research language but in terms of specific things that are going on there's a GCRF AHRC conference in a week or so specifically focused on the conflicts portfolio and a large part of that is to see whether there are generic opportunities for doing things for impact in particular to bring stakeholders in the multinational sort of dimension UNHCR Red Cross and so on and the other thing to not lose sight of is the way we work with DFID because DFID have a research programme which is a comparable size to GCRF and is more naturally suited towards some of these impact orientated stuff so the way we work with DFID I think is absolutely critical to this but quickly as you said education for us is very central because of the situation but is the field where we have seen the overlapping competing complexity of the displacement in the whole society being very much at play different curricula the negativity, the asses different shift the fact that teachers are not paid for doing X numbers of so being embedded as a challenge fundamentally I hope that would be already an element of the creativities around which others in multiple stakeholders that already are doing an experimenting little project can be somehow scaled up through the innovation which is mainly digital innovation for us crucial has been to use two education partners within UCL, the Institute of Education and in the Lebanese studies there to work exactly on that so to have experiences and capital to develop that digital stakeholders, innovative stakeholders and I must say creativity and innovation we are working directly with a civil society organisation that does education through providing playgrounds in both refugee camps and in marginal countries so through others means rather than the conventional schooling curricula production so combining that into the process of creation the third element is probably the creation of what we call the prosperity index which is one of the legacy of the project so the construction of an index that difference stakeholder mainly at the state level and academic level could use as to monitor exactly and to guide the prosperity towards a better future so probably stopping that policy practice from the two points completely not just one following the other right I'm aware I know there's more questions but we have overrun and we have a short time for a coffee break before we go into the next session so we will be another opportunity for questions but I would like to have an opportunity to thank the speakers so if we could reconvene at 12 o'clock that would be fantastic held miserably with 10 minutes over and that's all my fault but can I bring us all together and I think the last two presentations were moving into the space of the practicalities and my colleague Rob who's going to join us in a minute is going to take us into the practical reality of applying for funding through our next significant activity so over to you Rob Thanks very much Mark My name is Rob Felstead I work for Mark in the international development team working specifically on the global challenges research fund I led the growing research capability call which is the first collective fund call and today I'll be giving you some more information detailed information about the second collective fund call the interdisciplinary research hubs call so I'll try and get through as much there's quite a lot of detail here I'll try and be quick and concise but there is quite a lot of information and I will also take questions at the end so the interdisciplinary research hubs call this is a call looking for impact focus interdisciplinary research hubs the rules for these is they're established and led by eligible UK research organisations and we're looking to fund 12 to 15 hubs depending on the quality of them and they can be of a size in terms of finances of 8 to 20 million full economic cost and they will be 5 years long in terms of the assessment process and I'll talk about that a bit later the key deadlines are the intention to submit which is a week from today then there is the outline phase which the deadline for that is the 9th of November and then we have for those that are successful the full proposal deadline will be May of next year and then we have the decisions and then the hubs will be due to start in December of next year so it seems like quite a long time away but these things actually always seem to come up faster than you'd imagine so the key focus of the hubs is around intractable development challenges so to as quick as I can explain this there's obviously a lot more detail in the call text these are multi-dimensional complex challenges that we cut across sustainable development goals they're generally resistant to change prone to fragmented responses and they generally can't be solved by a single organisation sector or discipline and so in order to tackle them you need the capacity to think across and between the sustainable development goals with a clear understanding of how those different disciplines that are brought in to solve it can contribute as well as have an awareness of underlying factors and contexts so this is really at the heart of this call and it's very important that when you're thinking of developing a bid that you really think about whether the challenge or challenges that you're tackling with this hub really fit this criteria if you're not sure please do come and talk to us my colleague Sean is kind of like the lead expert on this and even if we can't give you a definitive answer please do still ask the question anyway because we might be able to steer you a bit further towards what we're looking for in terms of what a hub would actually look like so I'll start you off, there's a lot of information on this slide so I'll start you off in the top left hand corner to it being challenge and impact focus so that's kind of where you start you're looking at it being focused around the challenge that I just described and then it being looking to have impact so solving that challenge you will be generating excellent and novel research but you should be able to translate that research into measurable development impacts and it can be or it should be a broad range of scalable impacts as well as being a sustainable program so it should have a legacy beyond the initial five year investment and that should be built into the design of the program if I move over to then the top right hand quadrant focus is interdisciplinary research excellence so what we're looking at is using and developing excellent research capacity in the UK and developing countries but also with the capacity to think across between and within sustainable development goals you should be looking to assemble new knowledge and insights across different research communities relevant to the challenge and of course you can and should where possible strategically build these investments on to the partnerships I know Mark spoke a lot about this this morning I'll emphasise it again because it is so important for these co-development with international partners and substantial genuins as that word again genuine and meaningful collaboration and engagement so these do have to be genuine partnerships and full consideration of the relevant developing country context as well so that's kind of really a key part of this and then now on to the final quadrant organisation and leadership so you should be looking to have shared values and goals across the program with strong research and operational leadership so that's making sure that you have the right management in place and that that is properly resourced from the program something that's very important making sure that you do have the resources to manage the program within these very large awards and included in that is the appropriate and effective monitoring and evaluation so for these big programs the monitoring and evaluation is a key part of that in terms of identifying the indicators towards impact and progress of the project and that being part of a full monitoring and evaluation framework but within that there is the ability to learn and adapt these aren't things that are set in stone at the beginning of five years these will adapt and change throughout time and so that is very important part of it so I want to talk a little bit about eligibility so it's a bit about the nitty-gritty now it's important though because we have recently updated our call text that about eight days ago that went live and it just clarifies and goes into more detail about what we set out in the initial call document so the PI hub the PI principal investigator or a hub director does need to be employed by the lead organisation and they should be employed for the duration of the hub that lead organisation does have to be based in the UK so they have to be eligible to receive RCUK funding this call is also open to public sector research establishments and if there are people from those who are wanting to apply they need to get in contact with us to discuss that in terms of research partners so they can be again eligible UK organisations or international research organisations for example, higher education organisations public labs and non-profit research intensive organisations so for this call what we need to just see from those organisations is we must know that they can deliver research and they should have governance control and financial stability so there will be a kind of a requirement just for us to be able to see that those international research organisations do meet these requirements in terms of what we require now there's not a lot we will require at full stage for those that are that get through to the full stage a commitment to meet those and there is detail in the updated context about what is required from those what it does mean is that all the people from these research partner organisations and that's a key definition will be eligible to be co-investigators we also have project partner classifications as well so for research organisations we don't meet those minimum criteria so for example if they are particularly small or they don't have as much research activity they still can be engaged in the project and we have specific rules over what funding those organisations cannot get depending on their status so again please do look at the documentation on that and ask us any questions and we also have sub contracts as we would usually have with research council grants these are to be used for the procurement of goods and services and these are open to anyone so businesses and the like so if you are looking for a particular service within your award you can use a sub contract for that although what you shouldn't do is use a sub contract to fund someone that should otherwise be a research partner because if that is the more appropriate relationship then that's how they should come into the grant in terms of the finances available for research partner organisations it depends on very much so on the country so if it's UK based it's within our normal UK rules so that's current FEC policy 80% direct and indirect costs get covered by the research councils if they are from a DAC list country so that's within the OECD framework that's all income categories so from upper middle income, lower middle income down to least developed it's the same across the board for all of those we will fund up to 100% of the eligible costs and up to 30% of that as a contribution to indirect costs and in the call document we have defined what cannot be claimed under direct costs and indirect costs so I know we are looking ahead here to kind of well sort of further down the line but it is quite important actually to look at that and to look at what we would count as direct and indirect costs for countries that are not on the DAC list or ones that are likely almost well they are almost certain that they are off so that's Chile, Uruguay, Antigra and Barbuda and the Seychelles we will cover 50% of the eligible costs ourselves for direct costs and we won't cover indirect costs so if you are working with those countries they can be co-investigators they can be involved but 50% of the cost will have to come from somewhere else for multi campus universities just as a technical thing the cost will be awarded based on where they are legally registered and for multinational organisations it depends on where their headquarters are located and again please do ask us if you are not sure we have a lot of queries on this and we can answer them for you in terms of project partners the project partner classifications those not eligible to be research partners we do fund for third sector organisations charities not for profit up to one FTE per organisation across the whole award across the whole project or the whole programme there's a maximum of 10% towards these project partners and up to 100% of the resources can be awarded on those and again subcontracts in terms of the amount that research councils will fund it depends on the country that's actually managing that subcontract so if the governance arrangements are that a particular country should manage that subcontract then we will fund appropriate to that country in terms of costs that we will not pay for as the research councils in that we can't pay for them that includes the capital expenditure so any item of equipment above £10,000 or infrastructure costs for government departments and business outside of the subcontracts and fees and stipends for masters and PhD students so that's not to say that these people cannot be involved in the project or that they cannot be these resources alongside the hubs but it's just things that we cannot fund as the research councils in terms of the details of how to apply so we have a naming convention please do look at this please stick to it got any questions do ask but please do try and stick to our naming convention a comprehensible title please without acronyms, jargon technical terms or names of people or organisations for the intention to submit the deadline is next week this is mandatory for anyone who wants to submit an outline so this is part of our planning so we can understand what the demand is and if it's necessary perhaps take steps and contact yourselves to manage that demand we only need at this stage the details the principal investigator, the title the primary challenge area and the approximate total cost so there's not a huge amount of detail but we do need that detail to help us to plan there are a range of estimates or guesses in the office as to what the demand might be ranging from two hundred to a thousand obviously our response will be different based on that I don't myself believe that there are a thousand credible hub applications out there but that doesn't mean that we won't get a thousand applications at outline stage so hopefully it won't be that high but it is something that obviously we will have to deal with if that is the case and so I do ask you to really think about your application and to make sure that it's definitely it meets the criteria which I'll talk about in a second so the outline proposals these are in more detail and they'll be coming through our jazz system and the documentation so you have the form and then you have the case for support which has certain details and the details in five pages an ODA compliance statement which I'll briefly mention in a bit and also as a section on commitment of the organisations involved as well as a CV for the PI or hub director and the deadline for that is the ninth of November in terms of our assessment process which should guide your application development we will have the intention to submit these aren't assessed but we do need one to make for you to be able to go to the next stage the outline will go through a peer review panel process and the full stage will go through a peer review written comments and panel and interview process so it's quite a long process which is why we wouldn't know the outcomes until November next year but this is the process that we will be using in terms of our panels for the peer review we will be looking for a range of disciplines so people who represent a raw range of disciplines and including people who have a track record of interdisciplinary working we will have international representation particularly from DACList countries and we will have inclusion of the user communities and others to assess the likelihood of impact and so these are the range of people that will be assessing the proposals and that's something to bear in mind when writing your bids in terms of the assessment criteria for the outline stage each proposal will be judged on fit to call, research excellence research team and interdisciplinary partnerships and likelihood of impact and any proposal that goes through will have to meet all those four so if you're not sure for example if it fits the call that is a big problem so it does need to fit the call in order to get through to the next stage so it's very important that you really think about the call document the text making sure that it really does fit that call and again if you're not sure please do ask us for the full stage we then expand that criteria and there will be more documentation required which we will tell the people who are successful at outline stage and these are the criteria I won't list them all now just to point you down to the bottom that this value for money is actually very important as Mark mentioned earlier this isn't just research funding it's also aid money as well and so value for money is incredibly important these are very large awards for international development 8 to 20 million pounds is a lot of money and so please do make the case and make it clear why that money should be spent and how it is value for money here are the key dates again one date was missing at the top actually which was our pre announcement which went out I think it was the third week of April so we did let people know that something was coming at that point then we had the call go live on the 14th of July as I said the intention to submit survey closes next week and then the outline proposals 9th of November then here's the rest of the process there just to give you an idea of what we will be doing and when again looking for the outcomes to be announced in November of next year for the awards to start in December just some hints and tips now for your regards to the hubs so just to what's quite helpful is to compare the first call and the second call the first call which was around growing research capability and the second call on the hubs so the first call its primary focus was on capacity and capability building with supporting research activities so the idea was to grow the research communities based around a research challenge the second call the primary focus is on the research itself and you can have supporting activities including capacity and capability building so that can be a part of it and it should be a part of it if in solving that challenge you do need to build capacity the first one did have a focus on a significant development challenge but the hubs call requires again the challenge requirement is much more upfront about what type of challenge it needs to be and again its this broad complex challenge including the interactions with other development challenges in the first call interdisciplinary approaches was strongly encouraged and we actually did get a range of disciplines involved in each bid however for the hubs call it is a key requirement its essential that you have an interdisciplinary approach with a particular focus on novel disciplinary combinations perspectives and approaches in addition to the hubs act as a key focal point within the global research landscape so lessons we've learnt from previous activities these aren't just standard grants with overseas partners I hope most of you wouldn't think an 8 to 20 million pound grant would be a standard grant but it's interesting how some people do often think of it being oh well it's just a big grant I can do what I've always wanted I can get everything on my shopping list that's not what this is and so do think of it really do look again at the kind of criteria and what we're trying to achieve with this the proposals do need to be official development assistance challenge led solution focus that's absolutely essential for these and the applicants as part of that need to demonstrate an understanding of the context the in country partners need to be appropriate and they need to be involved at all stages so in the scoping and delivery of the research and adding value and at the impact stage as well so they need to be involved at all levels you should look to support adaptability and resilience within the programme by focusing on the key competencies skills, expertise people required rather than necessary getting really stuck down into we want this person and this work stream so think about what skills and competencies you need and that's where the flexibility comes into these especially when it's not entirely sure where it's going to go in solving these challenges and please, please, please to be clear and realistic about the potential impact if you've got a big focus on reducing absolute poverty within your proposal if you say that you will lift 800 million people out of absolute poverty please do at least make a case as to how that's going to happen because if you just say there are 800 million people in absolute poverty and we're going to do that the panel won't be convinced unless you have a real rationale for how 20 million pounds will do that and to be honest that is a bit of a stretch so please, please, please do be realistic about what it is that you can achieve and also then say what the pathways and the potential pathways are to that it's very important I know people have a tendency to overplay these things but it really doesn't help and please do look at the benefits beyond the lifetime of the grant these are research hubs and so a lot of the impact will occur we hope not just during or towards the end of the project but going way beyond it and so please do talk about the benefits beyond the lifetime of the grant that's really important and please do learn from others others that have applied there have been presentations this morning there have been a lot of bids over the years and so please do try and learn from that I'm just going to quickly do this because it's part of our the official development assistance statement I hope you would have got the sense that really for the hubs absolutely these should be completely compliant with official development assistance because their primary focus is around benefiting developing countries but just to be clear these are the criteria for official development assistance these are questions that need to be answered when completing the statement if it's obvious to you why your project or programme is going to be beneficial to developing countries that's fine but you do need to articulate that to us because it might be obvious to you but it might not be obvious to the research council so please do use this statement to make sure that you get those questions answered and then just saying on for that so again it's looking at specific problems that are having impact and so this is really what the statement is about is just making sure that you're identifying issues and that you're looking to address those issues okay so that's most of it for the hubs I just want to quickly then talk about other things that are going on so in terms of GCRF more widely as Mark said it's a range of delivery partners and a range of activities you can be involved as a UK based applicant or as an international co-investigator or as a researcher or as a research partner organisation project partner or subcontractor and again if you're not quite sure the best way to engage please do talk to us and we can sort of guide you in the right direction for that otherwise peer reviewers and we're looking to develop a GCRF college or an international development college of reviewers particularly building up our international peer reviewer research capability in developing countries we are building that as time goes by but we're going to develop a college for that we will be looking for funding panel members and obviously people to attend various meetings and workshops around scoping and things like that when you're looking at GCRF calls bear in mind that your area of research might not appear in the call title but that doesn't mean you can't get involved and we're going out for the the remit of the research so if there is a call that's say run by one of the research councils just because you might not normally apply to that research council doesn't necessarily mean that it's not appropriate for you one of the things of the global challenges research fund is that as well as having these big collective fund calls that are open to any research council there have also been other cross council calls as part of that including ones that have had up to five in a kind of collaborative way so the multi and interdisciplinarity is actually there within GCRF and quite a lot of calls and at quite a lot of levels so please do be open minded about what you might be able to apply for but be also aware that different calls will support different types of grants so they might have a focus on capacity building or research or networking or something else new activities are released periodically please do check out our website and also research councils, Twitter feeds and things like that will alert you to those and be aware that these are not the only official development assistance opportunities as Mark mentioned earlier there are funds within the Newton fund and also within the Department of Health and other funds as well so do be on the lookout for those here are just a list of calls which are currently live from a range of different sources and again this is on our website as well okay so obviously I'm not Sean, Sean is the lead on this call so if you've got any specific questions do please go to the inbox or give Sean a call if Sean's not there then someone else will pick up the phone probably me, probably someone else and we'll do our best to answer your question other than that it's over to you for your questions Hi, I'm Sarah from the University of Exeter thanks very much for that just wondering if you could give us an indication of perhaps what proportion of the grant you would expect to go to developing countries or overseas partners thank you so we don't have a limit so it's kind of what's appropriate for the first collective fund call I think the average was about just under 40% about 40% of the funding went to developing countries within that we had a range from it could have been as low as maybe 20% up to the majority so 70-75% going to developing countries within the grants that we funded so obviously as you can see there's quite a range there actually in terms of the funding we just say that the partnerships have to be meaningful and it has to be appropriate and beyond that it's kind of what financially makes the most sense there's a lady in the pink card again I know Hi, Caroline Barker from the University of Kent I know this is not in the call guidance but I wondered how much of a spread over countries that you're expecting the hubs to cover rather than maybe a single country so for an individual hub yeah it's a good question I would always say start with the challenge and then kind of see where that is so if it's a challenge that is an intractable challenge and it's only really specific to one country then you could argue that there might be the case that that is a as long as the impact is like to be very high that that could be a credible option but do think that if there is a challenge and that it is relevant to more than just that country that you should really be looking further afield and be looking to at least try and engage those countries around it because these are meant to be at a global scale so if there is a challenge that affects multiple countries or regions and I'd like you to think of regions as well then please do look to try and engage those because one thing that the peer reviewers will ask is that well this is a big challenge here but why haven't they engaged this country when actually it's just as a bigger challenge there if not bigger so that's something to really bear in mind with what you're doing can I just add something to that which is there's the rules and satisfying the rules is not enough because this is a competition and it's a big competition so you have to kind of be realistic because this is something special and that means that whatever comes forward has to be special and just to kind of give you a different take on things one of the projects that I was quite impressed with under the grow call was a project at the Liverpool school and they had a partnership which was at the heart of it was existing relationships they had with Kenya and Ethiopia where they were very confident in those relationships but in addition they were looking to develop new partnerships into Sudan and Somaliland I think and they saw those as taking more of a risk on the relationship and I think that kind of approach is actually quite a practical sensible way of thinking about things in terms of how you make sure that you can make progress but also be a little bit more more pressing and more challenging yourself Can we forget for someone in the middle? Hello, I'm Deanna Hello, I'm Deanna Ford from Harvard University You said that one of the key characteristics is co-development of hubs with international partners so I have two questions related to that One, developed country research institutions are clearly eligible to join as a supporting research institution but I was wondering if there are any other special considerations joining in with a hub proposal and then second, for collaborations with DAT country research institutions is there a particular value in having a specific co-investigator join from one of those institutions or is just a strong collaboration with those locally based research institutions sufficient? Okay, so in answer to the first question there isn't a particular special consideration other than the requirement for financial support and that's kind of a key one really and obviously peer review will judge the appropriateness of that relationship which then needs to the second question which is that we don't always have a requirement ourselves within the rules that someone has to be a co-investigator for example but again when it comes to peer review they'll ask the question why isn't that person a co-investigator if actually they're a partner why haven't they got the credit that comes associated with being a co-investigator for that so that is a question that will be asked and so if you can articulate why they're not and why it's a strong relationship then that's absolutely fine but just bear in mind that peer review will ask that question so a gentleman down there it's a very technical question that follows up on this in order to see how it should receive funding as a research partner organisation on UK research organisations will need to register with research councils in the GIS document it's impossible to list an international co-investigator who isn't registered with GIS already so I'm wondering how do we international co-investigators within the GIS form so at that stage you can register then on GIS but obviously it takes a few days so you can do that, it is an option but I would suggest if you do do it do it sooner rather than later because it does take a few days to go through so that's your advice rather than but in terms of what we're saying so just to be clear in terms of our requirement to register organisations that is separate from that so if you want to get the co-investigator onto the grant then you need to register them with GIS because that's a requirement but that will take a few days so you can do that but you need to do that sorry just to be clear it's technically possible to register a co-investigator without having their organisation registered with RCUK that is correct there is a certainty here between organisation or registration and person registration which I won't go into the details too much but that is the case okay and if we have a problem with that we can charg we've had this query and we haven't had a response to it yet but we will get one if we follow up but I do ask if you aren't going to register a person please do not do it the day before because it just won't happen so please do it sooner rather than later I'm aware of time that's one more question right good I'll be around at lunch and this brings us to the final session for lunch which is Professor Michael Collier from the University of Sussex over to you thank you very much I've been asked to speak about implementation and the context of the project that I'm going to be talking about is very much smaller than the ones we were hearing about this morning but it has the advantage that we've been working on it for getting on for a year so I have a few insights to share with you about how that's worked one of the things that I've learnt most from this is the fitting in of different projects together under a very similar banner we've had three interlinked projects working with the same partners with the same broad objectives and you can see that this GCRF project fits in as one of those three this was funded under the forced displacement call which came out last summer and because of the different timings of these different grants we were able to fit it in with a grant from the IASACDIFID poverty alleviation call which we already had but had taken a lot longer through the application process the application process was almost a year long in that case but because of the start times these are now running pretty much together two year projects they started a month apart even though the calls were almost a year apart when they initially came out and that's been a particularly effective way of working this I was a little uncertain in doing it about whether that would count against us but actually combined these three projects are just over a million so individually they are relatively small certainly by the context of the projects we were hearing about earlier but nonetheless because of this three project structure it has a particular complexity to it and I want to run through some of those first of all I'll talk about the overall objectives of the three projects because they're shared they're about migration into cities and they fit in this context that migration to cities is expected to be the top line figure usually given as 50 million people are expected to move into cities in Africa and Asia between now and 2050 obviously there's a lot of variability in that and broadly that scene is problematic this photo is from Sri Lanka where I do a lot of work the former defence minister who also happened to be the urban development minister and it's not coincidental that they went together highlights a characteristic problem that migrants are seen in post-conflict countries like Sri Lanka as security risks elsewhere such as bringing crime or disease or various unpleasant problems along with them so migration is is repressed in various ways and Sri Lanka is a good example of that managed in quite regressive forms which migrants themselves find particularly demeaning so one of the objectives is to try to change the way in which local government authorities think about migrants in the areas where we're working and we have three questions partly driven by theoretical interests in this movement around how mobility is used as a resource by migrants what are the factors behind the persistence of urban poverty in these three four cities where we're working and how is this linked to mobility and how can the arrival of migrants in the city and particularly the sort of circularity that migrants often maintain for some time after moving to a city be maintained in sustainable ways and that leads to four research contributions that we hope this research is already starting to make in some cases firstly it's comparative and I think that's the key to some of the challenges of implementation that we faced and multi-partner, multi-location projects one of the, not the soul certainly one of the major senses of projects with that kind of organisation are that there is a comparative element to that but clearly that brings certain organisational issues that I'll go into in a moment secondly we're interested in in migrant use of urban space particularly through qualitative techniques of interviewing and social mapping then we have a quantitative component around modelling particularly of attitudes to mobility and we have a significant element of public engagement working with the Royal Geographical Society and the Institute of British Geographers on educational programmes and public exhibitions in the cities where we're working to talk about each of these projects in turn we're working in Colombo, in Sri Lanka, in Dhaka in Bangladesh, at Hargesa in Somariland and Harare in Zimbabwe and initially we put together this team in response to a call from the Royal Geographical Society and the Institute of British Geographers called Migrants on the Margins initially we were told we had this we'd been granted this support but it didn't amount to anything at all it was a commitment from the RGS to work with us to start to raise money which the RGS then did and collectively through private sponsorship and various other forms of fundraising that the RGS have come through we've got to about £250,000 to support things which were difficult to fund in other ways particularly PhD and an MA scholarships which are supporting the research and support for an international advisory committee and this strong public engagement that the RGS is very good at through linking out to schools mostly in the UK but to a certain extent internationally the second project is this GCRF project which relates more directly to the concerns of today called the Unknown City that is very much funding the qualitative elements of the research that they're doing things like community discussions this is in Sri Lanka but also a range of other qualitative techniques around migration histories community ethnography particularly forms of social mapping and one of the major capacity building elements of the project is working with partners in these four cities and developing skills around use of participatory social mapping and graphic representations we're working with positive negatives here at SOAS as Jonathan mentioned this morning and so in terms of coordination around the qualitative elements of the project we had a meeting in Nairobi about six months ago to initiate this this organization and some elements of qualitative research we were simply keen to allow each partner to respond to the same range of question and that was relatively easy in terms of coordination but particularly in terms of social mapping we wanted to approach things in very similar ways so that we had a comparative set of maps that we could look at the ways in which people in four very very different cities think about urban space so we out of the five days of discussion in Nairobi we came up with very clear protocols that each of the partners would follow in each of these four cities with the aim that this would lead to some sort of comparative framework that we could look at the way different communities in these four cities were devising the maps that we were working with the third element is this funding coming through the SRC DIFFID poverty alleviation work project called Trapped Populations which is essentially a series of quantitative methods and that's one of the easy things about organising these two is that there's been this clear separation that the GCRF, the SRC AHRC funding has funded the historical graphic cartographic elements of the project and the SRC DIFFID has funded a series of surveys this is a photo from this process of using Q methods a very interesting way of bridging qualitative and quantitative if anyone who's familiar with that asking people to rank different statements in various ways about mobility into urban areas and this was probably the most challenging form of organisation we started with focus groups into these Q interviews the system of ranking our statements that come out of the focus groups so we had to sequence them in this way and then the outcome of the Q interviews was an analysis which led into the first of two questionnaire surveys so there was a clear order that these had to be conducted in and they all had to be conducted more or less the same time so that we were conducting the survey and we were restricted in time because too early in the year and it was raining too hard in Colombo and too late in the year and it was too hot in Hagesa and we had Ramadan in the middle so it was very difficult we had about a month window in which we could put all this together to conduct the survey and that was one of the major challenges of implementation and coordination making sure that everything came together in these four cities in order to develop some sort of meaningful comparison coming out of the questionnaire so I've just got a final slide to show you the organisation of this and it's very similar to what was already said this morning that this was based on very well established existing partnerships in the four cities in Colombo, Dakar, Harare, Hagesa the eight individuals in the middle here were all co-investigators on the grunt and as you can see they're paired so that we have the director of each of these research institutes that we were working with along the top and an individual in the UK I was working directly with the Colombo team in addition to the overall coordination my colleagues at Durham and here at Saras also working on a UK team and I've worked a little in Dakar before never in Harare and Hagesa and it was this mix of different networks that I think have been one of the effective elements of this project but even though I've worked very closely with the Colombo partner for a very long time and similarly my colleagues have all worked individually with the partners that they're working with the novelty that we're getting out of this project is this mix between different researchers in the UK and different destinations but also the interchanges between different organisations. We've had a meeting in Colombo to launch this as I said we had a meeting in Nairobi and we're having a meeting in Harare to finish everything off next summer and within that there is opportunities for mobility developing so one partner can go and visit another partner and try to understand both the research challenges but also the sort of barriers facing dealing with local government for example or other issues of research uptake in these four cities so there's a level of interconnection between the partners as well which we were really keen to encourage coming out of this and alongside that we have separate structures linked into the different funding streams and the different requirements of those funding streams so we have a postdoc fellow at Sussex specialist in quantitative analysis who's been working on the capacity building travelling to each of these locations and on the unknown city the GCRF project we have a variety of different individuals with particular expertise on social mapping or GIS skills who are leading different elements of that work and all of this is coordinated because everything is all emails or Skype conversations include both individuals working in each city so that there is always somebody who is able to check up who is following very closely what's happening in Harare and as the overall coordinator that's not something that I have to be completely aware of because I know that there's conversations going on between people who know each other very well and work together with a degree of trust so I think that there was I think a I was very sympathetic to a question this morning about to what extent should there be a balance between working with established partners and developing new networks and I think this is an answer to that question in the sense that to an extent it does both of those that this key criteria of genuine partnerships it's very difficult to demonstrate that a brand new partnership has been put together specifically for a particular grant is genuine and that's and if I was reviewing that that's one of the things that I would want more details of but a partnership which has a long history to it it's much easier to demonstrate that that's a genuine partnership that there's a degree of co-development of knowledge within that and the novelty is in the mixing up of different partnerships and that so far almost halfway into this grant seems to be working quite effectively I'll stop there and we can have lunch thank you I'm Nathan Hill here at SOAS and I have a practical methodological question I'm sure the working language of the research project itself is English but if you're giving questionnaires to poor people in various countries you have to work in the language they speak so then you have a question of for instance whether your singleese questionnaire and your Bengali questionnaire say the same thing and so I'm wondering how you kind of constrain that methodologically that's a really interesting question and clearly an important one in this context and we were working in five different languages in singleese and Tamil in Sri Lanka and Sri Lanka is the only country where we could reliably depend on literacy amongst the people that we were working with so we did the standard translation and back translation as you would expect in that context to make sure that there was some commonality to the English but that's a very well established methodology that certainly I've used quite regularly before what we did in this context was also have quite a detailed discussion with all of the partners beforehand face to face going through the questionnaire question by question we'd already had an email discussion so that partners could identify and add certain questions that they thought were specific to their own location and in the end about 90% of the questionnaire is common to all four cities which was more than I was expecting I was thinking that we would aim for about 75% of commonality of questions that we were asking in that four context and then have 25% that was specific that reflected the interests that particular partners had in their different context but partly because of this stage of discussing things to start with and identifying comparators beforehand and one of the questions I remember we had quite a long discussion on was about types of house is the house in the Sri Lankan terminology people talk about temperate, semi-permanent or permanent that doesn't mean anything in a Zimbabwe context or in the context of Hagaise we had a discussion to identify common terms that would capture this idea of the degree of permanency of a house is it essentially a thatch hut or does it have concrete floors and walls and roof that would translate across these four areas and that was quite effective that I would do again in that way and I think that's one reason why we're able to get this quite large section of commonality across the questionnaires but it's a really interesting area hi Kate Baylars can I ask what are your measurable impacts on this project that's a very good question our overall aim is to change the way that people think about migration into these cities given the context that this is very widely seen as very problematic in all four cases migration into cities is seen not just by local government but also by NGOs by police, by security forces so we have regular meetings with all of these stakeholders and the measurable impact is through comparison of initial questionnaires that we did at the first stakeholder meeting and hopefully questionnaires at the final stakeholder meeting for people next year in Harare they're doing these stakeholder meetings every month we only have funding for every quarter but they're particularly enthusiastic about it so in the other cities we've had four meetings so far and in Harare they have had eight so we have quite regular meetings with people who want to engage it's clearly a self-selecting group but we are hoping that in each of these cities we will be able to demonstrate that something has happened in addition to that we're funding exhibitions in each of the cities for a broader public engagement and we'll do similar attempts to measure the way that people respond to those exhibitions but the measurement of what is ultimately a very qualitative aim is a challenge and I'm not sure that we've effectively got it but we should know a bit more about that next year thank you thank you my question is how do you distinguish each of the projects which to feed to the call and how the founders of different schemes look at when you're already doing different work because that is really a synergy perspective but how can you really play it out in a very kind of smart way thank you thank you that's one of the elements I was very uncertain about in putting this together one of the projects is slightly different in that the Royal Geographical Society identified us as a team to work with to help generate more funding for this so they were explicitly interested in working with us as a partner to help us get more funding the uncertainty was really in the GCRF which was the last one that we applied for the ESRC, HRC, forced displacement call we already had the ESRC DFID poverty alleviation project and we were just very transparent in writing the grant saying that this is what we've already got funded and really detailing very specifically in the grant what was funded so what was collective what this grant would benefit from that wasn't being funded from this grant and what was being funded from this grant that would obviously have a knock on impact onto the other one to be quite clear sticking to that and I regularly have to go back and check what was the list, which grant did we say we'd fund this bit from or this meeting from generally the quantitative qualitative distinction has made that quite clear but there's obviously a lot of overlap in terms of things like stakeholder meetings that could be funded from one or the other and it's just a question of being transparent in the initial proposal and that was accepted the possible advantages of that were about to outwey the disadvantages and to try to maintain that in the management of the budget Before we break for lunch just explain what's going to happen after lunch we've got quite a long lunch session and it's called Eating and Networking and you will have picked up from this morning and the projects we've talked about describing them as projects is one way of thinking about it probably a better way of thinking about these as describing them as network partnerships so since the next period is eating and networking I would urge you to use well to get through the first and maximise the second but after that at 2.30 I believe we then move into breakout sessions where there's an opportunity to have more of an interactive discussion around some of the themes and I understand that your badges will tell you where to go and when we go outside there will be identified points is that right where people need to gather before being taken onward to wherever it is they're going so please eat first and don't forget the networking