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The UK Government White Papers on international
development published in 1997 and 2000 each stressed the importance
of a strong southern capacity to undertake and use research. The
1997 White Paper explains that improved access to knowledge and
technologies by poor people will be “achieved through continued
investment in research and research capacity in developing countries”
while the 2000 White Paper on “Making Globalisation work for
the Poor” states that “efforts must also be made to strengthen
the capability of developing countries to produce, adapt and use
research".
DFID invests something in the order of £90
million each year on research through its central research funds
covering natural resources, health and population, engineering,
economic and social development, and education. Although these programmes
ask that the leading research institution should enter into a collaborative
research partnership with a southern agency, any strengthening of
the ability of the southern partner to undertake research subsequently
is regarded as a desirable but subsidiary benefit. The primary objective
of DFID’s centrally funded research programmes is to generate
and share the results of high quality research. Given the necessary
trade off between the objective of producing excellent research
and that of capacity building, it seems that partnership arrangements
within these research programmes are limited in their ability to
strengthen capacity.
In June of this year, DFID held a workshop in South
Africa to discuss the capacity for socio-economic research in the
South, and the role that donors play and should play in supporting
this. The meeting was organised to inform DFID’s own strategy
regarding research capacity in developing countries. A subsequent
meeting held in London, attended by a DFID staff from a cross section
of departments as well as by Tony Killick and Simon Maxwell of ODI,
discussed what further actions should be proposed in the field of
building research capacity. In that meeting it was agreed that a
useful first step would be to better understand what others are
doing in this area.
Purpose, objectives and approach
The purpose of this study is to inform DFID policy on southern research
capacity building through a preliminary mapping of the range of
organisations and networks that already work in this area. Its objective
is to identify and offer a profile of those organisations and networks
that have strengthening research capacity in developing countries
as one of their principal aims. The study, conducted during August
and early September 2001, included a brief literature review, internet
search and telephone and e-mail discussions.
Caveats
There is a lot of literature about development research,
development research institutions and programmes, and about capacity
building, but relatively little about research capacity building
– particularly about its impact and effectiveness. There are
however, lots of organisations, which claim to be involved in southern
research capacity building. This study is based on information about
organisations from their web-sites and/or annual reports, which
tends to be subjective and promotional rather than objective and
critical. The analysis in this study is fairly superficial due to
lack of time.
Outputs
The outputs of the study are presented
in the following pages:
- Conclusions and
recommendations - including
an assessment of which organisations deserve a closer look; and
recommendations for further work.
- A list, and brief summary of the capacity-building
organisations identified during the study with links to pages
with more details including location; purpose; size; scope of
work; geographical and thematic coverage, approach, activities
and current financing arrangements, links to relevant documents
(if available electronically) and links to the organisation's
web sites.
- A list of documents
reviewed, brief summaries of most of the documents and links to
the full documents (if available electronically)
- Links to some web-sites
on capacity-building.
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