RFI Report Writing Workshop – October 3rd, 2017 in Cape Town, South Africa

CAAST-Net Plus, in collaboration with the Department of Science and Technology (DST), South Africa; the Council on Health Research for Development (COHRED); the Spanish Foundation for International Cooperation, Health and Social Affairs (FCSAI); and the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MoEST), Kenya – held an RFI Report Writing Workshop in Cape Town, South Africa on October 2 – 3rd, 2017.

The workshop took place at the Hotel Verde. Teams/individuals from six South African institutions attended the workshop:

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1. University of Cape Town

2. Stellenbosch University

3. University of the Western Cape

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4. Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University

5. Human Sciences Research Council

6. University of Fort Hare

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This workshop focused on introducing the institutions to the RFI Reporting Guide and it’s rationale, as well as helping them to begin writing their reports, with the aim of going back to their institutions and recommending the tool to the executive level.

Some comments from the workshop include:

“Its certainly given us a lot of food for thought, because many of our practices have been traditional and inherited, or may have been practices that were important to our previous university, and not in its current format. So I think its a good exercise… This as a toolkit would allow us to look at areas that are important… It illuminates a lot of areas that we still need to give attention to. We will certainly recommend it.” – Prof Prem Govender, Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University

“On behalf of UWC, thank you very much for the opportunity to assess where we’re at… There are some aspects that we’ve highlighted that we should take back to our institution to address because of the implications for research going forward.” – Prof Priscilla Baker, University of the Western Cape

“To me one of the areas where this would help is if it was acknowledged in funding application forms produced by funders’ where they actually put a question in there for reviewers to assess the fairness of the sharing of budget or resources or roles and contributions by the different partners, and for the reviewers to comment on that when they review a grant application.” – Dr Yolande Harley, University of Cape Town