GCRF Funding Cycle
2019-20
Principal Investigators
Katherine Keenan, Mike Kesby
This capacity building project brought together over 40 scientists from East Africa and Scotland for the first time to train in a range of qualitative, quantitative and geospatial methods which can be applied to tackle the global health threat of antimicrobial resistance. The project was uniquely interdisciplinary and included specialists from a range of biomedical and social science disciplines.
Covid-19 meant the project was redesigned from an in-person 2-week workshop to a set of intensive online training sessions which were able to involve more people, widening the reach and making this more accessible. The interactive trainings were co-designed and delivered over several weeks by staff in St Andrews. This helped to develop stronger South-South and North-South collaborative networks, and led to the development of the St Andrews African Research Network (StAAR), which has recently won follow-on funding to consolidate its activities through a central online hub, advanced trainings, seminar series and analysis partnerships.
StAAR researchers have used this strengthened network to design an interdisciplinary project investigating how Covid-19 has impacted antibiotic use and AMR in Uganda and Tanzania, which recently won GCRF funding from NIHR/MRC to run for 18 months.