Africa Research Universities Alliance, Centre of Excellence for Non-Communicable Diseases
Economic and Social Research Council
University of Nairobi
The project seeks to develop a strong collaborative research and training platform, the ARUA Centre of Excellence on Non-Communicable Diseases (ACE-NCD), anchored at five ARUA member universities: Nairobi, Makerere, Ibadan, Ghana and Witwatersrand - working closely with other universities on the continent and UK universities. Specifically, ACE-NCD shall seek to  1. Form a strong network of researchers broadly addressing the problem of NCDs in Africa. Researchers will be drawn from ACE-NCD universities, University of Glasgow and University of Leicester, as well as regional and international universities. Research teams' activities will revolve around six initial thematic areas: Prevention, mechanics of disease, multi-morbidity, bio-banking/biomarkers, models of care, and big data.   2. Bring on board other ARUA and non-ARUA African Universities, especially those that are less-research intensive. Each ACE-NCD spoke university will serve as a regional hub, actively engaging universities within their countries and regions: Ghana and Ibadan targetting West Africa, Nairobi and Makerere focussing on Eastern and Central Africa, and Witwatersrand on Southern Africa. Once on-board, these additional universities will actively collaborate with all members institutions across the continent and indeed the world. This approach will ensure the organic structured growth of the network leading to intra-Africa research capacity-building in NCDs.  3. Provide training and capacity-building in support of NCD research through Masters and PhD programmes (where students will be co-supervised by faculty drawn from the network) and post-doctoral training attached to existing and new research projects.  4. Develop and mount targeted short courses and capacity-building workshops and seminars offered both face-to-face and through e-learning.   5. Develop strong research collaborations with other global networks, initially with the World Universities Network where NCDs is one of its four key pillars and in which Nairobi and Ghana are active members with existing related research projects.  6. Build strong collaborations with African governments, policy-makers, non-university, research institutions, professionals, private sector players, and civil society through the regional hub approach for co-design and co-production to ensure relevance, usefulness, high quality of the research outputs.   7. Develop a vibrant research culture across the network, breaking down traditional silos within and across the member universities to form multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary research teams working to develop fundable high-impact research projects that address the challenges within the identified research themes. These projects will also build upon and strengthen on-going related research activities in member institutions. Supporting activities will include identification, dissemination and exploitation of funding opportunities, training on writing winning grant proposals, support in proposal preparation.
2.6 Resources and infrastructure (aetiology) / Research Grant