Research Enrichment Funding for the Public engagement programme of CIDRI-Africa
Wellcome Trust
University of Cape Town
The Wellcome Centre for Infectious Diseases Research in Africa (CIDRI-Africa) at the University of Cape Town leads research programmes on high-burden infectious diseases, particularly HIV and tuberculosis. Through this enrichment grant, we will develop our researcher community as public engagement champions, improve our research through inolvement of our local communities and stakeholders, and raise awareness of our research to maximise health outcomes.   To develop our researcher community’s involvement in PE, we will create and implement a PE communication toolkit, which will become an embedded component of study conduct at CIDRI-Africa, and enable our researchers to confidently engage the wider public.   We will continue to engage the community with whom we conduct research through health research awareness activities, and establish a community advocacy programme to extend the work of CIDRI-Africa’s Community Advisory Group. Members of the advocacy programme will bridge research and non-research communities, providing input to both and effectively advocating tuberculosis and HIV research.   We will engage young people through our school’s engagement project, drawing on methods from a previous pilot. This will follow a workshop format, and improve understanding amongst school learners and the people they connect with of tuberculosis and HIV as well as research into these conditions.
7.1 Individual care needs