For most patient organisations research is a key strategic priority. In our CISU programme we support patient organisations in East Africa to facilitate research, in order to limit the knowledge gap in the region, to facilitate an evidence based advocacy effort and evaluate the impact of our interventions.
Our current research approach are two fold and can be described by two examples.
1. We facilitate meetings in a regional non-communicable disease (NCD) research committee in East Africa, where key researcher from the region can meet each other and discuss regional research priorities and common project. On top of this, we invite researcher from Europe, mainly Denmark, Germany and UK to participate in some of these meetings, as they are usually capable of attracting research funding. A recent example of a research project fostered by these meetings is an article on diabetes and hypertension control and learnings from HIV funded by London School of Tropical Medicine but conceptualized through our network (https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(21)01731-1.pdf#%20).
2. In a climate and health integration project in Kenya we are working with a team of national and Danish researchers to conduct a Knowledge, Attitude and Practice study, to measure the impact of our intervention. The intervention is a pilot intervention trying to increase the local community’s resilience towards air pollution, in one of the major informal settlements in Nairobi. The research effort is important to measure the impact of the pilot and estimate the effect of the effort. If proven successful the research component can also help us in our advocacy effort as we can present valid data to policy makers, and we expect it to be a major asset in future fundraising to potentially scale up the intervention.