ResearchRound

A limited supply of professional local researchers exists in Africa, contributing to the less than 2 percent output to global research. Africa has only 198 researchers per million people compared to 4,500 per million in the UK and the US or global average of 1,150. This contributes to the low level of clinical research require to understudy, prevent and control diseases especially those peculiar with Africa. ResearchRound is working to significantly increase the amount of qualified researchers in Africa by enlightening young researchers, training them and supporting them with the resources to do quality research. At scale, we can move Africa's researchers per million to a more responsible 2000 researchers per million, supporting not just Africa's healthcare system but the entire industry and development space. 

Imagine the United States without the consistent contributions of MIT, Stanford, Yale and Harvard etc. A limited supply of professional local researchers exists in Africa, contributing to the less than 2 percent contribution to global research. Africa has only 198 researchers per million people compared to 4,500 per million in the UK and the US or global average of 1,150. As research is a cumulative process whereby authors build on each other’s work, a “critical mass” of scholars is needed for rapid scientific progress to occur. An average 500,000 Nigerians do a research project every year, however majority of these are unpublished and are usually poorly done. This waste, in terms of knowledge, funding and work hours are the result of the gap that exists. Many researchers tend to work in relative isolation. When we ran a survey among researchers across Africa, one of the primary reasons for the gap was many local researchers lack access to high-quality research training and mentoring to attempt cutting-edge scientific research. This shortfall makes development and prevention of diseases immensely difficult for Africa. 

Thus our problem statement is how can we improve the capacity of researchers to do quality research in Africa?

When we completed our research into things that inhibited quality research output in Africa, the most consistent responses were surprisingly also the simplest to solve, of course with the will to do it. We created a publishing platform and a community. Our first step was to create a community to bring interested students and researchers together. Students who are interested in research apply online to join the community. Our communities run offline and online. Chapter leads in different universities handle local programs. Students can join local programmes or start one where one does not exist by applying to start a chapter.

Through our platform, we take a five step approach to solving basic problems that exist especially in capacity development and publishing. We enlighten students on campus on reasons to do quality research, train students in research skills and when they finally have research work to publish, our team of editors help them in the publication process. Through the community, researchers meet one another and can collaborate where necessary. We also intend to build our numbers to the point we can leverage it to get access to key resources like discounted access to journals, free access to research tools etc. 

Our goal is to work with young students who will do research as part of their academic experience. Over 2 million students are present at each time across Nigerian universities (our local community is Nigeria even though we hope to reach the rest of Africa too). Thus, students between 16 and 45, who are enrolled in a university whether as post graduates or undergraduates. At least 500,000 of them do actual research each year. Our engagements with them are enlightenment during faculty activities, about the potential impact they can make with doing quality research, providing capacity development through training and mentoring, and publishing their works on our platform. Our current work improves their capacity and interest in doing quality research. These groups of students, with consistent engagement with our community become better prepared to be professional researchers, which they would not have been without our commitment.

The result of our work, which we will see in the near future, is a ramp up of quality research works published by Africans. Among these will be researchers with better capacity to address health challenges in Africa through rigorous research. 

During the 2020 pandemic, most universities and research institutions in Nigeria were shut. This was the same time the whole world needed all its scientists and researchers to have their hands on deck seeking solutions. At the same time, Africa was suffering the least from the pandemic. The poor research culture in Africa, largely caused by the poor capacity of many researchers meant the world had a shortfall of diversity in its search for a cure. Our solution is working very hard to develop professional researchers in preparation for the next pandemic especially in a continent where diseases are rampant.

We like to think that innovation for us are simple solutions that make huge differences. Simply put, there are very few trained researchers which results in low research output. The answer is simple, train more researchers. Thus, our first step is taking responsibility and taking initiative. A good number of things are easily solved when people take responsibility and take initiative. Our second step is simplicity. In order for us to reach a large number of people, we have made our process simple so people who work with us can easily replicate it in their communities. Our third step is strategic, this is aligning with people who will benefit from our progress but are currently shortchanged. Rather than work with institutions which in Afric are often dysfunctional, we are working directly with students/researchers whose interests are actually the most important but currently unsatisfied. These groups of people are usually motivated to act as your success guarantees their success. We are thus building a reliable platform that helps us deal directly with researchers cutting out the institutions that have often limited their progress. 

Another new thing we are providing is clarity in research. Ordinarily, academic papers are beyond reach for a lot of innovators and entrepreneurs, due to the technical terms in which they are written. Our innovation here is to get researchers to write articles about their research, providing clarity in simple language on what their research found and how their research is beneficial or could be beneficial. 

Our initial steps is reliant on simple CRM technology used to manage our community. While we use online platforms like Zoom for training. We are still at the pilot stage. At the point we validate our primary assumptions, we will launch our social research platform that profiles trained researchers across Africa, enables them to connect with other researchers within and across discipline while having access to tools for investigating research works published on the platform. This is similar to Researchgate but with focus on the urgent need for Africa. 

The most important part of this is that the platform will be open, the same as its content, to remove restrictions that currently accompanies published research works like those on platforms like Elsevier and Researchgate. 

Finally, the platform will be open to private and public agencies to collaborate with researchers when seeking new questions, or new answers. 

This is like LinkedIn for Researchers, particularly African researchers. 

We did an initial pilot of our idea in January 2020 under the name, The Ibadan Review. Gauging the reaction of our target audience, we launched a survey to understand what hinders them from doing good research and publishing them. The most consistent response from the lack of capacity to do research, ahead of other problems like information, funding etc. Most people felt they were likely to do better research if they were trained and mentored properly before having to embark on that journey. This is why capacity development and community building (to provide support and collaboration) are at the heart of our work. The image below describes our Theory of Change which combines several strategies and shows the direct link between our activities and the ultimate outcome we are targeting. 

If image does not appear, please use this link https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gRF-RcU0cgYt3hYwsBPy2lJzTQDql1h4/view?usp=sharing 

We currently have over 200 people we serve. This number is limited before our second launch happened during the pandemic while schools were shut. As schools resume and students are more interested in school work, we will deploy our local teams to get more people to join the community and benefit from our work. Our goal is to reach 5,000 members before the year runs out. In 5 years, our lower target will be to reach 500,000 members. However, if we get generous funding, we will serve more than a million people. We would also build a database that profiles people in our community and their areas of research to enable us to attain more collaboration. We are currently present in 5 universities in Nigeria. At the end of the year, we hope this can reach 20 universities. At the end of 5 years, we hope to have built the capacity to reach 200 universities, training an approximate minimum of 5000 students per school. 

There is something called the triple helix. It requires the government, industry and academia to work together to enable innovation and development in a society. Advanced countries usually have the contribution of these three sectors to develop strong socioeconomic systems. Africa is deficient in all three areas. However, industries are beginning to pick up again. There are now more African companies recognized globally. These have raised the wave of Africans interested in building sustainable organizations and companies that create impact. During the pandemic, companies like LifeBank and Flying Doctors played a huge role in supporting governments activities to mitigate the effects of the pandemic. However, too little African researchers were actively collaborating to stem the pandemic.

Our success would translate directly into development for Africans who are currently left behind. Supporting academia with training and resources to rise to the challenge of providing scientific backings for ideas, as well as studies that reveal more about African communities will make development in health sector and other areas faster and sustained. Rigorous work like ethnographic expeditions, empirical research of ideas, products and approaches, which entrepreneurs and social leaders may be unable to undertake will be provided by our trained researchers. Our work will lead to more independent research and development groups across the continent which has the ability to ensure rapid growth while developing the critical mass for research required to lead to breakthroughs. We are excited about this future, we hope you are too. 

Financial: This is the biggest barrier we could have. Being able to raise the right funding to support our local programs work will play a large role in our success. We need money to train people. We need lots of money to train lots of people. 

Institutions: While we are dealing directly with researchers, we do have to deal with the incumbents who are not doing well to prepare their researchers. We must be able overcome any challenge they might throw our away in a bid to protect their dignities.

Personnel: Our current team has several volunteers who believe in our work. However, we understand that despite this passion, they may have new responsibilities in the coming years. Our ability to attract, reward and retain the right hands is critical to our success.

Technical Challenges: As our community continues to grow, we will need to raise our technical capabilities to manage the numbers and as well, build tools that support the members of this community in their work.

Financial Barriers: Our primary approach was to build a distributed financing model, where each chapter tries to raise funding for their needs while keeping activities cost minimal. Funding is currently provided by the founder. Another way to approach this is through partnerships. These partners will support our work thus reducing the need to pay for them. Finally, we will actually seek to raise funding over the next one year, so we can be more in control of our work. Money raised will go into producing materials for awareness, paying for digital tools, running training programs and events. Etc. as well as remunerating our staff.

Personnel: Good funding will enable us to keep people with us longer. Our ability to provide reasonable compensation for key members raises our ability to keep them. For those not directly paid, we hope to build a rewarding capacity development process that makes the experience valuable, thus attractive to new members. Institutions: Work directly with researchers, and build strong partnerships with private partners and nonprofit who have built enough social capital we can leverage on. 

Technical Challenges: We hope to build our own software in-house to manage financial costs associated with running communities on third party platforms.

Six members work full time. There are about 20 volunteers.

Our team comprise mainly of researchers. I, the founder, am a product designer with over 5 years experience in the education sector. I oversee product design for the team. Waliyah Oladipo who oversees the operations of the team still attends school but is well positioned to lead our programs in schools, especially due to proximity. Ajibola Adigun is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar with over 6 years experience as a researcher. Malik Kolade is the team's technical lead and combines years of product development experience with his impressive interest in cutting-edge technology. We have over 20 volunteers working in about 5 universities to set up our local programs and help us get started with our pilot. 

None yet. But we are in talks with Nigeria Economic Summit Group, an organization that provides innovation advisory to university fund commission, TETFUND and the Nigerian University Commission. This organization is heavily invested in the triple helix model of innovation. Our work with them will be to enlighten, support and train young researchers across different universities in the country.

We will also be collaborating with the World Conference Research Integrity in developing research guidelines for our community. 

While we are yet to solidify our business model, this is how we have been thinking about it.

1. Paid Training: While we will do lots of free training and awareness programs, certain trainings will come at a price. This will form a key part of our early revenue. We will also train people in the Research and Development sections of private companies as well.

2.  Consultancy: We will help manage corporate, public and private investment and collaborations in research in African regions. As we grow, we expect more organizations and companies to be interested in funding research initiatives. In this situation where they are less likely to trust the current institutions, we provide a credible platform to directly invest in researchers across the continent.

3. Data Management: Through publication of research works and data, 0n the long term, we will build tools to make it easy for people to use and investigate these data for their work. 

4. Matching: With our database of researchers, we can supply researchers to private companies and agencies for specific periods and charge 20% commission for it. 

We intend to raise capital through grants and donations at the initial stage. Over time, we will be able to provide the services listed in the previous section, which will provide us a revenue stream. Our model is to operate an independent but connected social and business services. Our social service will continue to support the capacity development of researchers across universities, while our business service would aim to provide services that being able to build our community provide us. These include management engagement contracts between researchers and companies, selling training, and consulting and managing investments in research.

With the prize money, we will be able to support campus programmes and reach our training milestones faster. This can shorten the length of our journey by ensuring we can build the capacity of researchers in a shorter period than we expect. 

The prize’s connection with MIT can provide us with the linkage to one of the world’s most prestigious research institutions- a partnership that would enable us gain more credibility and design better interventions for the research community in Nigeria and the rest of the continent. Our connection with MIT can also help us in building the capacity of our own team in delivering on our promise. 

MIT Solve's vast network will present us with several insights on how to approach our business model. As we are keen on doing good while ensuring sustainability, we are still trying to figure out the best way for us to run.

Our technology which we are working on can benefit from the technical expertise from MIT's network. We will also be interested hiring through the network. 

MIT
MIT is what any world class research institution will want to look like. We aspire to build a research community that aspires to such excellence as MIT. Working under the guidance of interested contributors at MIT will provide us an incredible leverage to deliver value for the people in our community.

Springer Nature Research
As a research publication, Springer understands the process of getting research done appropriately. We would like that Springer works with us to help set editorial standards for our local publications as well as support our education of researchers to publish works published by Springer’s journals.

Student Organizations in Nigeria
This accelerates our access to students and acceptance as well. Working with our students’ organizations will build our community faster.

Amongst other benefit that will result from our success, our work will lead to the creation of more clinical researchers who can support the fight against diseases in Africa. During the 2020 pandemic, as the world's researchers and scientists were going to work to find a solution to the virus, most African researchers made no contribution. With over 1 billion people, such risks cannot continue to be justified as we are working to rectify this. The prize money from Elevate will allow us train more researchers faster, and improve Africa's preparedness for the myriad diseases rampant in its sphere. 

Amongst other benefit that will result from our success, our work will lead to the creation of more clinical researchers who can support the fight against diseases in Africa. During the 2020 pandemic, as the world's researchers and scientists were going to work to find a solution to the virus, most African researchers made no contribution. With over 1 billion people in Africa, such risks cannot continue to be justified as we are working to rectify this. The prize money will allow us train more researchers faster, and improve Africa's preparedness for the myriad diseases rampant in its sphere. 

Our work at ResearchRound in strengthening the research ecosystem in Nigeria and the rest of the continent makes us fundamental to the health sector. SDG goals catered for by ResearchRound include Goals 3, 4, 9 and 17. The prize money will raise the level of impact we can make in a short time due to the urgency that recent events have thrown at us. With over 100,000 dollars, we can train and incubate about 1000 more researchers in Africa. While we get more support for their continued development. 

Research is fundamental to the growth of Africa, and the growth of its industry and development space. Think about that. 200,000 dollars will allow us build research hubs in Africa where young researchers will have a place to work together, have access to modern tools for researcher, and have mini-labs for testing out their ideas.