Meet the Winners of the 2010 R2P Small Grants Competition

As the Small Grants training in Baltimore, Jackson Chakaya, a counselor and nurse for the KEMRI/MSM program, presents Stefan Baral, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Department of Epidemiology, with traditional Kenyan art.

The winners of the 2010 R2P small grants competition are:

• Enda Santé (Senegal): An Integrated Approach to Reducing HIV Vulnerability Among Men who have Sex with Men in Senegal: Research and Evaluation of Income Generating Tools for MSM;
• Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kenya): Evaluation of Health Worker Training Intervention to Improve Quality of HIV Prevention and Other Services for Men who have Sex with Men in Coastal Kenya;
• The Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation’s Men’s Health Division (South Africa): Using Novel Strategies to Access Men who have Sex with Men in South Africa.

Each grantee was awarded $50,000 to support research costs involving staff time and training, travel and data collection. In addition, R2P ran a one week training course (September 20 – 23, 2010) for all Small Grant awardees in Baltimore, Maryland. This course provided focused training on qualitative and quantitative research methods, research ethics and translating research findings into interventions. Grant awardees also receive ongoing, on-site technical assistance from an epidemiologist with extensive experience working with MSM at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

At the end of the one-year grant period, the recipients of the small grants are expected to produce a final technical report on study implementation and key research findings as well as draft manuscripts for peer-reviewed publications.

The small grants competition was open to host-country nationals from developing countries. The winning grants were chosen from a pool of almost 50 highly-qualified applications by a six-person selection committee that included representatives from R2P, and the Departments of Epidemiology, Health, Behavior and Society, International Health, and Population, Family and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

R2P is a USAID-funded, five-year project led by the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health and managed by the Center for Communication Programs. The primary aim of R2P is to promote greater use of evidence in the design and implementation of HIV prevention programs and policies in countries most affected by the HIV epidemic, particularly Eastern and Southern Africa.

Through its Small Grants competition, R2P seeks to build the capacity of researchers based in the developing world to conduct applied research.

Learn more about Research to Prevention (R2P) [1].