Funding Opportunity Announcement

The Global Health Research Initiative (GHRI) is partnering with the Canadian HIV Vaccine Initiative (CHVI) to offer a new program to build sustainable African capacity and leadership to conduct future prevention trials, with special focus on innovations in HIV/AIDS prevention technologies, particularly HIV vaccines trials. This new program also aims to advance the collaboration and networking of African, Canadian and international researchers and institutions in global HIV/AIDS prevention trials efforts.

This program, in line with the conclusions and program ideas emerging from the international consultation conducted by the CHVI on February 10-12, 2008, emphasizes the need to extend the concept of capacity beyond the traditional technical and scientific skills to include research management, leadership, administration, and community and policy engagement. 

Conclusions and program ideas drawn from the CHVI consultations include:

• Building 'platforms' for prevention trials with both generic and disease-specific training components that permit a more flexible and sustainable capacity that could be deployed across a range of prevention trials.
• Developing the technical, scientific, management and leadership capacity of researchers at multiple points along the research career ladder, including capacity to build and manage partnerships (across disciplines and to engage policy and community actors), and to develop cohort readiness/preparedness.
• Strengthening the capacity of African institutions to lead and administer prevention trials.
• Collaborating and/or coordinating with other capacity building or prevention trial activities (‘additionality’).
• Broadening capacity building efforts to engage new countries or regions

 

These strategies provide a reference for applicants to consider in determining their particular strategy or niche and it is expected that applicants will provide a strong rationale and a clear statement of the 'value added' of their proposal.

Please note that this two-phase competition solicits letters of intent (LOI) followed by invited full-scale applications.

Up to nine successful teams at the LOI stage will be invited to submit a full-scale application. Each team will receive a three-month Development Grant of up to CAD $20,000 to assist the team to prepare a full-scale application. 

Teams successful at the full-scale application stage will each receive a Team Grant of up to CAD $1.4 million profiled over a maximum of four years.

Interested researchers will find the Call for LOIs available here. If you have any questions about this competition please contact us at prevention-trials@idrc.ca