At COHESION-I, we’re building skills and fostering collaboration among our team members from India, Mozambique, Nepal, and Peru. Our internal training sessions strengthen team capacities, creating a win-win for both the project and its members.
Building on the experiences of the original COHESION Project (2016–2020), we adopted a structured approach to capacity building for COHESION-I (2022-2026). Recognizing the individual and institutional expertise of our partners and understanding the unique contexts in which all of us operate, we developed a capacity-strengthening strategy and plan. Our activities are based on annual training assessments of the team’s assets and needs.
Our capacity-strengthening strategy focuses on developing three skill categories: (1) core skills that are essential for completing the project’s outputs and outcomes, (2) beneficial skills that are useful for implementing project activities, and (3) strategic skills that could provide long-term value for career growth and future research projects. We have implemented various forms of internal capacity-strengthening aligned with these skills categories and with the support of our own team’s expertise. Some examples of the topics addressed through these virtual trainings include: qualitative data coding and analysis, economic evaluation, Good Clinical Practice (GCP), and Data Governance for Public Health Research in LMICs. Our team in Nepal also offered workshops to postgraduate residents in topics that included project dissemination, grant opportunities, evidence-based medicine, qualitative research methods, and the critical appraisal of health research publications.
Additionally, project and research team members benefited from opportunities provided by our founder, the United Kingdom National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). Several team members participated in the online and self-paced course on Community Engagement and Involvement (CEI), and a master’s student was granted the Global Health Research Short Placement Award for Research Collaboration (GHR SPARC) Award. The graduate student is from Peru and did a training placement at The George Institute for Global Health, in India (know more about her experience here).
As the project progresses, its capacity-strengthening activities will remain centered on promoting learning, innovation, and professional development among our project team members to create a lasting impact that extends beyond the project’s duration.