My name is Alun Davis, and I’m the lead of the Schools Engagement Programme at
the KEMRI Wellcome Trust Research Programme here in Kilifi, in Kenya.
Over the past 10 years me and my team have been establishing a set of activities
which bring school students, local school students and also schools from from Nairobi,
into contact with health researchers.
The aim of that is, or the objectives of those activities
are to raise awareness of health research among school students,
also to raise an interest in science and science related careers amongst students, and thirdly
to raise awareness of community issues and perspectives amongst researchers.
It started off from the community actually,
when we had community meetings with community representatives, chiefs for example, they would
tell us what are you doing to raise awareness of possible careers in science amongst our schools
and so we responded to that challenge we started off in a modest way with three schools,
and then by now over the last 10 years we've expanded that to activities going on
in about 50 schools both here in Kilifi but also in Nairobi as well.
We have a range of different activities, we have an attachment scheme
for very talented students in which we invite nine students to come and stay here with us to
experience different aspects of research, and we also have schools activities for example we have
between 500 and thousand students every year coming to the laboratories to
learn about research, learn about science, and talk to researchers.
Well I think what we were keen on being a fairly wealthy research institution based in a
resource poor setting like Kilifi, we were keen on drawing from the research centres'
resources available for research towards strengthening science education in the area,
we felt at the time that, you know science being our core business,
that we were kind of well placed to possibly inspire young people in science,
and so we set that about through talking to teachers and taking the advice of the local
education office and teachers on how best we could do this with the resources that we had,
and that involved a participatory action research approach to design
engagement activities with researchers and schools.
Another aspect of the school engagement work that we seriously is the evaluation of our activities,
we do this using mixed methods we've had a quantitative component surveys across 15 schools,
some control some intervention arms and the comparison between those two,
we've had qualitative interviews and focus group discussions with parents with teachers
and with students and participating researchers,
and also we've worked in a participatory video where we hand over the camera to students and
ask them to make films about their experiences, we found that that's a particularly powerful way of
enabling students to have a voice in the engagement process.
Well I think there's several reasons for engaging school students students or children will be the
parents in the future and we depend on their participation in research in the future.
There's also a growing need for research amongst adolescents and children, and I
think it's important that we try and tap into some of these unique insights that they have and use
that information or work with that information in order to inform the research that we do,
engaging schools offers a platform to be able to draw from those unique
insights to feed into the way research is being implemented.
There's several reasons why we should invest in engaging school students: the first one is that
in the future we will need scientists to conduct our health research so it makes sense to start
early with young people to inspire talented people to go into research, we've shown this in
the past in Kilifi that you are able to identify very talented people and nurture them through
from school leavers age through to a career to you know becoming scientists who fully understand the
context here in Kilifi and so are able to design research studies that fit well into the context.
Secondly children will be the future research participants, the future parents who will
make decisions on whether they want their children to participate in research or not,
and I think engaging school students at an early age gives them an opportunity to understand the
research process in a better way which will give them more of a chance to make an informed
decision of whether they want their children to participate in research in the future.