Tagline: Technology uptake: “let the sun shine in…”
Champion: Silvia Alonso
Team: Hopefully many across ILRI!!
ILRI has a long standing history in the development of vaccine and diagnostic tools. For those of us who have joined ILRI in the last few years we get to hear about those exciting lab experiments and how much ILRI has contributed to improved technologies.
Then, however, we often get also to hear that, when taken to scale the uptake is not as high as expected. The quick conclusion we all reach is that “those working in the labs don’t take enough time to explore the needs on the ground and how the technology should consider those needs”. By interacting with those working in the labs, you get to hear lots of anecdotal evidence of why each one of those technologies did not work most effectively or why it wasn’t taken up by farmers as much as expected. The one I like most talks about cows losing their tails as a secondary effect of the vaccine; no need to explain why farmers may be reluctant to use it. Other times, uptake is not optimal due to lack of reliable distribution channels, lack of cold chain, unaffordability… but the most interesting thing is that, often, those “negative experiences” are not properly documented and can even be affected by the so-called “publication bias” (“negative results are less likely to be published”). Learning from those experiences though can mean: target our lab work correctly, identifying support beyond the labs, but within ILRI, that can inform broader aspects of technology uptake, distribution, etc.
Before all that anecdotal information is lost overtime, we propose to go through a process of documenting all that anecdotal evidence, through in-depth interviews with ILRI people (current and past) that have been engaged in vaccine/diagnostics development and delivery over the years, and through access to relevant resources. We will document both positive and negative experiences. The aim of this exercise will be not only to document, but also to identify and categorize those bottlenecks that are precluding vaccines and diagnostic tools to be taken up by farmers/government (“the target of technology”) and we will explore to what extent those bottlenecks relate to the technology as such (i.e. the specific delivery mode, characteristics,…) or to aspects that are beyond ILRI labs control. Especially for the latter, we will identify if activities carried out by other ILRI teams can help address research questions around ways in which dissemination and uptake can be taken to its maximum.
This idea will, among others, help find out routes of collaboration within ILRI that have long been lacking (in other words: build a bridge between the lab building and Mara House)
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