- Robert E. Black, M.D., M.P.H. is the Edgar Berman Professor and Chair of the Department of International Health and Director of the Institute for International Programs of the Johns Hopkins...
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- Dr. Robert E. Black
- Professor and Chairman, Department of International Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore (U.S.A.)
Background of OCHRC Funded Research
History: In 1990 the Commission on Health Research for Development (COHRED) concluded that the majority of health research and development resources are being used on issues that are relevant to only a minority of the world's population. The population that is excluded from the benefits of health research is predominantly in the developing world, largely poor and often marginalized from power and decision making. For the past decade, this imbalance has been captured is the expression the "10/90 Gap” which indicates that less than 10% of the estimated USD 70 billion spent annually on health research by private and public sectors together is devoted to 90% of the world 's health problems. These imbalances also prevail in child Health and nutrition sector. Today a large discrepancy exists between resources committed for health research and the diseases and conditions that account for the highest disease burden in children. For example in Angola and Niger, 25 babies in every 100 born die before they can grow up to be five whereas less than 1 baby dies in Europe in same scenario.
Since 2001 OCHRC is promoting and funding priority context-specific and resource-sensitive researches to address the ever growing burden of childhood diseases in developing countries. Since conception OCHRC has funded nine research projects under the four requests for proposals (RFPs).
Through an open process of advertisement and competitive selection, individuals or institutions from low and middle income countries are selected to carry out OCHRC’s research interests. OCHRC provides administrative oversight to the projects, assuring that the research are systematically evaluated, and that partners and broader global audiences are kept informed through dissemination of information.
The RFP-1 was announced in 2001 by OCHRC (Initiative) with support of Global Forum for Health Research (GFHR). The objective of RFP-1 was to develop regional profiles by identification of regional child health and nutrition (CHN) research agendas and mapping of actors, i.e. individual researchers, organizations, universities, and groups, and their roles in the field of child health and nutrition within a region.
The regional profiles includes brief descriptions of importance of child health and nutrition research in an historical context, description of the process through which regional research priorities were identified, identification of urgent child health and nutrition research gaps and map of regional research actors. The regional profile identifies key regional challenges for child health and nutrition research for the next decade in each region.
In 2002, the RFP-2 was announced by OCHRC (Initiative) with support of Global Forum for Health Research (GFHR). The objective of RFP-2 was to develop and conduct interventions to scale up promotion of exclusive breastfeeding to six months by peer counsellors through IMCI (Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses) facility-based counselling at district or national level.
OCHRC (Initiative) with support of Global Forum for Health Research (GFHR) announced RFP-3 in 2003 to conduct population based studies to define the burden of low birth weight, i.e. prematurity and Intrauterine Growth Restriction (IUGR) and/or explore the relationship between prematurity and IUGR and neonatal morbidity and causes of death.
OCHRC (Initiative) announced RFP-4 in 2005 with support of Global Forum for Health Research (GFHR) to identify child health and nutrition intervention of known effectiveness, which is already being implemented in large-scale pilot or at regional or national levels, and evaluate the impact of a specific and defined delivery strategy on the intervention coverage.
The intent of the project was to determine factors that promoted or retarded the known effective intervention coverage at scale. An additional focus of the project was the documentation of delivery process, lessons learned and analysis that can improve the understanding of factors leading to successful or unsuccessful intervention implementation at country level.
