About Our Activities
The overall goal of OCHRC is to improve child health and nutrition of world's children through appropriately targeted research. Since 2001, OCHRC is working to promote priority, resource sensitive and context specific researches that address the ever growing burden of childhood diseases in the developing countries.
OCHRC pursues this objective by conducting priority setting exercises, funding appropriately targeted research and providing a platform for communication through the mapping exercise. OCHRC has three major activities. Brief descriptions of the activities are:
1. Priority Setting Exercise
Current investment practices in regional, national and global levels suffer from lack of formal analysis of the impact of the research and inability to set priority of research investment that can potentially reap most benefit. It is hypothesized that these lacks of systematic prioritization of research investment may be partly responsible for the persisting high levels of mortality in children globally. Adopting the strengths of the previous approaches to priority setting in health research, OCHRC has developed a new model for priority setting. The advantage of the new methodology is that it addresses several components of research options, incorporating views of both technical experts and stakeholders to identify priority research topics. On the other hand, usually the research topic is selected on the merit of generating new knowledge without taking into consideration the possible impact in terms of lives saved.
2. Funding Appropriately Targeted Research
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.
Request for Proposal (RFP) - 1: “Child Health Nutrition Research: Regional Assessment of Research Priorities and Research Institutions”
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.
Request for Proposal (RFP) – 4: “Understanding the Effectiveness of Large-Scale Child Health and Nutrition Interventions”
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.
3. Mapping Partners (Online Community)
On completion of RFP-1, the one time regional assessments of researchers and research institutions in Africa, Asia and Latin America in 2002, OCHRC created a permanent resource of information with up-to-date data on child health and nutrition research activities. The Online Community was developed with a vision to develop a knowledge sharing environment for the community of child health and nutrition researchers and interested people through a user friendly web based platform.
