Progress through partnership

Issued: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:36:00 BST

The University of Glasgow has a long history of working with universities and institutions in many low-income countries and particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2007 a new centre brought together the University’s expertise to help develop and strengthen these partnerships. Poverty, AIDS, climate change, natural disasters and gender discrimination are just a few of the issues being addressed by the Glasgow Centre for International Development.

GCID involves over 90 academic staff working across a broad range of disciplines. The centre’s work is currently organised into four key clusters:

• animal and human health
• environmental management and infrastructure
• education, lifelong learning and global citizenship
• economic development.

Among those engaged in the health cluster is Dr Mike Barrett of the School of Life Sciences. He is working to develop new drugs to treat deadly tropical diseases such as malaria and sleeping sickness. ‘Translating research from our laboratory to the field is vital,’ he says, ‘and GCID is making links with institutes in Africa, with whom we can collaborate to test our ideas. We’ve recently developed a test that detects drug resistance in sleeping sickness parasites and hope to test its suitability for use in an African field setting.’

The environmental management and infrastructure cluster involves researchers from the geographical sciences, chemistry, engineering and life sciences. Professor of Geography John Briggs is excited by the possibilities of the interdisciplinary approach. ‘My major area of interest is the management of the environment,’ he says. ‘GCID means we can work in partnership, not only with colleagues in Glasgow, but, more importantly, with our colleagues in universities in Africa and Asia.’

The education, lifelong learning and global citizenship cluster is bringing together staff involved not only in research but also in capacity building in Africa. Professor of Adult & Lifelong Education Mike Osborne relishes the way GCID has brought together different disciplines. ‘‘We see the exchange of ideas and practice as a way of developing together and learning from each other. Added value is achieved by sharing expertise in answer to the question, "What works?" If something works for one of our partners – in their context – it might work for others in different contexts.’

There is similar enthusiasm in the economic development cluster. Professor Farhad Noorbakhsh, head of the Business School, specialises in development economics. ‘We have more than a dozen postgraduate programmes – many of them geared towards students from developing countries – and many people engaged in development research. What we are hoping to achieve with GCID is to develop interdisciplinarity: economics with education and economics with health are two examples. Both would be extremely helpful.’

A key figure in the centre’s development is Pro Vice-Principal and Professor of Veterinary Physiology, Peter Holmes. ‘The work of GCID has the potential to bring huge benefits to the developing world. The big message of the centre is its interdisciplinarity: we can bring together skills and disciplines that in the past have worked separately. Bringing them all together adds something beyond what the individual pieces could contribute.’

• Find out more: Glasgow Centre for International Development