Mak-RIF Team engagement with UN Women Uganda Office

Makerere University Research and Innovations Fund (Mak-RIF) is grateful to the UN Women Uganda Office for hosting some of their staff members on March 13th, 2023. It is fulfilling that this initial engagement culminated into a deep discussion on how the two entities could collaborate and is likely to birth a strong working relationship between Mak-RIF and UN Women.

Discussion areas and actions points 

It was evident from the discussions that operations within the two institutions are being guided by similar thematic areas geared towards contributing to development. It was also noted that, Mak- RIF researchers and innovators have generated several multidisciplinary innovations which are ready for scale and commercialization to drive development in Uganda and beyond. Therefore, by leveraging synergies with UN Women programs, Mak-RIF can help to provide insights towards strengthening implementation of the UN Women programs as they support Mak-RIF through their networks to disseminate and explore how to have the targeted populations reached with relevant research and innovations. 

“Throughout our discussions, we learned that Mak-RIF can plug into various UN Women opportunities” noted Evelyn Nyachwo, Mak-RIF Research Support Officer.  In particular, we hope to plug into 4 opportunities: 

1. We plan to have capacity-building training sessions on gender equality and women empowerment. All these perspectives should be embedded in the programming of Makerere University ‘s Research and Innovations Fund.
2. We also plan to have a training on intergovernmental collaboration which will contribute to Mak- RIF’s visibility efforts and enhance its relevance and longevity.
3. Through the UN Women Networks, the outputs of the Makerere University Research and Innovations Fund will be widely disseminated to the targeted population. This could be through leveraging already existing structures established by Mak-RIF.
4. With UN Women as an implementing partner, the Research and Innovation Fund will focus on scaling and commercialization of innovations with proven transformative potential, especially in UN Women areas of interest including: Gender Equality and Women Empowerment with the perspective of Care Economy. 
5. Since the UN Women is mainly an implementing agency, we hope to leverage their buy-in on very specific research questions that directly inform the implementation of Mak-RIF’s programs while fostering learning and adaptation for better service delivery. We have therefore remained open to receiving specific research questions from UN Women on areas where they need to obtain evidence rapid assessments that would improve their programming e.g. On Gender statistics, Gender Equality, and Women Empowerment among others. Since the Research and Innovations Fund is aimed at providing solutions to accelerate development, it is our wish that we can plug into the information needs of key development actors in areas that intersect with the national research agenda that we developed. Detials are shared on rif.mak.ac.ug