This event is for anyone interested in discussing the current UKRI GCRF/Newton Fund agile response call. It will be chaired by Professor João Porto de Albuquerque, who holds a number of externally funded GCRF grants and is a current member of UKRI's GCRF Scientific Advisory Group. Gwendolene Cheve, the Research Development Officer for GCRF in Research and Impact Services will also attend.

This event is for University of Warwick researchers.

Participants will have the opportunity to pitch ideas, engage in group discussion, and provide and/or receive peer feedback & advice. We would also like to use this event as an opportunity for participants to share any information about work they have been doing to support LMICs during the COVID-19 crisis and any thoughts on how this might be developed.

If you would like to attend, please complete the simple form below and we will send you a meeting invitation with the MS Teams link.

Call outline (from UKRI)

Proposals are invited for short-term projects addressing and mitigating the health, social, economic, cultural and environmental impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak in Low and Middle Income Countries¹.

This call is funded through the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and the Newton Fund. These Funds address global challenges through disciplinary and interdisciplinary research and strengthen capability for research and innovation within both the UK and developing countries, providing an agile response to emergencies where there is an urgent research need. These Funds form part of the UK's Official Development Assistance (ODA) commitment.

Researchers holding existing UKRI GCRF grants should in the first instance consider whether they could repurpose that funding to address the objectives of this call. You can apply to switch your existing funding here. Repurposing your existing grant is the quickest way to start the research.

• • Project length: up to 18 months
  • Eligibility: UK applicants must be eligible to receive Research Council funding.
    Additional eligibility rules apply for international applicants, please see below
  • Closing date: none – apply at any time
  • Funding: 80% of the full economic cost (fEC) for Research Council funding.
    Additional funding rules apply for international applicants, please see below
  • The primary benefit of proposals should be to any Low and Middle income Countries (LMICs) likely to be negatively impacted by COVID-19.
  • Award range: there is no specific budget for this call. We are interested in funding research of any scale that can demonstrate it will deliver impact during the lifetime of the project.

COVID-19 is fundamentally a global crisis. The pandemic presents an unprecedented challenge, threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions of people around the world. While the epicentre of the pandemic is currently focused around Europe and the US, a growing number of cases are reported in Africa, the Middle East, and Central, South America and Asia with potentially serious social, economic and political consequences for these regions. Some of the poorest societies in the world will be the least prepared and most vulnerable to the effects of the virus. Other Low and Middle Income Countries may however have experiences, for example from TB / HIV / Ebola, of responding to epidemics from which they and the rest of the world can learn.

UKRI will support excellent proposals which meet at least one of the following:

• • New research or innovation with a clear pathway to impact on policy or practice that has the potential (within the period of the award) to deliver a significant contribution to the understanding of, response to, and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic in a developing country context.
  • Supports the manufacture and/or wide scale adoption of an intervention with significant potential for impact in developing countries.
  • Gathers critical data and resources quickly for future research use.

Applications for funding that do not, as their primary objective, benefit the welfare of low or middle income countries should apply instead to the UKRI open call for funding to address the impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak.

See our regularly updated list of research and innovation projects and other awards supported by UKRI