Research skills building

To accelerate newborn care across Africa, there is a need to strengthen local capacity for applied implementation research, especially on how to translate findings into action. Opportunities to develop research leadership and skills are critical for delivering and sustaining contextually relevant newborn care solutions.

Building research leadership helps us ensure that newborn care solutions are designed, tested, and refined by those working closest to the realities of care. These are delivered by interdisciplinary team members, including:

• Clinicians;
• Biomedical Engineers, Technicians, and Innovators; and
• Data, Quality Improvement (QI), and public health specialists.

What does the research skills building workstream do?

By investing in Early Career Researchers (ECRs), PANSAA aims to strengthen African-led newborn research. We aim to foster future newborn leaders while accelerating the generation of evidence that improves outcomes for small and sick newborn across diverse African settings.

From an open call in 2025, with more than 120 applications, we selected 10 ECRs affiliated with NEST360, African Neonatal Association (ANA), or African Neonatal Network (ANN) hospital sites. We are also delighted to have a small grant for a French-speaking ECR pilot scheme.

We support our ECRs through:

• An early-career mentorship scheme that outline personalised two-year career development plans, with at least one mentor assigned to each ECR.
• Skills-building by joining our Data Systems, Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC), and Neonatal Infections workstreams for regular participation.
• An annual workshop with defined focuses, such as implementation research skills building or science writing.

Through mentorship, practical training, and integration into PANSAA’s workstreams, our ECRs will gain invaluable experience conducting research within real-world health systems.

Our expected research skills building outputs

We aim to develop essential technical skills among our Early Career Researchers, such as:

• Quantitative, qualitative, and economic research;
• Grant writing;
• Scientific writing;
• Publication submission and review processes; and
• Knowledge translation and dissemination

We anticipate the following outputs from our ECRs and our other three workstreams:

• Conference presentations;
• Abstracts;
• Dissemination products;
• Locally-relevant implementation studies; and
• Peer-reviewed publications.

We also aim to support the development of competitive grant proposals by workstream that will enable ECRs to gain the skills required to target future funding opportunities and sustain their careers to strengthen African-led research capacity. This will elevate locally developed innovations while building a foundation for ongoing implementation research that advances newborn survival across Africa.