Research4life/INASP Advocacy competition on Elsevier Connect

Published: Monday 4th July 2016
Category: News

Grace-Ajuwon2To highlight the critical role that doctors, researchers, librarians and policymakers play in advocating their leaders to support research in their institutions and countries, Research4Life joined with INASP to launch an advocacy competition. The aim of the contest is to find case studies that show how users have overcome hurdles to boost critical leadership support for the information and infrastructural resources needed to improve evidence based health care, agriculture and environmental policies as well as basic research in their countries.

A good example of advocacy leadership is the story of Grace Ajuwon, one of the first librarians to be trained to use Hinari, Research4Life’s flagship biomedical database. Over a decade ago, Grace, a senior librarian at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, used that training to jumpstart her own research into health information. A year later, in 2003, she published a peer-reviewed paper in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, concluding that clinical and nursing students were neglecting electronic resources. Grace successfully advocated for the inclusion of computer education in medical and nursing curricula, ensuring that computer laboratories were installed and went on train thousands of medical and research staff across her own and other African institutions in effectively using scientific resource.

Read more on Elsevier Connect

Hinari