2020 Small Grants round-up

The job of assessing applications is in the hands of our network of Global Assessors, whose role is to review the applications and provide detailed assessments. Each application is reviewed by at least two Assessors, who give their time to provide this important quality review.

We would not have been able to deliver our small grants programme without their support and so we would like to thank them for all of their time and dedication in collectively carrying out over 1,600 assessments.

We wanted to share some more detailed analysis of the awardees, including the gender split, thematic areas, countries where research will be carried out and where our researchers are based, and a little more detail on the awardees themselves.

The 2020 grant awardees represented 28 countries. Of these, 82% of recipients were from across Africa. The country with the highest number of recipients is Nigeria (17), followed by Uganda (15) and Cameroon and Kenya (11 each). In 2019, UK nationals were the only Europeans to receive small grants. This year, there were five grants to those of UK nationality and one grant to an awardee of German nationality.

We received more than 70 applications on COVID-19-related projects and these projects were the highest number awarded (23) followed closely by snakebite projects (22 awards). There were seven awards each in the areas of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), onchocerciasis and schistosomiasis. We awarded grants across our priority areas including NTDs, malaria and planetary health. We also awarded grants in areas of multi-morbidity such as onchocerciasis alongside type 2 diabetes.

Given the emergence of COVID-19 earlier this year, we were very pleased to see so many COVID-19 project applications and this disease topic has translated into the highest number of awards cutting across a range of areas, including seroprevalence, behaviour, shielding and service delivery. With a huge amount of global research ongoing in this space and as our knowledge evolves, we hope to see more applications submitted to our 2021 programme.

Snakebite envenoming has been historically an under researched and under-resourced NTD. It kills between 81-138,000 people annually and leaves many more people with long-lasting disabilities[1]. It is estimated that between 2008-17, only $57m was invested in research globally[2]. As a comparison, £230m was spent on cancer research in the UK alone, in 2018/19[3]. With the help of RSTMH and many of our partners, the profile, funding and awareness of snakebite envenoming has increased in recent years. In 2019, the WHO launched its global strategy for prevention and control of snakebite envenoming and the Wellcome Trust announced an £80m programme into snakebite research[4]. With our partners, we are delighted to award 22 grants in this long-neglected disease. The third International Snakebite Awareness Day on 19 September 2020 provides an opportunity to remind ourselves of the challenges of tackling snakebite and also to showcase women on the frontline of this issue.

AMR is a global problem. Increasing resistance to our current suite of antimicrobials can lead to routine procedures becoming very high risk, as without effective drugs, the risk of infection increases. There are at least 700,000 deaths every year due to drug-resistant infections and it is estimated that this will increase to 10m by 2050[5]. The grants we have awarded include research on the assessment of antibiotic prescribing patterns, AMR strategies and economic evaluation in LMICs, and AMR policy implementation.