Although the Newton Bhabha Fund workshop on Clean Energy Research for Rural India is now over there are still a few outstanding posts I want to complete. Our plan is to turn these into a guide for others running these kinds of workshops once we’ve given the participants a few weeks to settle back into their usual routines. Today’s post looks at the theme we covered on day 4 of the workshop when we looked out the resources which facilitating turning ideas into projects.
Clearly a significant factor here is the availability of funding, but we also heard from Stuart Govan, from the Royal Society of Chemistry which co-funded the workshops with the British Council. I’m going to comeback to some of the points that Stuart made in a future post, but to be efficient, here is a link to his slides from the workshop which make it clear how many benefits there are to being an engaged and active member of a professional learned society.
Again, we recognised that the expertise on this topic lay in the group rather than solely with the organisers, so we gave a brief introduction to the general funding and opportunity map as we know it in the UK (with a healthy warning that this is currently in a state of flux). This presentation was based on others I’ve previously given in funding workshops but didn’t focus on international development research opportunities. For this we handed over to the group, first creating 5 headings for them to cluster their knowledge of funding schemes :
- visits and exchanges
- proof of concept/initial studies/seed funding
- workshops and networks
- project funding
- programme funding
The group produced a wealth of information from both the UK and India. Finding links for all the schemes is going to take some time, but here are a few key funders.
UKIERI – the UK India Education Research Initiative
The Universities themselves – almost all of those represented at the workshop from both UK and Indian institutions had internal funds which were available for visits.
RCUK – the UK’s cluster of research funding councils have a range of schemes. Coincidentally, the BBSRC launched its India Partnering calls today.
Indian Council of Social Science Research
Although currently closed, the SAGES/PECRE funds from the Scottish Funding Council were mentioned.
Participants were also encouraged to use the “Pathways to Impact” section of RCUK proposals to cost visits and exchanges if international development was a relevant impact area.
Another Indian funder mentioned was the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research.
I’m just scratching the surface here of the schemes and funders that the group were aware of – the point is that there is a significant and flexible funding landscape but it is complex – for many schemes you will need partners, so a good starting place is to attend workshops (such as ours) and to ask these questions of your fellow attendees.
For our group the next steps will be a mix of student exchanges, visits and proof of concept funding. If you are interested in engaging with this kind of research, Newton Bhabha (and other Newton Fund iteration) workshop are a great starting point. In the next blog I’ll look at how our attendees became aware of the workshop and why they chose to attend.
