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Background

The Swedish research collaboration with Uganda was initiated in 2000. The main objective of the bilateral research collaboration has been to enhance capacity of public higher education institutions to conduct and sustain strategic and high quality research that will contribute to the development needs of Uganda and beyond through building a critical mass of independent researchers.

To contribute to the establishment of a coherent agenda for research and researcher training in Uganda, the support is mainly focused at Makerere University, the largest public university in the country. The research Program aims to support Makerere University towards its goal of becoming a vibrant, internationally competitive research university. During the research agreement 2010-2015 four other public universities entered the cooperation: Kyambogo, Busitema, Gulu and Mbarara University of Science and Technology. The support to those universities was channelled through Makerere University. Sweden remains by far the largest funder of research capacity strengthening in Uganda. There has been three consecutive agreement periods since the start of the Swedish research cooperation with Uganda in 2000. Total disbursement since inception is 525 million SEK, approximately USD 70 million.

The amended agreement 1 July 2020 to 30th June 2022 entails 45 million SEK, approximately USD 4.5 million. The Swedish research collaboration with Uganda has been built on international research collaboration, the main component being PhD training with principally Swedish universities in a so called ‘sandwich mode’ allowing for Ugandan students to stay 3-5 months annually in Sweden for course and laboratory work. The amended agreement entails support to staff from the above mentioned Ugandan universities, training 99 continuing PhD students (of which 16 in sandwich mode) divided over 17 projects.

The research areas are chosen by Uganda and cover natural and social sciences, humanities, and medicine, research projects being designed to be multi-disciplinary. Institutional support goes towards building long-term research environments and sustainable academic institutions through support to libraries, laboratories, ICT, scientific equipment, quality assurance of scientific results, gender policy, innovation, as well as research and administrative reform processes. The latter has been focused on improved strategic planning and resource management, enhanced pedagogy, and graduate training evaluation.

Please refer below to the Standard Operating Procedures (SoP) for Mak-Sida Phasing out Research Collaboration Program 2020-2022 download