Strengthening pre-award grants management at Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH) - ABSTRACT
Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH) is the largest teaching and referral hospital in Kenya. KNH’s mandate
includes facilitating research and participating in national health planning and policy development, in addition
to providing medical training and care. As the leading site for clinical research in Kenya, KNH established a
Research and Programs Department to oversee conduct of research which currently is implementing >40
collaborative clinical research projects and programs and has seen growth of the internal research database
with >2,000 research conducted to date.
For over 90% of the implemented programs, KNH researchers act as subcontractors on awards due to limited
pre-award research administration capacity. Of the awards at KNH, 80% are linked to the collaborating partner
University of Washington (UW). Through this partnership many research trainings, mentorship and career
growth opportunities have been made available to the KNH researchers and other local institutions.
Researchers have attained MPH or PhD trainings, advanced research trainings and mentorship that have
expanded their capacity in research methods and grant writing skills from institutions such as UW and Yale
University. This has created more applications being developed by KNH investigators, but has not increased
the capacity or systems at KNH to effectively support pre-award research administration. This creates a need
to strengthen the capacity for pre-award grants management processes at Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH)
and other local institutions in Kenya to eliminate over reliance from outside collaborative institutions. By
strengthening the capacity for pre-award grants management processes, it will enable more KNH researchers
to successfully apply for research funding from NIH, and create a benchmark for other local institutions to learn
and improve their grants processes.
The objectives of this proposal are to: 1) Train two KNH senior research administrators on pre-award grant
management processes at University of Washington and the National Institutes of Health; 2) Develop
institutional pre-award processes that are compliant with the US federal government regulations; and 3) Build
capacity through training of other research administrators at KNH and other Kenyan institutions that receive
NIAID funds.
Two senior administrators at KNH will undergo training at UW (Global WACh and UW's Office of Sponsored
Programs) and NIH to help them to develop standard operating procedures and training materials on NIH
grants management. Post training, they will implement an on-the-job training and mentorship program by
creating a research administrators’ community of practice aimed at enhancing capacity for other research
administrators within KNH. The overall implementation will be overseen by the MPIs Dr. John Kinuthia, deputy
director Research and Programs department at KNH and Ms. Emmaculate Nzove, a Program manager.
