Seven EDCTP prizes close tomorrow, and you have to put yourself forward. Plus 176 other open calls, and a conference worth planning for a year out.

Forty-nine of the opportunities on this week’s sheet close within a fortnight. Nine of them close tomorrow.

That is what the first week of September looks like every year, and it is why this issue leads with the things that close first.

Tomorrow

EDCTP Prizes 2027 — 2 September, 17:00 Brussels

Seven prizes. The Dr Pascoal Mocumbi Prize and the Outstanding Research Team Prize at €50,000 each, the Outstanding Female Scientist Prize at €20,000, and four Scientific Leadership Prizes at €15,000 each.

Those four are split by residence and gender, so there is one category reserved for a woman resident in sub-Saharan Africa and another for a man. Read the residence rule carefully: it requires residence in a country that is a constituent state of the EDCTP Association, not simply anywhere on the continent.

And the part most guidance still gets wrong: you apply for these yourself. Earlier editions worked by third-party nomination. Under the 2027 rules candidates and teams submit directly through the EU Funding and Tenders Portal, supported by at least one letter of recommendation from a reputable scientist. Nobody is going to put your name forward. Read the call, or the fuller write-up here.

17:00 Brussels is 16:00 in the UK and 18:00 in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

Two EDCTP3 calls — also 2 September

Enhancing Integrated Research and Healthcare in Sub-Saharan Africa, and Training and Innovation Networks for Sustained Capacity Development. Both on the sheet with links.

Also closing tomorrow

• Leducq Foundation International Networks of Excellence — up to USD 9.5 million.

• British Council Transnational Education Exploratory Grants — up to GBP 25,000.

• NIHR James Lind Alliance Priority Setting Partnerships rolling call — UK institution required.

This week

Novo Nordisk Foundation — several, 1 and 8 September

The Global Science Summit Programme at up to DKK 7 million and Regenerative Medicine Catalyst Grants at up to DKK 10 million both close on 1 September; Project Grants within Nutrition close on 8 September. Novo Nordisk is one of the better-funded foundations open to international applicants and appears rarely in most UK-facing digests.

EHA Bilateral Collaborative Grant — 1 September

Up to €320,000 from the European Hematology Association for collaborative work between two groups. Relevant to anyone in haematology or sickle cell research looking to formalise an existing collaboration.

Royal Society University Research Fellowship — 9 September

Early-career scientists building an independent research career, with a host in the UK or Ireland. One of the strongest fellowships in the UK system, and squarely relevant to diaspora readers rather than Africa-based applicants.

MRC Early Independence Career Development Fellowship — 15 September

Carried over from an earlier issue and now close. UK host required.

Commonwealth Shared Scholarship — 15 September

One-year taught postgraduate courses in the UK for students from developing Commonwealth countries, covering fees, travel and a stipend. Applications go through a UK university rather than direct, so the practical deadline is whatever the university sets — usually earlier. Check the institution first.

New: The Missing Curriculum, Part 4

The numbers that judge you. What the Impact Factor and the h-index actually measure, and why it isn’t you. One was built to help librarians decide which journals to buy. The other counts papers in databases that index 7.4 per cent of active African journals. Both are used to decide careers. Read Part 4

Free, as the whole series is.

The survey: open until the end of September

When the UK cut aid spending, the consequences were counted in budget lines. What was not counted was what happened to the research itself — the studies that stopped, the posts that went, the collaborations that quietly ended, the people who left the field.

The parliamentary inquiry that might have gathered that has reported and closed. So I am gathering it here instead.

The survey takes about ten minutes. It asks what you lost, what you did about it, and what you would want a funder or a select committee to understand. Responses are being written up for publication, anonymised unless you say otherwise, and I will publish the aggregate findings here whatever a journal decides. Take the survey

It closes at the end of September. If you have been affected by the aid cuts, by the changes at NIHR, or by the US federal funding disruption, your experience belongs in that record.

And if you have already responded — thank you. The most useful thing you can do now is send it to two colleagues. The people whose work was hit hardest are, reliably, the least likely to write about it.

The datasheet

The funding datasheet is updated for this issue. A hundred and seventy-seven opportunities, sorted by closing date, with the forty-nine that close within a fortnight shaded.

The free sheet names every one of them with its funder, deadline and days remaining, and gives full detail and live links for everything closing on or before 31 October. The subscriber sheet gives full detail and links for all of them, with no date restriction.

Free sheet: open the free sheet

One thing before you go

If you are eligible for one of the EDCTP prizes, tomorrow at 17:00 Brussels is the whole of your opportunity this year. It takes an afternoon and one letter from a colleague.

If you are not eligible, you almost certainly know someone who is. Send this to them today rather than tomorrow.

And if the aid cuts have changed your work in the last eighteen months, the survey is open until the end of September. Ten minutes, and it becomes part of a published record rather than a private frustration.

Dr Catherine N. Kibirige — biomedical scientist; research funding (formerly Wellcome Trust), IP and global health.

IP Strategy Officer, Enterprise Division, Imperial College London · Project Coordinator, IoPPN, King’s College London · Project Coordinator and Qualitative Researcher, Sickle Cell Alliance London · Honorary Senior Research Fellow, MUHAS, Tanzania · Chief Scientific Advisor, Afromics.

Consultancy enquiries on funding strategy, proposal development and research IP — reply or write to ckibirig@outlook.com.

Read more

What the Impact Factor and the h-index actually measure, and why it isn’t you.

Somewhere in a hiring committee or a funding panel, a number attached to your name is being read as a summary of your worth as a scientist. Nobody will tell you which number, or how it was arrived at, or what it can and cannot support. You are simply expected to have a good one.

So here is what those numbers are, where they came from, and what they actually measure. Not so you can dismiss them — they will keep being used whether or not you approve — but so that you can see them clearly, use them where they help you, and recognise the moment when someone is asking a number to do a job it was never built for.

The Impact Factor measures the journal, not the paper, and not you

The Journal Impact Factor has a formula, and the formula is not a secret. Take the citations recorded in one year to the articles and reviews a journal published in the two preceding years, and divide by the number of those articles and reviews. That is the whole thing. It is an average, calculated once a year by Clarivate and published in the Journal Citation Reports.

Read that again and notice what is missing. Your paper is not in it. Your name is not in it. The Impact Factor of a journal is a property of the journal, in the same way that the average height of a country is a property of the country and tells you nothing about the height of any person who lives there.

It also was not built for what it is now used for. Eugene Garfield developed it at the Institute for Scientific Information as a tool to help librarians decide which journals to buy. That is its origin: a purchasing aid for collection development, later adopted as a proxy for scientific quality by people who needed a number and found one lying around.

The average is a bad description of the journal it describes

The deeper problem is statistical. Citations within a journal are not evenly spread; they are heavily skewed. A small number of papers collect most of the citations, and the majority of papers in any given journal are cited far less often than the journal’s average would imply.

Per Seglen, who established this in the early 1990s, only a small fraction of a journal’s articles are cited anywhere near the journal mean — and, crucially, the same skew appears at author level, so the journal average correlates poorly with the citedness of any individual researcher’s work. Garfield himself acknowledged a rough 80/20 pattern, with something like a fifth of articles accounting for four fifths of citations. Independent analyses of individual journals have found around two thirds of papers falling below the mean. When a distribution looks like that, the arithmetic mean is close to meaningless as a description of a typical article.

Garfield was direct about the consequence. Using a journal’s Impact Factor to estimate the citation count of a particular paper is, in his words, rather dubious given the known skewness — and he was describing exactly the practice that has since become standard in hiring and promotion.

There is a formal position on this, and it is worth knowing precisely. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment was drafted by a group of journal editors and publishers at the American Society for Cell Biology’s annual meeting on 16 December 2012 and published on 13 May 2013. Its very first recommendation is that journal-based metrics should not be used as a surrogate for the quality of individual research articles, nor to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, nor in hiring, promotion or funding decisions.

That is not a hedge. It names the exact practice most researchers are subjected to and says do not do it. DORA reports more than 2,000 organisations and over 17,000 individuals as signatories across more than 140 countries — among them funders and universities that will still, in the same breath, ask you for the Impact Factors of the journals you have published in.

The h-index measures how long you have been working

The h-index is the other number. It is simpler than it sounds: your h-index is h if you have published h papers that have each been cited at least h times. Fifteen papers with fifteen or more citations each gives you an h-index of 15.

It has one honest virtue — it is harder to inflate with a single lucky paper than a raw citation count is. But it carries three properties that matter enormously and are rarely stated:

• It can only go up. An h-index never falls. This means it is, in large part, a measure of how many years you have been publishing. Comparing a postdoc’s h-index with a professor’s is comparing career lengths.

• It is field-dependent. Citation rates differ by an order of magnitude between fields. An h-index of 20 means something entirely different in molecular biology than in mathematics, and the number itself carries no marker of which.

• It depends entirely on which database is counting. Your h-index in Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science will be three different numbers, because each indexes a different slice of the literature. There is no true value.

That last point is where this becomes a question of equity rather than statistics.

The databases cannot see most of the research published in Africa

Web of Science and Scopus are the two databases that most research evaluation runs on. University rankings use them. National science reports use them. Promotion committees and funding panels use them, usually without asking what is in them.

Here is what is in them. A study published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology identified 2,229 active African journals. Web of Science indexes 7.4% of them — 166 journals. Scopus indexes 7.8%, or 174. CrossRef, which is free infrastructure rather than a curated commercial index, covers 45.6%.

The distribution within that small share is skewed again. South African journals account for roughly three quarters of the African journals in Web of Science, while Nigeria, which publishes about 44% of all African journals, is badly underrepresented. A separate regional analysis found sub-Saharan Africa to be the most underrepresented region in the world in both databases, with journals published there around four times less likely to be indexed than journals published in Europe.

Follow that through to its consequence. If you publish in a respected regional journal — read by the clinicians and policymakers who can actually act on your findings — those citations very likely do not exist as far as your h-index is concerned. The work happened. The readers read it. The number does not move.

This is the mechanism, stated plainly: a metric that only counts what a commercial database chose to index will systematically undervalue research published outside the regions those databases favour. It is not that African research is judged and found wanting. It is that it is largely not seen by the instrument doing the judging.

What to actually do about it

The declaration is short, and reading it is ten minutes well spent: the DORA recommendations in full.

Knowing this changes what you do, in fairly concrete ways.

• Know your own numbers before someone else quotes them. Look up your h-index in Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science and note the difference. When you are asked for it, give the figure from the database that sees your work best, and name the database. Nobody can object to a sourced number.

• Cite your own field. Citations are the currency, and where you point yours is a decision. Citing regionally published work that deserves citing is both accurate scholarship and a small correction to the count.

• Use article-level evidence when the journal-level number is unhelpful. Citations to the specific paper, downloads, policy citations, guideline adoption, clinical uptake. If your work changed a national treatment protocol, say so — that is a stronger claim than any Impact Factor, and it is checkable.

• Check whether the body assessing you has signed DORA. The list is public. If they have signed, they have committed not to use journal metrics to judge individuals — which means you can build your case on the work itself, and you have a reasonable footing if a panel drifts back towards journal titles.

• Do not pretend the numbers do not matter. They are used. Understanding them is not the same as endorsing them, and refusing to engage with them mostly costs the person refusing.

The point

None of these numbers were designed to measure a scientist. One was built to help librarians buy journals. The other counts papers in databases that cannot see most of a continent’s research. They persist because they are cheap, quick and available, and because judging quality properly is slow and expensive.

You are not obliged to believe them. You are obliged to understand them, because the people assessing you will be using them either way — and the difference between a researcher who knows how the number was made and one who does not is, quite often, the difference in how the conversation goes.

Next in the series: who owns the scoreboard — the handful of companies that own the journals, the databases that decide which journals count, and the rankings, all at once.

Sources

1. Garfield E. The history and meaning of the journal impact factor. JAMA. 2006;295(1):90–3.

2. Seglen PO. How representative is the journal impact factor? Research Evaluation. 1992;2(3):143–9. doi:10.1093/rev/2.3.143

3. Seglen PO. Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research. BMJ. 1997;314(7079):498–502. doi:10.1136/bmj.314.7079.497

4. San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. American Society for Cell Biology; drafted 16 December 2012, published 13 May 2013. Available from: https://sfdora.org/read/

5. Hirsch JE. An index to quantify an individual’s scientific research output. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005;102(46):16569–72. doi:10.1073/pnas.0507655102

6. Asubiaro T, Onaolapo S, Mills D. A comparative study of the coverage of African journals in Web of Science, Scopus, and CrossRef. J Assoc Inf Sci Technol. 2023. doi:10.1002/asi.24758

7. Asubiaro T, et al. Regional disparities in Web of Science and Scopus journal coverage. Scientometrics. 2024. doi:10.1007/s11192-024-04948-x

8. Clarivate. Journal Citation Reports — Journal Impact Factor methodology.

The Missing Curriculum is a free series on how the machinery of a research career actually works — the parts nobody puts in a training programme. It publishes alongside the Global Health Funding Digest.

The EDCTP Prizes close on 2 September, and most of the advice about them is out of date.

There is a prize closing next Wednesday with a category reserved for a woman resident in sub-Saharan Africa. It is worth €15,000. And a great many of the people eligible for it will not apply, for a reason that has nothing to do with merit.

They are waiting to be nominated.

What changed

For most of their history, the EDCTP Prizes worked by third-party nomination. Someone senior put your name forward. That is how a lot of scientific recognition still works, and it is the model most of us carry in our heads.

Under the 2027 rules, that is no longer how it works. Applications must be submitted directly by the individuals or teams applying, through the EU Funding and Tenders Portal, supported by at least one letter of recommendation from a reputable scientist. The call says so plainly.

So the recommendation letter remains — you still need someone to vouch for you. But the act of putting your name into the process is now yours to perform. If you are waiting for a professor to notice, you will wait past the deadline.

I am flagging this specifically because second-hand guidance has not caught up. Several summaries still describe these as nomination-based. If you read one of those and concluded there was nothing for you to do, that conclusion was wrong.

What is actually on offer

Seven prizes across four categories:

• Dr Pascoal Mocumbi Prize — €50,000

• Outstanding Research Team Prize — €50,000

• Outstanding Female Scientist Prize — €20,000

• Scientific Leadership Prizes — €15,000 each, in four separate categories

The four-way split on the Scientific Leadership Prizes is the part worth understanding. There is one for a woman resident in sub-Saharan Africa, one for a man resident in sub-Saharan Africa, and the same pair for residents of EU member states. A researcher based in Dar es Salaam or Kampala or Accra is not competing against the entire European field. There is a category reserved for them, and within it, one reserved for women.

That is an unusually deliberate piece of design, and it only works if people use it.

Read the residence rule carefully

The two sub-Saharan categories require residence in a country that is a constituent state of the EDCTP Association — not simply anywhere on the continent. The two European categories require residence in an EU Member State or a country associated with Horizon Europe. Check your country before you invest an afternoon.

The deadline is 2 September at 17:00 Brussels time. That is 16:00 in the UK and 18:00 in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Detailed eligibility for each category sits in the Rules of Contest document linked from the call.

The wider point

This is the third time this year I have found a funding route where the barrier was not eligibility or competitiveness, but a widely held belief about how the process works. Advisory committees that people assume are filled by invitation, and which in fact advertise. Fellowships people assume require a professor’s blessing, and which in fact take direct applications.

The information is public in every case. It is simply not circulated, and nobody teaches you where to look.

That is what The Missing Curriculum is for — a free series on the parts of a research career that no training programme covers. The most recent instalment is about exactly this: the rooms that decide funding and science policy, and how they actually recruit.

And the weekly Global Health Funding Digest exists because a call you never hear about is functionally the same as a call you were not eligible for. This week’s issue has 177 open opportunities, sorted by closing date. Forty-five of them close within a fortnight.

If the paragraph about the reserved category made you think of someone else, send it to them.

If it made you think of yourself and then talked you out of it, that is precisely the reason the category exists.

Free weekly funding intelligence for global health researchers across Africa and the diaspora. Live calls, real deadlines, and the things nobody teaches you.

Subscribe to the Global Health Funding Digest

Twenty-six opportunities close on the first and second of September alone. Here is what to look at before the wall arrives.

The summer pause in this sector is real, and so is the reckoning at the end of it. Forty-five of the opportunities on this week’s sheet close within a fortnight, and more than half of those land on two consecutive days. If you are back at your desk on the first of September, several of them will already have gone.

So this issue is organised by urgency rather than by theme. The things that close first come first.

Closing this week

ARNTD African Researchers Small Grants — 24 August

The African Research Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases runs its Small Grants Programme for African researchers working on NTDs, and the eighth call closes tomorrow. If you have something ready, it is worth the evening. If not, note the cycle and watch for the ninth. arntd.org

Wellcome Accelerator Awards — 25 August

Wellcome’s Accelerator Awards close on Tuesday. These support researchers from backgrounds under-represented in the research workforce, and the value is discretionary rather than capped. Two days is not long enough to start one, but it is long enough to finish one.

Gilead Public Health Research Scholars Program — 28 August

Four awards, each up to USD 100,000 over two years. Research on HIV or viral hepatitis B, C or D, in implementation science or clinical epidemiology, and it is written for investigators based in low- and middle-income countries — sub-Saharan Africa is explicitly eligible. Junior faculty here means within ten years of your terminal degree, with an in-country research mentor and at least half your time on research. Closes 23:59 CEST.

One thing to watch. Gilead runs several Research Scholars programmes at once, with different values and different closing dates, and the figure of USD 130,000 that circulates against this deadline belongs to a different one — the HIV International programme, which closed in March. Check you are looking at the Public Health programme. researchscholars.gilead.com/public_health

The second of September

Six EDCTP prizes and two EDCTP3 calls all close on the same day, and between them they carry more money than anything else on the sheet this week.

EDCTP Prizes 2027 — 2 September

These recognise researchers and teams from Africa and Europe. The categories, with values:

• Dr Pascoal Mocumbi Prize — €50,000

• Outstanding Research Team Prize — €50,000

• Outstanding Female Scientist Prize — €20,000

• Scientific Leadership Prizes — €15,000 each, in four separate categories: a woman resident in sub-Saharan Africa, a man resident in sub-Saharan Africa, a woman resident in an EU member state, and a man resident in an EU member state.

The four-way split on the Scientific Leadership Prizes is the part most people miss. It means a researcher resident in sub-Saharan Africa is not competing against the whole field — there is a category reserved for them, and one reserved for women within it. Read the residence rule carefully: the two sub-Saharan categories require residence in a country that is a constituent state of the EDCTP Association, not simply anywhere on the continent. The two European categories require residence in an EU Member State or a country associated with Horizon Europe.

You apply for these yourself. That is worth stating plainly, because earlier editions worked by third-party nomination and a good deal of second-hand guidance still says so. Under the 2027 rules, candidates and teams submit directly through the EU Funding and Tenders Portal, supported by at least one letter of recommendation from a reputable scientist. Nobody is going to put your name forward. Read the call

Deadline is 17:00 Brussels time, which is 16:00 in the UK and 18:00 in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Detailed eligibility for each category sits in the Rules of Contest document linked from the call.

Two EDCTP3 calls — also 2 September

Enhancing Integrated Research and Healthcare in Sub-Saharan Africa, and Training and Innovation Networks for Sustained Capacity Development. Both are on the sheet with links.

New: The Missing Curriculum, Part 3

The rooms recruit in public. Advisory groups, academies and expert panels are not filled by tap on the shoulder — most of them advertise, and nobody circulates the notices. It covers INGSA-Africa, the AAS Affiliates Programme, the Global Young Academy, the Africa CDC and WHO calls for experts, and the UK routes, along with the thing that actually decides eligibility for all of them, which is not your passport. Read Part 3

Free, as the whole series is. The Global Young Academy call it flags closes on 15 September.

The datasheet

The funding datasheet is updated for this issue. A hundred and seventy-seven opportunities, sorted by closing date, with the forty-five that close within a fortnight shaded.

The free sheet names every one of them with its funder, deadline and days remaining, and gives full detail and live links for everything closing on or before 30 September. The subscriber sheet gives full detail and links for all of them, with no date restriction.

A handful of rows read “Link to verify”. Those are opportunities where no primary funder URL was available in this cycle’s source, and they are being rebuilt from the funder pages directly in September. Where a link is uncertain it says so, rather than sending you somewhere wrong.

Free sheet: open the free sheet

One thing before you go

The EDCTP Scientific Leadership Prizes have a category reserved for a woman resident in sub-Saharan Africa. It closes on 2 September, and you have to put yourself forward — nobody does it for you.

If that sentence made you think of someone other than yourself, send it to them. If it made you think of yourself and then talked you out of it, that is the whole reason the category exists.

Dr Catherine N. Kibirige — biomedical scientist; research funding (formerly Wellcome Trust), IP and global health.

IP Strategy Officer, Enterprise Division, Imperial College London · Project Coordinator, IoPPN, King’s College London · Project Coordinator and Qualitative Researcher, Sickle Cell Alliance London · Honorary Senior Research Fellow, MUHAS, Tanzania · Chief Scientific Advisor, Afromics.

Consultancy enquiries on funding strategy, proposal development and research IP — reply or write to ckibirig@outlook.com.

Read more

Advisory groups, academies and expert panels are not filled by tap on the shoulder. Most of them advertise. Here is where they advertise, and who can actually walk through the door.

There is a belief, widely held and rarely tested, that the committees which shape health policy are closed — that membership arrives by invitation, through networks you are either born into or not.

It is mostly wrong. A large share of these rooms recruit through public calls, on their own websites, with application forms and closing dates. What is true is that nobody circulates those calls, they are not in any funding database, and they do not look like opportunities. They look like notices.

Here is what is actually open.

The African routes

INGSA-Africa. The Africa chapter of the International Network for Government Science Advice — INGSA’s first regional chapter, founded in Hermanus, South Africa in February 2016, and an affiliated body of the International Science Council. Membership is free and open: register at ingsa.org/join and set your region to Africa. That is the whole barrier.

Its Science Advice Skills Development Programme pairs early and mid-career African scientists with experienced science advisers. Fifty-eight scientists from nineteen African countries have been mentored across four cohorts since 2022, with a fifth running in 2026. If you want one route from this instalment, this is the one I would take: free to join, explicitly for people at your stage, and mentorship rather than a lecture.

The AAS Affiliates Programme. The African Academy of Sciences selects around forty early and mid-career researchers a year across all five African regions, for a five-year term, from a field that has run to more than three hundred applicants. Affiliates get mentorship from AAS Fellows, plus grant-writing, publishing and science communication training.

The eligibility combines both gates from Part 1: you must be an African national and resident at or affiliated with an African higher education or research institution. PhD within the last ten years, substantial postdoctoral experience, and aged forty or below — with explicit consideration for women over forty who have had career interruptions. Free to apply. Check aasciences.africa for the current cycle; the deadline was not datestamped when I looked.

The Global Young Academy. Global membership for early and mid-career researchers, with an annual call open from mid-July. The 2026 round closes at 18:00 UTC on 15 September 2026, for the cohort of 2027, who will meet in Indonesia. Members commit around four hours a month, and science-for-policy work is a substantial part of what the academy does. Open worldwide, including to Africa-based researchers. globalyoungacademy.net

In South Africa there is also the South African Young Academy of Science, under ASSAf, which elects around ten new members a year from South Africa-based PhD holders under forty.

Your national academy. Mostly honorific and filled by peer nomination rather than application — but not uniformly, and the exception matters. The Tanzania Academy of Sciences uniquely offers an application-based Ordinary membership, open to Tanzanians and to selected non-nationals of high academic standing, alongside its elected Fellowships and a residence-based Associate membership for resident non-citizens. Uganda’s UNAS, Ghana’s GAAS and the Nigerian Academy of Science all work by nomination and election. If you are Tanzanian, you can apply. Elsewhere, the route is to be nominated, which means being known to a Fellow — so the practical step is a conversation, not a form.

The clearest LMIC-open route of all

Africa CDC and WHO recruit advisory group members through public expressions of interest, and they do it regularly.

Africa CDC has run open calls for its Continental Immunization Advisory Council, its African Strategic Advisory Group on Genomics and its Diagnostic Advisory Committee. WHO’s Regional Office for Africa issues calls for experts — for example for the Technical Advisory Group on Noncommunicable Diseases — and explicitly encourages applicants from the African region. WHO centrally maintains expert advisory panels, nominated through its ePanel system, and an International Health Regulations expert roster.

These are unpaid advisory appointments. They are also the single most direct way for a researcher based in Africa to sit in a room where continental health policy is decided, and they are advertised on the organisations’ own news pages rather than anywhere you would think to look. Checking africacdc.org and afro.who.int once a month is a five-minute habit with a disproportionate return.

The UK routes, and the gate that decides them

This section exists because a large share of this readership is diaspora, and because the answer changes depending on something that is not your passport.

The Royal Society Pairing Scheme places thirty researchers with parliamentarians and civil servants for a week in Westminster. You must live in the UK and work at a UK institution, with at least two years of postdoctoral experience. Applications usually open in early September.

POST fellowships place researchers in the UK Parliament for three months to write briefings. Fellows must be able to work in the UK and pass security vetting, and most schemes require registration at a UK university.

UKRI policy internships are open only to doctoral students funded by a UK research council. UKRI policy fellowships are individually named posts, applied for one at a time, not a single standing scheme.

And one that is not a scheme at all. The Universities Policy Engagement Network sits underneath all of the above — 124 UK member institutions, six communities of practice, a mentoring programme, a jobs and consultations board, and its own Government–University Pairing Scheme, which places academics with civil servants and is a different thing from the Royal Society scheme that places them with parliamentarians. Its membership model is the part worth knowing: membership is institutional, not individual. In UPEN’s own words, if your institution is a member, so are you. A great many academics at member universities are already members and have never used it.

Two things follow. If you are at a UK university, check the directory at upen.ac.uk/members before assuming you need to join anything. And if you are not — the resources library and the newsletter are open to anyone, anywhere. The toolkits, guides, case studies and the map of the academic-policy ecosystem are public. The network is UK-only; the teaching is not.

Read those together and the pattern is the one from Part 1. Every single gate is about residence or employment, not citizenship. A Tanzanian researcher employed at a UK university can apply to all of them. A British citizen working at Muhimbili can apply to none. The passport is not what is being tested.

One route deliberately left out of this list. MRC boards and panels also recruit annually from early September, but sitting on a funding panel is assessment rather than policy advice, and it belongs with peer review and editorial boards. That is a later instalment.

That cuts both ways, and it is worth saying plainly rather than resentfully: if you are diaspora, these doors are open to you and are largely uncontested by people who assume they are not eligible. If you are based in Africa, the WHO and Africa CDC routes above are yours in a way these are not, and they lead to bigger rooms.

What actually works, according to the evidence

There is a real literature here, and most of it is not about communication at all.

The most cited African example is Uganda’s rapid response service, which let policymakers ask a question and receive synthesised evidence within days. In its first twenty-eight months it received sixty-five requests from thirty policymakers and stakeholders, most of them from the Ministry of Health. It has been evaluated repeatedly and copied widely. The lesson is unglamorous: what changed behaviour was being reliably available at the speed a ministry works, not producing better papers.

Policy BUDDIES, in South Africa and Cameroon, tested pairing sub-national policymakers with researchers and found it increased their use of systematic reviews. The broader systematic review of what works is Langer, Tripney and Gough’s The science of using science, from UCL’s EPPI-Centre in 2016.

One caution, since it is frequently cited as though it were African evidence: the SPIRIT trial, which is the best-known experimental study of increasing research use in policy organisations, was conducted in Sydney. Use it as a design precedent, not as evidence about Kampala or Dar es Salaam.

The five-minute version

1. Join INGSA-Africa today. It is free and it takes minutes.

2. If you are under forty with a PhD in the last decade, put the AAS Affiliates and Global Young Academy calls in your calendar. GYA closes 15 September 2026.

3. Check africacdc.org and afro.who.int monthly for calls for experts. Set a reminder; nothing else will tell you.

4. If you are Tanzanian, look at TAAS Ordinary membership, which you can apply for directly.

5. If you work at a UK institution, the Royal Society and POST routes are open to you, and both open in September.

None of this requires permission. All of it requires knowing the door is there.

Next in the series: the numbers that judge you — what the Impact Factor and the h-index actually measure, and why a journal average and a citation count end up deciding careers.

The Missing Curriculum is a free series on how the machinery of a research career actually works — the parts nobody puts in a training programme. It publishes alongside the Global Health Funding Digest.

Every funding database on the market will tell you about the £3m Arthritis UK consortium call closing next month. None of them will tell you that a free science communication webinar, run by CABI and open to researchers in most sub-Saharan African countries, closes for registration this Wednesday.

That asymmetry is not accidental. Databases index grants, because grants have values and deadlines and structured metadata. Free training, free memberships and free advisory routes have none of those things, so they fall through — and they are precisely the routes that cost an early-career researcher nothing to take.

This issue carries both kinds. The money first, because deadlines are deadlines. Then the ones nobody indexes.

Closing in the next fortnight

NIHR James Lind Alliance Priority Setting Partnerships — 18 August. A rolling call with an actual closing date, which is a distinction worth holding on to. We listed all three NIHR rolling calls without dates last week; they carry them, and the other two close 25 November.

ARNTD Small Grants Programme VIII — 24 August. USD 30,000 for the early-career component. Not the USD 65,000 that circulates in reposts and in at least one commercial funding database.

British Council TNE Grants with India — 25 August, 11:00 BST. Moved from 5 August. If you wrote it off a fortnight ago it is live again.

Wellcome Accelerator Awards, RAEng Enterprise Fellowship, Keystone Global Virome — all 25 August.

Female Genital Schistosomiasis integration (COR-NTD) — 26 August. USD 175,000.

Gilead International Research Scholars — 28 August.

AREF–MRC Towards Leadership Programme — 28 August, 16:00. African citizen and employed at an African institution — both, not either. The gate most people will miss is two-sided: prior funding of typically more than £50,000 but less than £500,000 combined. Too little and you are out; too much and you are also out. Three workshops between March 2027 and March 2028, costs met, and your institution must authorise attendance at all three in writing. Partial attendance is not permitted.

Researchers in Residence Sprint — 31 August, 23:59. £25,000 to £50,000. You must have discussed the project with a host Catapult before submitting.

The ones nobody indexes

Script science communication webinar — Wednesday 19 August, 11:00 GMT. One hour, on Zoom, free, run by CABI’s SciDev.Net training arm. Open to researchers based in CABI member countries, which includes Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Rwanda and Ethiopia among others. If your country is not on that list, the self-paced Script courses are open to everyone regardless.

NIHR HTA application writing workshop — expression of interest by 21 August. Free, in person, places limited. Free grant-writing training from the funder who will read the application is not a common thing.

INGSA-Africa membership — open, free, no deadline. The Africa chapter of the international government science advice network. Register and set your region to Africa. That is the entire barrier. Its mentorship programme has paired 58 scientists from 19 African countries with experienced science advisers since 2022.

UPEN resources — open to anyone, anywhere. The UK’s academic-policy engagement network is institutional and UK-only, but its toolkits, guides, case studies and newsletter are public. The network is closed; the teaching is not.

All four are on the Certifications and Panels tabs of this week’s sheets. None of them appeared in a funding alert.

This week’s picks — free

Every opportunity, all tabs, full details for anything closing before 31 August: the free picks sheet.

Two housekeeping notes on the sheet. The three NIHR rolling calls now carry their real dates. And a small number of Apply links currently read “Link to verify” rather than pointing somewhere: an audit found several links had drifted onto the wrong rows, and where I could not confirm the correct destination I have removed it rather than leave you clicking through to the wrong funder. Names and deadlines are unaffected. The full link rebuild happens in September.

New this week

The Missing Curriculum, Part 2: Nobody teaches you to be understood. Public engagement, science communication, knowledge translation, research uptake and policy influence are five different jobs with different funders and different training. Free.

First published 16 August 2026.

The series index has also been rebuilt. It now runs to nine parts, and Part 3 — on how advisory groups, academies and expert committees actually recruit — follows shortly.

Policy watch

NIH foreign subawards remain abolished. NOT-OD-25-104 and NOT-OD-25-155. Anyone costing a US-led application with an African partner needs PA-26-002 before budgeting.

Researchfish closes July 2027. Elsevier is shutting the platform. NIHR will use it until then; the successor is unannounced.

Dr Catherine N. Kibirige — biomedical scientist; research funding (formerly Wellcome Trust), IP and global health

Imperial College London · King’s College London · Sickle Cell Alliance London · MUHAS Tanzania · Afromics

Consultancy: bespoke funding roundups and grant strategy for institutions and groups — reply or write to ckibirig@outlook.com

Read more

Public engagement, science communication, knowledge translation, research uptake and policy influence are five different jobs. Most researchers are told to do all five and trained in none.

I am learning this properly at fifty. Twenty-five years of lifesciences, a PhD, a diagnostic that works, and I am only now fully understanding how to put research in front of the people who decide what happens to it. Nobody taught it. It was never examined. It appeared on grant forms as a box called impact, and I filled it in the way everyone fills it in — by promising to publish and present.

So this instalment is written from the inside of the gap, not from above it.

Start with a distinction that almost nobody makes, and that determines which training you need, which funder pays for it, and which deadline you are working to.

Five jobs wearing one name

Public engagement is dialogue with people who are not researchers — schools, patient groups, community meetings, radio. It is two-way by definition. If you are only broadcasting, it is not engagement.

Science communication is explaining your work clearly to non-specialists. One-way, skill-based, and the one most people mean when they say either of the other terms.

Knowledge translation is synthesising evidence into a form a decision-maker can act on — a policy brief, a rapid response to a ministry question, a guideline submission. The audience is small, specific and busy.

Research uptake is getting findings actually used, and is increasingly what funders mean when they ask about impact. It is a plan, not an event.

Policy influence is shaping a decision. It usually happens in a room, over months, through a committee — and it is covered in Part 3.

These are not synonyms and they are not a ladder. A brilliant science communicator may have no route into a ministry. A researcher sitting on a national guideline committee may never have written a press release. The reason to separate them is practical: they have different funders, different training, and different things to put on a CV.

The training exists, it is free, and it is not advertised where you are looking

Four routes are genuinely open to a researcher based in Dar es Salaam, Kampala, Lilongwe, Accra, Lagos or Nairobi. None costs anything.

Script — SciDev.Net’s training brand, run by CABI. Free self-paced courses with certificates: science communication skills for scientists, for journalists and for press officers. No time limit, no fee. There is also a free live webinar series, run roughly monthly and facilitated by Dr Charles Wendo, a veterinary doctor and science journalist with more than twenty years in science communication training. One hour, on Zoom. Courses at scidevnet.teachable.com; webinars at scripttraining.net.

And here is the gate, because there is always a gate. The live webinars are open only to researchers based in CABI member countries. That is a membership list, not a map. It happens to include Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Ghana and Nigeria — along with Botswana, Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Mauritius, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. If your country is not on it, the self-paced courses are still open to you. Check the list rather than assuming either way.

AuthorAID, run by INASP. A free global network for researchers in low- and middle-income countries: mentoring, resources, and twice-yearly online courses in research writing and proposal writing, with certificates. INASP reports supporting over 23,000 researchers, with more than 35,000 participants from 135 countries through its courses. inasp.info.

The TDR Implementation Research MOOC, from WHO. Free, multilingual, with facilitated regional cohorts including one for the WHO African Region. Open to all applicants; a health background helps but is not required. It covers translating implementation research into policy and action, which sits precisely on the boundary between the third and fourth jobs above. tdr.who.int.

The Conversation Africa. Not training — a platform, and the highest-leverage free route on this list. Articles are written only by academics and researchers with a current university or research-institute position, working with an editor who does the heavy lifting on style. The Africa edition is hosted by the University of the Witwatersrand and works mainly with researchers in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal, but any eligible academic may register and pitch. Articles are republished free under Creative Commons, which is where the reach comes from: the network reports 228,000 articles by 115,000 academic authors and a monthly audience above 40 million reads. Register at theconversation.com/become-an-author.

What this is worth on a grant form

Two practical points, because engagement is easier to justify when it is funded.

Wellcome runs Research Enrichment – Public Engagement, between £10,000 and £250,000, typically around five per cent of the main grant. The condition is that you already hold a Wellcome grant, including through the Africa and Asia programmes, which have their own application route. If you hold Wellcome money and have not looked at this, it is the cheapest engagement funding you will find.

More generally: engagement written as a plan beats engagement written as a promise. “We will disseminate findings through publications and conferences” is what everybody writes and it persuades nobody. A named audience, a named format, a named month and a named person responsible is a different sentence entirely.

This month

1. Decide which of the five jobs you actually need. Most people need knowledge translation and think they need science communication.

2. Check whether your country is on CABI’s member list. If it is, book the 19 August webinar. If it is not, start a Script self-paced course, which is open regardless.

3. Register as an author at The Conversation. Registration is not a commitment to write; it puts you in the system for when you have something.

4. If you hold a Wellcome grant, read the Research Enrichment terms this week.

Next in the series: how you get into the rooms where the decisions are actually made — advisory groups, academies and panels — and which of those rooms will let you in.

The Missing Curriculum is a free series on how the machinery of a research career actually works — the parts nobody puts in a training programme. It publishes alongside the Global Health Funding Digest.

The usual shape of an NIH grant reaching an African institution was a subaward: a US university holds the money, an African partner does the work, funds pass down. That mechanism no longer exists.

Fogarty’s own funding page now states that NIH will not issue awards including a subaward to a foreign entity, and that applications containing non-US subawards are not accepted for review and are withdrawn automatically. The replacement structure requires separate linked awards and a US prime applying to a notice that supports it, the first of which appeared in January 2026.

Which makes the other Fogarty door worth knowing about. On the Emerging Global Leader Award, the applicant organisation is the African institution. Not a subcontractor, not a named partner — the grantee. It closes 3 December.

This issue collects the calls built that way: where an African institution holds the award, or an African researcher is the applicant.

The calls that want an African lead

Fogarty Emerging Global Leader Award (K43) — 3 December. Applicant must be a citizen of a low- or middle-income country, hold at least a master’s, and be junior faculty at an LMIC institution, committing 75% of their time. One US-based and one LMIC-based mentor required. Two notices run in parallel: PAR-24-295 where an independent clinical trial is required, PAR-24-296 where it is not allowed. Salary and research costs for three to five years.

SGCI Multilateral Research Call, STISA 2034 — 25 September. Funding is restricted to African institutions. Northern partners may join a consortium but cannot receive funds, which makes this one of the few instruments where the equity argument is built into the budget rather than the impact statement.

EDCTP3 calls and Excellence Prizes — 2 September. The Scientific Leadership Prizes split by residence, not nationality. A Tanzanian scientist based in London is assessed in the EU-and-associated category; a British scientist based in Dar es Salaam is in the sub-Saharan one. Read which noun the call uses.

Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation 2027 — 8 September. Sub-Saharan citizenship AND sub-Saharan residence. Two tests, not one.

Closing this month

NIHR HTA application writing workshop — EOI by 21 August. Free, in-person, places limited. On the Certifications tab.

ARNTD Small Grants Programme VIII — 24 August. The figure is USD 30,000 for the early-career component, not the USD 65,000 that circulates in most reposts and in at least one commercial funding database.

British Council TNE Grants with India — 25 August, 11:00 BST. The deadline moved from 5 August. If you checked this a fortnight ago and wrote it off, it is live again.

Wellcome Accelerator Awards, RAEng Enterprise Fellowship, Keystone Global Virome — 25 August.

Female Genital Schistosomiasis integration (COR-NTD) — 26 August. USD 175,000.

Gilead International Research Scholars — 28 August.

Researchers in Residence Sprint — 31 August, 23:59. £25,000–£50,000, UK university employment. You must have spoken to a host Catapult before you submit; applications not co-developed with one are refused outright. Some Catapults also restrict which nationalities they can collaborate with — a detail two clicks into the page that no summary carries.

This week’s picks — free

Every opportunity, all tabs, full details for anything closing before 31 August: the free picks sheet.

New tab this week: Key Conferences. Nine conferences with abstract deadlines, travel awards, early-bird dates and — the column that took longest — how you get involved beyond submitting an abstract.

New this week

The Missing Curriculum, Part 1: Nobody teaches you to read a funding call. Six eligibility gates, in the order a funder applies them, and the live calls where each one bites. Free.

First published 9 August 2026.

Three things the conference tracker turned up

The funded routes are oversubscribed several hundred to one. The World Health Summit received 7,000 applications for up to 15 stipend places. Roughly 470 people per place.

The unfunded routes that put you on a platform are barely contested. At that same summit, civil society organisations and youth groups can host one of three side meetings free of charge, and youth-led organisations can request complimentary tickets. Stipend fellows, by contrast, attend all open sessions but do not speak. Seven thousand people applied for the door that does not lead to the stage.

Proposing a session is an open call, not an invitation. The Union takes symposia, workshops and postgraduate courses through the same portal and window as abstracts. ASTMH does the same and advertises its Scientific Program Chair role annually. AORTIC runs fifteen special interest groups you can join directly, all year, with no submission window at all.

And one correction: AIDS 2026 has already happened — Rio, 26–31 July. Its scholarship deadline was 27 January, the same day as abstracts, six months ahead of the conference. That calendar is the most useful planning document on the page.

Policy watch

NIH foreign subawards abolished. NOT-OD-25-104 and NOT-OD-25-155. Anyone budgeting a US-led application with an African partner needs to read PA-26-002 before costing anything.

Researchfish closes July 2027. Elsevier is shutting the platform down. NIHR will use it until then and is working with DHSC and other funders on what replaces it. If you report on a UK grant, the reporting system is changing and the successor is not announced.

Global Talent Visa route opened to innovative research businesses. Relevant to diaspora researchers weighing a UK move or a UK-registered venture.

Dr Catherine N. Kibirige — biomedical scientist; research funding (formerly Wellcome Trust), IP and global health

Imperial College London · King’s College London · Sickle Cell Alliance London · MUHAS Tanzania · Afromics

Consultancy: bespoke funding roundups and grant strategy for institutions and groups — reply or write to ckibirig@outlook.com

Read more

Six eligibility gates decide whether your application is ever read. Here they are, in the order a funder applies them, and the live calls where each one bites.

Most applications that fail never reach a reviewer.

They fail at eligibility screening — an administrative check that happens before anyone assesses the science, carried out by someone who is not a scientist, against a list. It takes minutes. There is no appeal, and in most cases no feedback beyond a line saying the application was not taken forward.

Doctoral training teaches you to design a study, analyse it and write it up. It does not teach you to read the eligibility section of a funding call, which is the only part of the document that can end your application in a single sentence. That is the gap this series exists to close.

What follows is the order a funder actually applies the tests, with a live call against each one.

Gate 1 — Citizenship

A passport test, and almost always absolute. There is no discretion clause and no route around it.

The Fogarty Emerging Global Leader Award (K43) requires the applicant to be a citizen of a low- or middle-income country, and specifies that at the time of award the applicant may not be a US citizen, a non-citizen national, or a lawful permanent resident. The Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation requires sub-Saharan citizenship and sub-Saharan residence — two tests, not one, and we corrected our own entry on that in Issue 8.

If a citizenship clause excludes you, stop reading. Nothing later in the document will rescue it.

Gate 2 — Residence

A different test that is routinely confused with the first, and the one diaspora researchers get wrong in both directions.

The EDCTP3 Scientific Leadership Prizes are split into parallel categories by where the nominee lives, not by which passport they hold. A Tanzanian scientist based in London is assessed in the EU-and-associated-country category, not the sub-Saharan one. A British scientist based in Dar es Salaam is in the sub-Saharan category. Read which noun the call is using — citizen, resident, or based at — because funders use all three and mean different things by each.

Gate 3 — The applicant organisation

This is the gate that catches the most people, and the one that reposts hide most reliably.

Ask one question of every call: who signs the application? If the answer is an institution you do not work at, you are a potential collaborator, not an applicant. That can still be worth pursuing, but it is a different conversation, on someone else’s timeline, and it should not be sitting on your list of things to draft.

A poster circulating in East African medical-student and early-career networks in the past fortnight listed the Stanford Global Health Seed Grants among six routes for global health researchers in 2026 and 2027. The principal investigator on that scheme must be Stanford faculty with PI eligibility, or a Stanford clinician educator. There is no route by which a researcher at Muhimbili, Makerere or St Francis can lead one. Anyone who spent a weekend on a concept note for it lost the weekend.

The same test explains why the K43 is unusual and worth knowing about: on that award the applicant organisation is the LMIC institution itself. The African university is the grantee, not a subcontractor.

Gate 4 — Career stage

Career stage is measured from a date, and every funder picks a different date and counts interruptions differently.

Some career-stage rules are professional-registration rules in disguise. Academy of Medical Sciences Starter Grants are for UK Clinical Lecturers holding GMC, GDC or RCVS registration — no amount of seniority substitutes for the registration. Others are windows measured from the PhD, where the real question is how career breaks, clinical service and non-research employment are counted. That counting rule is written down, it varies by funder, and it is the difference between eligible and not for a large number of people who assume they are too far past their doctorate to apply.

Read the funder’s own counting rules. Do not infer them from another funder’s.

Gate 5 — The mechanism

The invisible gate. You can pass every personal test and still have no route, because the funding instrument you were planning to use no longer exists.

The clearest current example is NIH. Fogarty’s own funding page states that NIH will not issue awards including a subaward to a foreign entity, and that applications containing non-US subawards are not accepted for review and are automatically withdrawn. The traditional foreign subaward — the mechanism by which most African researchers actually received NIH money, as a partner under a US-led grant — has been replaced by a structure of separate linked awards requiring a US prime applying to a notice that supports it, the first of which appeared in January 2026.

So the same funder is moving in two directions at once. The collaborator route has narrowed sharply. The direct route — the K43, awarded to the LMIC institution, closing 3 December 2026 — is open. A list that says only “NIH Fogarty” tells you nothing about which of those you are looking at, and the difference is everything.

Gate 6 — The pre-conditions

Requirements that must be satisfied before you may submit. They do not appear under the heading Eligibility, and they function as eligibility.

The Researchers in Residence Sprint, which closes at 23:59 on 31 August 2026, requires that you have discussed your project with a host Catapult before submitting, and states plainly that applications will not be accepted if the proposal was not co-developed with that Catapult. The same page notes, two paragraphs earlier, that some Catapults have restrictions on the nationalities they can collaborate with. That is a nationality gate buried inside a UK domestic scheme, and no summary of that call anywhere will mention it.

ARNTD’s Small Grants Programme VIII carries a set of disqualifying conditions that most reposts drop entirely, alongside a value that is widely circulated as USD 65,000 when the early-career component is USD 30,000.

The ten-minute check

Before you read the science section of any call, in this order:

1. Find the applicant organisation. Who signs? If it is not you, you are a collaborator.

2. Find every instance of the word must. Those are absolute. Should, and preference will be given to, are not.

3. Find the date the clock runs from, and the rule for counting breaks.

4. Find the mechanism. Is there a live instrument, and are you inside it?

5. Find the pre-conditions. Anything that has to happen before you may submit.

6. Only now, read the science.

Ten minutes at the start, against the funder’s own page. Not against a summary.

Why the summary is never enough

Eligibility is where the exceptions live, and exceptions are the first thing lost when a call is compressed into a bullet point. Every substantive error this publication has had to correct in eight issues has been an eligibility or a value error inherited from a secondary summary — including one of our own, where four university pages had copied the same wrong figures from each other and we copied them too.

The rule that came out of that is the one worth taking from this piece. Verify against the funder’s own page, every time, even when everyone agrees. Especially when everyone agrees.

The Missing Curriculum is a free series on how the machinery of a research career actually works — the parts nobody puts in a training programme. It publishes alongside the Global Health Funding Digest.

Next in the series: what a funding panel does with your application once it clears eligibility.

There is a wall in early September, and almost nobody is talking about it.

Count the deadlines. Between 1 and 17 September, more than thirty significant calls close — the entire EDCTP3 slate and all of its prizes on the 2nd, the Academy of Medical Sciences Starter Grants on the 1st, APEX and the Africa Prize on the 8th, Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowships and the Royal Society URF on the 9th, the MRC Early Independence Fellowship on the 15th, the Wellcome Snakebite Innovation Prize on the 16th, British Council Researcher Challenges on the 17th — though its partner countries are Egypt, Brazil, Morocco and Palestine rather than sub-Saharan Africa.

All of it has to be drafted in August. And August is exactly when the people you need — heads of department, technology transfer offices, prospective sponsors, collaborators in Europe — are least available. That is the whole problem, and it is a scheduling problem rather than a research one.

So this issue is built around preparation rather than listings. What closes before the wall, what forms it, and what you can realistically still start.

Closing before the wall

Two things worth acting on this fortnight, while the sector is still answering email.

Nexa: From Climate Risk to Health Resilience — up to CAD 2,000,000 from Grand Challenges Canada, run jointly with the Science for Africa Foundation, for approaches that let local health actors turn climate risk into health resilience. Closes 12 August.

Funder’s read: the joint administration with the SFA Foundation means the African-led framing is structural rather than decorative. Nine days left, so this is for teams with something already shaped. Note that Nexa excludes individuals and sole proprietorships outright — you need an incorporated organisation, and that includes research institutions.

ARNTD Small Grants Programme VIII — African-led implementation research on neglected tropical diseases, funded by FCDO. USD 30,000 for early-career researchers, with a maximum of four awards. Closes 24 August, 17:00 GMT.

Funder’s read: read the official call, not the reposts. The USD 65,000 figure circulating widely belongs to a different component and is restricted to previous SGP grantees who completed successfully. What is open now is the early-career component: USD 30,000, four awards, ten months to deliver. Three disqualifiers that the summaries leave out — anyone who has completed an ARNTD Small Grant as principal investigator is ineligible, so is anyone who has won any grant worth USD 100,000 or more, and so is anyone at Associate Professor level or above. One provision worth knowing if it applies to you: career breaks taken for health or family reasons are explicitly discounted from the five-year post-doctorate window, which is rarer in call documents than it should be. Applications go through Google Forms in English, French or Portuguese, with shortlisted proposals in English. An application without a budget on the prescribed template is rejected rather than marked down, as is any application carrying unsolicited attachments. Salaries, conference attendance, tuition and routine programme monitoring are all out of scope. Your proposal must align with your own country’s national NTD programme, not with a European partner’s priorities.

The wall itself

Global Health EDCTP3 and the EDCTP Prizes — the full slate closes 2 September, 17:00 Brussels. That includes the research calls, the Forum 2027 calls for abstracts, scientific symposia and workshops, and all four prize categories: the Dr Pascoal Mocumbi Prize, the Outstanding Research Team Prize, the Outstanding Female Scientist Prize and the Scientific Leadership Prizes.

Funder’s read: if you are preparing one EDCTP submission, prepare all of them — the deadline is shared and the supporting material overlaps. The workshop call is the one most people miss: selected facilitators receive scholarships covering their Forum participation in Madrid, which makes it a funded route into a room that is otherwise expensive to enter. On the prizes, the categories are not interchangeable: each carries its own rules on residency and, for the Scientific Leadership prizes, on age. The women’s EU and Horizon-associated category is EUR 15,000 and requires the nominee to be under 50 on the launch date of the contest rather than at submission. Read the topic page for the exact category before drafting a citation.

MRC Early Independence: Career Development Fellowship — full salary and research costs for up to five years, at 80% of full economic cost with no cap on the amount requested. Closes 15 September, 4pm UK.

Funder’s read: hosted at a UK research organisation, but open to applicants of any nationality including those not currently in the UK — and it funds up to twelve months at a second organisation overseas, which is where an African partner institution belongs in the plan rather than as an afterthought. Five separate pieces of writing come from other people: the host organisation statement, a second host statement, sponsors, mentors and project partner letters. That is what August is for.

Wellcome Snakebite Innovation Prize — a GBP 6.25 million prize fund for practical, locally led solutions in high-burden settings. Closes 12:00 UTC on 16 September.

Funder’s read: ‘locally led’ is doing real work in that sentence. This is written for teams in the countries where snakebite kills, not for external groups proposing to work there. Finalists receive funding, mentorship and tailored support rather than a single payment, which favours teams that can absorb support and move.

APEX Awards and the Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation — both close 8 September.

Funder’s read: APEX is a joint British Academy, Royal Academy of Engineering and Royal Society scheme, whatever the reposts say — the Royal Society only supplies the application portal. It needs an established academic post at a UK institution and a proposal genuinely spanning more than one Academy’s remit; single-remit applications are not permitted rather than merely uncompetitive. The Africa Prize takes the opposite view of who belongs: RAEng defines engineering broadly, so diagnostics and health technologies qualify, and non-engineers may apply — but applicants must be citizens of sub-Saharan African countries and ordinarily based there. Between them the two schemes cover both halves of this readership, and neither covers both. The Africa Prize wants a working prototype already in early commercialisation rather than a concept, and brings eight months of business support with it; the prize pot is £85,000, with individual prizes from £5,000 to £50,000.

Two Gates calls, now dated

Both of the Grand Challenges opportunities the digest has been tracking since Issue 7 now have confirmed deadlines.

• AI-enabled consumer engagement to advance family planning — closes 25 August.

• Multiplex platforms for micronutrient status, inflammation and infectious disease — closes 8 September. If you work on multiplexed or point-of-care assays for low-resource settings, this is the closest match Gates currently has open. Note that it requires a legally recognised corporate entity, so an individual researcher applies through their institution.

Not funding, but worth more than most of it

NIHR Reviewer Development Scheme — NIHR is recruiting early-career global health researchers to review its funding applications.

Funder’s read: the eligibility reads as though it were written for this newsletter: close to completing a PhD or within ten years of it, never having held a grant over GBP 100,000 as lead applicant, and a health professional from or working in a low- or middle-income country. You learn what a fundable NIHR application looks like from the inside, and you get documented CPD for it. This is the step from being judged to being one of the judges, and for once the funder is asking rather than waiting to be approached.

Also new on the sheets

PAHO/TDR Impact Grants for Latin America and the Caribbean (19 August); the SFA Foundation GEN-IMPACT sub-study call (14 August); NIHR Public Health Research commissioned topics (18 August); the Victoria’s Secret Global Fund for Women’s Cancers career development award with AACR and Pelotonia (3 September); ERDERA’s rare disease clinical trials call (10 September); UKRI Policy Fellowships, fifty placements across UK government departments including a natural hazards and pandemic preparedness strand; and the Churchill Fellowship, which opens 1 September and closes 20 October — a learning-and-travel award rather than a research grant, and one that explicitly prioritises people who have had least opportunity to learn overseas.

Two corrections

The digest exists to be checked, so here are this week’s.

• RSTMH Early Career Grants have paused. RSTMH has paused the opening of its 2026 programme and has not published a reopening date. Applications had grown from about 200 in 2019 to over 3,500 in 2025, with more than 90% of awards going to LMIC-based researchers. It is a capacity problem rather than a withdrawal, but it is closed, and the Travel tab now says so.

• OWSD Early Career Fellowships remain closed. No call was issued in 2025 and none has been announced since. The OWSD–Elsevier Foundation Awards are a separate annual route and remain open.

Both schemes were listed when the Travel and Conference tab launched in Issue 7. Both now carry a status note explaining what happened and what to do instead.

This week’s picks — free

Everything above, plus the rest of the 120-odd live opportunities, with full details and live links for deadlines up to 30 September.

Open the free picks sheet

New this week — a series

Nobody sat me down and explained how any of this worked. Not what the Impact Factor really measured, not who decided which journals counted, not that the number quietly attached to my name was calculated from databases that cannot see most of the research published across Africa. I found it out the way most people do: too late, by stumbling into it.

So I am starting The Missing Curriculum — a running series on how the machinery of a research career actually works, and how to navigate it without either pretending it is fair or opting out of your own future. Six parts, threaded between the deep dives over the coming months. Every one of them free.

Read the introduction, and what is coming

Dr Catherine N. Kibirige — biomedical scientist; research funding (formerly Wellcome Trust), IP and global health.

Imperial College London · King’s College London · Sickle Cell Alliance London · MUHAS Tanzania · Afromics

Consultancy: funding strategy, proposal development and IP for global health teams — reply or write to ckibirig@outlook.com

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When I started out in research, no one sat me down and explained how any of it actually worked.

No one told me what the Impact Factor really measured — or that it measured the journal, not my paper. No one explained why some journals ‘counted’ and others didn’t, or who got to decide. No one mentioned that the number quietly attached to my name — the one hiring panels and funders reach for — was calculated from databases that cannot see most of the research published across Africa. I found all of it out the way most people do: too late, by stumbling into it.

Writing this digest these past weeks, I have kept coming back to that gap. So I am going to do something about it.

Alongside the funding roundups and the deep dives, I am starting a running series: The Missing Curriculum — a plain-English guide to how the machinery of a research career actually works, and how to navigate it without either pretending it is fair or opting out of your own future. It is for researchers, and especially global-health researchers, who were handed even less of this than I was.

Here is what is coming — not week by week, because a looming funding call will always take the week when it needs to, but threaded between the deep dives over the coming months. Parts will publish out of order when a deadline demands it.

Every piece stands on its own, and every piece is free. The knowledge belongs to the people who need it — and the people who need it most have always had the least access to it. For anyone who wants to go further, there will be a companion toolkit — the worksheets, checklists and templates to do this, not just read about it — but the teaching itself stays open to everyone.

Part 1 is live: Nobody teaches you to read a funding call — the six eligibility gates that decide whether your application is ever read, in the order a funder applies them, and the live calls where each one bites.

If that sounds like the guide you also never got, subscribe and it will come to you. And if you know someone starting out — or someone a few years in who, like me, has been quietly winging it — send them this.

If you have been looking at MRC’s early-career funding this summer, you have probably come across two schemes that appear to do the same thing. One is a fellowship with a hard deadline in September. The other is a grant with no deadline at all. They fund the same career moment — the step from working on somebody else’s programme to running your own — and you are not allowed to apply for both.

Choosing between them is the first real decision of this application, and it is worth making deliberately rather than by whichever page you landed on first. This piece covers what the fellowship is, who it is genuinely for, the disqualifiers that catch people out, what you have to write, and what it means if you are currently based outside the UK.

The essentials

• Funder: Medical Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation.

• Opened: 23 June 2026.

• Closes: 15 September 2026, 4:00pm UK time. There is no late submission.

• What it pays: your full salary plus research costs, at 80% of full economic cost. There is no cap on the amount you can request, but everything must be justified.

• Duration: up to five years, and MRC expects you to use the full five.

• Where: an eligible UK research organisation. Applicants of any nationality may apply, including those not currently living in the UK.

• Interviews: 23 and 24 March 2027. Fellowships start between June and September 2027.

If September 2026 does not work for you, the next two rounds are already published: 26 January to 20 April 2027, and 22 June to 14 September 2027.

A note on the name

This is the scheme that used to be called the MRC Career Development Award. It sits inside UKRI’s new Fellowship Investment Framework and has been renamed accordingly, and the old Career Development Award page has been marked as replaced. If you are working from a colleague’s application, a departmental template or a two-year-old guidance note, you may still see the previous name. The career stage and the underlying logic are the same; the page you need is the Early Independence one.

No, this is not the New Investigator Research Grant

This is the confusion worth clearing up before you write a word. The New Investigator Research Grant supports the same transition, but it is a grant rather than a personal award, it pays a contribution to your salary rather than all of it, and it assumes you will be doing the research alongside teaching, clinical work or faculty duties. The fellowship buys out your time almost entirely: you may spend up to six hours a week on other commitments, and you cannot hold a salaried post at the same time.

The two are mutually exclusive in both directions. You cannot apply for both at once, and if you have held one you cannot later apply for the other. If you are clinically active, neither of these is your scheme: the equivalent is the Early Independence Clinician Scientist Fellowship, which closed on 2 September 2026.

The practical read: if you want protected time and are willing to give up your current post, the fellowship. If you want to keep your post and add a research programme to it, the grant — and the grant has no deadline, so you can take the time to write it properly.

Who can apply

You need a PhD or equivalent, evidence of productivity and development across your previous posts, and research plans that do not significantly overlap with those of your current group leader or your proposed sponsor. That last point is not a formality. The scheme is about establishing your own niche, and an application that reads as a continuation of your supervisor’s programme fails on exactly that ground.

There are no eligibility rules based on age or years since your PhD. MRC states explicitly that it values intellectual, methodological and technical leadership equally.

The disqualifiers

This list is where most avoidable rejections come from. You are not eligible if:

• you have applied for an MRC fellowship in the last year, or twice before;

• you have another UKRI fellowship of the same type, or an MRC new investigator award, currently under assessment;

• part of the fellowship project is sitting in a grant application somewhere else;

• you have already been awarded a comparable early-independence fellowship or new investigator award, from any funder;

• you have already led grants that funded postdoctoral staff — MRC reads that as independence already achieved;

• you are clinically active;

• you will not be employed by an eligible UK organisation.

A permanent academic post is not an absolute bar, but MRC says plainly that if you have achieved independence by securing one, your application will not be competitive. The narrow exception is a genuine change of direction — moving from a teaching-focused role into research, for instance — and if you are funded you would have to give up the post or convert it to a proleptic appointment.

What it will and will not pay for

Beyond your salary, the fellowship covers a small number of research and technical staff, consumables, equipment, travel, training, data preservation and sharing, estates and indirect costs, public partnership activities, and NHS research costs where relevant. Since January 2026 it also covers visa fees and the Immigration Health Surcharge for the fellow and dependent family members relocating to the UK.

It will not pay for PhD studentships, publication costs, sponsors, mentors, senior staff in any role, a large team, or bridging between grants. MRC is direct about the boundary: a request built around numerous enabling staff or senior posts stops being a fellowship and becomes a research grant, and will be read that way.

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Most funding advice assumes the hard part is the research. Often it isn’t. The harder part — the one with far less money and far less guidance around it — is everything after: turning a validated finding into a product, a service, a tool that actually reaches the people who need it.

This issue leans into that gap. Alongside the usual verified opportunities, there’s a run of translational and enterprise funding that researchers routinely miss — and this week’s deep dive is a Funder in Focus on the MRC Early Independence Career Development Fellowship, which closes on 15 September.

This week’s picks — free

A verified selection below; the full 90+, with live links, are in the free sheet at the end of this section.

Global Health EDCTP3 2026 — up to €147m across TB, respiratory infections, HIV co-infections and climate & health in sub-Saharan Africa. CSA calls (digital/AI, regulatory training) close 2 September; full consortium proposals 17 September.

Funder’s read: consortium-scale, so for most individuals the way in is a CSA call or the brokerage service (open to 17 September) to join a consortium — not a solo application. Start with the brokerage if you don’t already have partners.

We’ve a full Funder in Focus deep dive on EDCTP3 — the Europe–Africa partnership, and how to clear its bar — for subscribers.

Africa Health Collaborative Research Fund — up to $22,000 for early-career-led research on primary health care in sub-Saharan Africa. Deadline 15 August.

Funder’s read: an expression of interest, not a full proposal — but you must be at one of the nine AHC member institutions. Check the list first.

GIZ Women’s Health Innovation Challenge — €75,000 per stream for diagnostics and affordable therapies in women’s health. Deadline 31 August.

Funder’s read: serious money and partners — but South African start-ups and research institutions only.

Wellcome Accelerator Awards — for moving a promising discovery toward real-world application. Deadline 25 August.

Funder’s read: broad remit and substantial; the right fit if your work is past proof-of-concept and needs a translational push.

RAEng Enterprise Fellowship — up to £75,000 equity-free plus a 12-month deep-tech accelerator, for UK and Irish university researchers commercialising their research. Deadline 25 August.

Funder’s read: engineering is defined broadly, so diagnostics and biomedical tech qualify. The academic-spinout route runs through your technology transfer office — worth a look if you’re UK-based or diaspora with something to commercialise.

MRC Early Independence Career Development Fellowship — full salary and research costs for up to five years, at 80% of full economic cost, with no cap on the amount requested. Deadline 15 September, 4pm UK.

Funder’s read: hosted at a UK research organisation, but open to applicants of any nationality, including those not currently in the UK — and it funds up to twelve months at a second organisation overseas, which is where an African partner institution belongs in the plan. This week’s deep dive walks through it.

GHA-SciEx research fellowships — funded research visits of up to 90 days across 18 institutions in Africa and Europe. Next deadline 1 October.

Funder’s read: covers travel and subsistence, sometimes childcare; you or your host need to be in the CoRE-GHA network, or you an African STARS alum.

Closing this week: Fondation Mérieux (1 August). And for UK-based and diaspora clinicians to pass on: the AMS Starter Grants for Clinical Lecturers (1 September) — you apply to the Academy of Medical Sciences via Flexi-Grant, not to Wellcome, whatever the reposts say.

New this week — a Travel & Conference Grants tab

The sheets now have a dedicated tab for the funding that gets you to the meeting — conference bursaries, mobility awards and lab-visit fellowships, the category most databases miss entirely. Two with deadlines to note now: the Keystone Symposia Global Health Travel Awards, travel funding for scientists from low- and middle-income countries backed by the Gates Foundation and GSK (25 August for the Geneva virome meeting, 8 September for the diabetes meeting in Colorado); and the World Health Summit Stipend & Fellowship — fully funded attendance in Berlin this October for researchers from low- and middle-income countries, on rolling admissions, so apply early. The tab also gathers the recurring schemes worth bookmarking: RSTMH Early Career Grants, the OWSD Early Career Fellowship for women scientists, TWAS, and the Company of Biologists Travelling Fellowships.

Free sheet — all 90+ opportunities, updated weekly: open the free picks sheet

Dr Catherine N. Kibirige — biomedical scientist; research funding (formerly Wellcome Trust), IP and global health.

Imperial College London · King’s College London · Sickle Cell Alliance London · MUHAS Tanzania · Afromics

Consultancy: curated funding intelligence and positioning for global-health researchers — reply or write to ckibirig@outlook.com.

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This week my feed filled up with funding. A WHO “Global Health Fellowship,” open worldwide. Johns Hopkins scholarships. McGill, fully funded. A UN Women fellowship. A Commonwealth Fund health-policy fellowship. Every one looked the part — official logo, confident copy, “Applications open now.” And every one was fake, or close to it: the same template, passed hand to hand around a ring of aggregator pages, none of it coming from the funder whose name was on it.

That is the reason this digest exists. Every opportunity below has been checked against the funder’s own site before it reached you. So this week, before the picks, a short field guide — because the fakes are getting good.

How to spot a fake

• The logo is on a poster, not the funder’s site. A real call lives on the funder’s own domain. If the only place it exists is a graphic, be suspicious.

• “Open to everyone, worldwide.” Real schemes have edges — a career stage, a country list, an eligible institution. “Anyone, anywhere” is a tell, not a welcome.

• No deadline, or no named scheme. Fakes stay vague. A real call has a specific deadline and a scheme name you can search for.

• The page posting it isn’t the funder. “Careers at UNESCO” posting a WHO fellowship; “Opportunities Feed” posting a Johns Hopkins scholarship — cross-agency mismatches and generic aggregator names are red flags.

• The link is a shortener you can’t see through. Real applications sit on the funder’s own portal, not behind an anonymous redirect.

One test cuts through all of it: open the funder’s own website and look for the scheme there. If it isn’t on the funder’s site, it isn’t real. (And the genuine ones people miss: WHO fellowships do exist — but you apply through your national Ministry of Health, not an open worldwide form.)

This week’s picks — free

A verified selection below; the full 90+, with live links through 31 August, are in the free sheet at the end of this section.

Africa Health Collaborative Research Fund 2026 — up to $22,000 for early-career-led collaborative research on primary-health-care systems in sub-Saharan Africa (Mastercard Foundation). Deadline 15 August.

Funder’s read: it’s an expression of interest, not a full proposal — lighter to enter. But you must be at one of the nine AHC member institutions, so check the list before you invest the time.

Women’s Health Innovation Challenge (GIZ SAVax / Team Europe) — €75,000 per stream, for diagnostics and affordable therapies in women’s health. Deadline 31 August.

Funder’s read: real money and serious partners — but eligibility is South African start-ups and research institutions only. If that isn’t you, it’s one to admire rather than apply to.

GHA-SciEx research fellowships (CoRE Genomics for Health in Africa + African STARS) — funded research visits of up to 90 days across 18 institutions in Africa and Europe — genomics, diagnostics, infectious and rare disease. Next deadline 1 October.

Funder’s read: covers travel and subsistence, and sometimes childcare. You or your host institution need to be in the CoRE-GHA network, or you an African STARS alum.

Aga Khan University — Early Career Health Researchers Conference (Nairobi, November) — abstract deadline 20 August.

Funder’s read: not funding, but a genuine platform — evidence-to-impact and health-systems strengthening across Africa, and a chance to present your work rather than just read about someone else’s.

Fondation Mérieux Grant — for infectious-disease research in low-resource settings. Deadline 1 August.

Funder’s read: modest sums, but Mérieux funds exactly the LMIC infectious-disease work the large funders tend to step over.

Wellcome Accelerator Awards — for moving a promising discovery toward real-world application. Deadline 25 August.

Funder’s read: broad remit and substantial support; worth a look if your work is past proof-of-concept and needs a push toward deployment.

And for UK-based and diaspora clinicians, two to pass on: the AMS Starter Grants for Clinical Lecturers (deadline 1 September — and note you apply to the Academy of Medical Sciences, not Wellcome, whatever the reposts say) and the MRC Early Independence Fellowship (15 September).

Free sheet — all 90+ opportunities, updated weekly: open the free picks sheet

Dr Catherine N. Kibirige — biomedical scientist; research funding (formerly Wellcome Trust), IP and global health.

Imperial College London · King’s College London · Sickle Cell Alliance London · MUHAS Tanzania · Afromics

Consultancy: curated funding intelligence and positioning for global-health researchers — reply or write to ckibirig@outlook.com.

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I held two academic positions.

At Imperial College London I could log into ResearchConnect and search twenty-three thousand funding opportunities, updated daily.

At Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences in Dar es Salaam, where I still hold an Honorary Senior Research Fellowship, I can search Google.

The calls are identical. The deadlines are identical. The difference is a subscription an individual researcher cannot buy at any price.

This article is about what to do if you are on the second side of that line — which, if you are reading this newsletter, you probably are.

It is also an honest comparison, which means it includes services that compete with this one, and says where they are better.

Free, and very good

Start here. Not as a consolation, but because two of these are better than what money buys.

Utafiti Africa

Built by the UbuntuNet Alliance, explicitly to bypass commercial paywalls. Free with registration. Aggregated funding calls, filterable by country and discipline, updated daily. It also runs grant-writing training on demand.

This is the most direct answer to the access problem that exists, and if you take one thing from this article, take this. It is aggregated rather than curated, so the signal-to-noise ratio is what you would expect. That is a fair trade for free.

utafiti.africa

The Fogarty International Center funding newsletter

NIH’s global health arm. Weekly. Free. Explicitly LMIC-aware, and unusually good on NIH mechanisms that most researchers outside the United States never learn to navigate.

It is the closest free comparator to this newsletter on scope, and I read it.

fic.nih.gov

TGHN Africa

The Global Health Network’s Africa funding page. Curated rather than aggregated. Smaller, cleaner, global-health-specific.

africa.tghn.org/funding

UKRI Funding Finder · Grants.gov · UK Find a Grant

Free to search. All three. But read the eligibility before you invest an evening: you generally need an institution in that country to hold the award.

Looking is not access.

Paid — and worth it, if somebody else is paying

ResearchConnect (Idox)

Twenty-three thousand opportunities. Daily updates. Excellent alerting. The best product in this space, by a distance.

An individual researcher cannot buy it. It is sold to institutions. If your university subscribes, use it. If it does not, no amount of money you personally possess will get you in.

That is the access barrier this article exists to name.

Research Africa

Subscription. International funding, curated for African researchers. Sold to African universities.

Identical scope to Utafiti Africa. Opposite access model. Worth noting that one of these is free.

Instrumentl

US-centric, nonprofit-facing, subscription. Strong on foundations, weak on research grants. Probably not for you.

The new layer: when your citation record decides what you’re allowed to see

Something changed in May and almost nobody noticed.

On 6 May 2026, Clarivate launched Web of Science Research Intelligence. It bundles Web of Science, Pivot-RP (funding), Derwent (patents), Cortellis (clinical trials) and EndNote into one platform. Sold to institutions.

Its Funding Discovery guide, in Clarivate’s own words:

“surfaces relevant, timely opportunities from global funders and intelligently matches them to your researchers based on their expertise and track record.”

Elsevier does the same through Scopus, SciVal and Funding Institutional. Digital Science does it through Dimensions.

Three companies now own the citation graph, the funding database, the reference manager and the recommendation engine.

Which raises a question nobody is asking.

Web of Science indexes 7.4% of African journals. Scopus indexes 7.8%.

Asubiaro T, Onaolapo S, Mills D. J Assoc Inf Sci Technol. 2023;74(7):745–58

If your track record is computed from a citation graph that cannot see 92.6% of the journals published on your continent, then the funding opportunities you are shown are matched to a version of you that does not exist.

You will be recommended less. Not because you have done less. Because the machine cannot see what you did.

I am writing at greater length about this. It is the most important thing in this newsletter, and it is not a funding-discovery problem — it is an infrastructure problem.

Free, independent, and worth reading

Impact Funding

A Substack, like this one. Monthly roundups of 280+ opportunities, SDG-tagged, with a short strategic read on each funder.

It is good, and their per-funder commentary is the thing this newsletter did not do until this month. I read it. You should too. Where we differ: their scope is global and cross-sector, so a July roundup will include Ontario arts grants and Canadian forestry funds alongside global health. Volume over filter. That is a legitimate editorial choice and it serves a different reader.

impactfunding.substack.com

Africa Health Ventures

Health-tech and startup funding, Africa-focused. Adjacent to this, not competing with it.

rowenaluk.substack.com

Aggregation is not curation

Volume is easy. Any competent scraper produces 280 opportunities a month.

Relevance is hard, and it is expensive, and it is the only thing worth paying for.

Ninety-eight curated entries beat 280 aggregated ones, and here is the filter I apply, stated so you can hold me to it:

• Geography: sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, LMICs. If a call cannot be held from those places, it does not go in.

• Domain: biomedical research, global health, diagnostics, clinical trials, health systems. Not arts. Not forestry.

• Links: every link goes to the funder’s own portal. Never to ResearchConnect. Not everybody has a subscription, and a link you cannot open is not a link.

• Provenance: every entry is tagged [VERIFIED], [METADATA ONLY], [FROM MEMORY] or [LOW CONFIDENCE]. If I have not checked it against the funder’s own page this cycle, I say so.

No other service in this comparison publishes its provenance. Not one. You cannot tell whether a deadline was verified or lifted from another aggregator, and when a deadline is wrong, you find out on the day.

This costs nothing to do and nobody does it.

What we started this month

Funder commentary. Short, specific reads on what a funder actually wants and what gets rejected.

Two labels, used honestly:

• Funder’s read — analysis from published call text, assessment criteria and funder portfolio. Careful, but derivable.

• Reviewer’s note — insider knowledge. Direct experience of how a funder assesses. Provenance-tagged. Used only where I have it.

The distinction is itself a provenance claim. Where I have only the first, I use the first label. Dressing inference as insight is the thing I would criticise a competitor for.

How to stack them

Nobody should use one service. Here is the honest configuration:

• Utafiti Africa for breadth. Free. Register today.

• Fogarty for NIH mechanisms. Free. Weekly.

• This newsletter for filtered relevance and positioning. The free tier is substantial.

• Impact Funding for the non-health SDG adjacencies. Free.

• Your institution’s subscription if you have one — and if you do not, you are missing less than you think.

Four of those five are free. That is not an accident and it is not charity. It is what the infrastructure looks like when you build it for people the commercial market has decided not to serve.

One thing we are exploring

Clarivate matches funding to researchers using a citation graph that indexes 7.4% of African journals.

OpenAlex indexes over 470 million works. It is free, CC0-licensed, has an open API, and explicitly covers the non-English and Global South scholarship that Web of Science and Scopus miss. Its reference coverage is now comparable to both.

A funding recommender built on OpenAlex would see the African researcher’s work that Clarivate structurally cannot.

That is not a marketing claim. It is a fact about the underlying data.

Paste your ORCID iD. Receive curated opportunities matched to what you have actually published — as recorded by a citation graph that can see you.

I do not have this. I am not promising it. It needs a developer, an API integration, and a matching heuristic. But it is buildable, it would be free, and it would be the only one of its kind.

If you build things, and this interests you, reply to this email.

Sources: clarivate.com · idoxgroup.com · utafiti.africa · fic.nih.gov · africa.tghn.org · impactfunding.substack.com · openalex.org · Asubiaro T, Onaolapo S, Mills D. J Assoc Inf Sci Technol. 2023;74(7):745–58

Weekly funding intelligence for global health researchers in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and LMICs worldwide · Issue 5 · 13 July 2026

Knowing that a call exists is the easy part. Every aggregator can tell you that EDCTP3 closes on 2 September.

What almost none of them tell you is that EDCTP3’s assessors distinguish between an African-led consortium and a European-led consortium with African partners — and that the distinction decides the outcome more often than the science does.

From this week, the Digest tells you both.

Every issue now carries funder commentary: short, specific reads on what a funder actually wants, what gets rejected, and what to do about it. Where the intelligence comes from published criteria and portfolio analysis, it is labelled Funder’s read. Where it comes from direct experience of how a funder assesses — sitting on the other side of the table — it is labelled Reviewer’s note and tagged with its source.

Nine commentaries are below, free. The full database now carries positioning notes on 38 opportunities, with more added weekly.

This is what the Digest is for. Everything else is a list.

Closing this month

FUNDER’S READ — Cancer Research UK — Early Detection and Diagnosis Programme Award

Deadline: 21 July 2026

CRUK is buying a programme, not a project. ‘Long-term, integrated and potentially renewable’ means they expect to fund you again — so this application is assessed as the opening phase of a decade of work, not as a three-year piece.

The failure mode is a large project dressed as a programme. Reviewers can tell. A programme has a research vision that outlives any individual experiment, a team structure that develops people, and a plausible account of what phase two looks like.

Early detection specifically. Treatment and therapy are out of scope regardless of quality — this is one of the cleaner scope boundaries in the database, and it is enforced. Up to £2.5M. UK host. Reviewed twice a year, so a near-miss is worth resubmitting.

FUNDER’S READ — Grand Challenges Canada — Nexa: Climate × Health Innovation

Deadline: 22 July 2026

Grand Challenges Canada requires Integrated Innovation, and it is not a rhetorical flourish. Every application must combine scientific or technological innovation with social innovation and business innovation. All three. Applications missing a leg are declined, and ‘we will think about sustainability later’ is a missing leg.

Nexa funds climate-driven health threats specifically: mosquito-borne infection, extreme heat, air quality. Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. LMIC-led applications are welcome and common.

Proof of Concept up to USD 200,000; Transition to Scale between USD 250,000 and 2M. Nine days from publication. If you have the idea and the partners already, apply. If you do not, GCC’s Stars in Global Health runs on a similar model — watch for the next round.

FUNDER’S READ — Wellcome Leap: Resistance Networks

Deadline: 22 July 2026

Wellcome Leap is not the Wellcome Trust. Different organisation, different assessment, very different tempo — and applicants who approach it as though it were Wellcome fail for reasons that have nothing to do with their science.

Leap scopes its programmes internally before the call opens, then looks for teams to execute against a framing that is largely fixed. Read the programme brief rather than the call. Write to what they have already decided they want. Applications proposing to redefine the programme are declined, however good.

Milestone-driven with hard go/no-go gates. They will stop funding you mid-programme without prejudice and consider that a success of the model rather than a failure of yours. If that prospect is intolerable, this is the wrong funder.

FUNDER’S READ — GDPC Spotlight Research Grants — Technology in Humanitarian Action

Deadline: 31 July 2026

Ten thousand US dollars, eight months, and explicitly restricted to researchers from low- and middle-income countries.

The eligibility restriction is the opportunity. The researchers who dominate most applicant pools — well-resourced, Northern, with institutional grant-writing support — cannot apply. The competitive field is thin in a way that is rare and will not last.

Scope is technology in humanitarian action, principled and accountable use. Data governance, digital health in crisis and displacement settings, and AI ethics in low-resource contexts all fit comfortably. A small grant, but a fundable pilot and a publication out of it is worth considerably more than the money.

Closing in August

FUNDER’S READ — ANeSA — SRHR in sub-Saharan Africa

Deadline: 23 August 2026 (Letter of Interest)

African-led is a hard eligibility requirement, not a scoring preference. Northern institutions applying as lead will be rejected before assessment. IDRC means this and has structured the call to enforce it.

The word doing the most work in the title is ‘neglected’. They want the parts of sexual and reproductive health that other funders will not touch — and if your application proposes something a mainstream SRHR funder would happily support, you have probably misread the call.

Two-stage. The Letter of Interest on 23 August is short, and it is where most applications are lost, because people treat it as a formality. It is the selection. There is an informational webinar on 15 July — attend it, and note who else does.

The September cluster

FUNDER’S READ — EHA Bilateral Collaborative Grant

Deadline: 1 September 2026

The European Haematology Association wants haematology research capacity outside Europe, and it has structured this grant so that a partner-country institution is not optional. You need an EHA member-country PI and a partner-country PI. Neither is subordinate.

Up to €320,000 is substantial for a bilateral scheme, and haematology is the entire remit — which means sickle cell disease, thalassaemia and haemoglobinopathies are the funder’s core field, not an example of global health.

If you work on SCD in sub-Saharan Africa, this is one of very few schemes where your topic sits at the centre of the funder’s discipline rather than at the edge of it. The binding constraint is the European co-PI. Identify them before you write anything.

FUNDER’S READ — EDCTP Prizes 2027 — four categories

Deadline: 2 September 2026

Free to nominate, and almost nobody does.

Four categories: the Dr Pascoal Mocumbi Prize for lifetime achievement, Outstanding Research Team, Outstanding Female Scientist, and Scientific Leadership. The Female Scientist and Leadership prizes in particular receive far fewer nominations than the field warrants — not because the candidates do not exist, but because nobody puts them forward.

Nominating a colleague costs you an afternoon. If you work alongside a senior African woman scientist whose public profile does not remotely match her contribution — and most of us do — this is the highest-leverage thing you will do this year, and it costs nothing but your time.

FUNDER’S READ — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions — Postdoctoral Fellowships

Deadline: 9 September 2026

MSCA is a mobility instrument before it is a research instrument. The evaluation weights the training and career development the fellowship gives you almost as heavily as the science. Applications that read as ‘here is my research project, and incidentally I will do it in Europe’ score badly. Applications that read as ‘here is what this host, this supervisor and this environment will teach me that I cannot learn where I am’ score well.

Any nationality is eligible. The mobility rule is the only real constraint: no more than 12 of the previous 36 months in the host country. For a researcher based in sub-Saharan Africa that is almost always satisfied — which is precisely why this route is underused by exactly the people it suits.

The Global Fellowship variant includes an outgoing phase and a mandatory return. If your long-term intent is to build capacity at home rather than to leave, structure it that way explicitly. Evaluators read the return phase as a statement of intent, and they reward it.

FUNDER’S READ — SGCI Multilateral Research Call — STISA 2034

Deadline: 25 September 2026

Funding is restricted to African institutions. Northern partners may join a consortium; they cannot receive money from it.

That single sentence makes this the most structurally African-led instrument in the database, and it is backed by IDRC, FCDO, Wellcome and the Government of Norway — four funders whose other schemes almost always route money through a Northern lead. Health is one of five thematic streams. Minimum three SGCI member countries. Three-year projects.

If you are at an African institution and you make one serious application this year, this is the one that is hardest to argue against. The competitive field will be African institutions only, and the consortium-building it requires is work you should be doing anyway.

Also closing — no commentary this week

• Wellcome Early Career Award | Salary + up to £400,000 | 21 July | Holdable at an LMIC institution. Full deep dive →

• Wellcome Career Development Awards | Salary + research costs | 28 July | Established independent researchers. LMIC-holdable.

• IGNITE Social Venture Competition | Up to £20,000 equity-free | 9 August | UK-registered ventures.

• Wellcome Accelerator Awards | Salary + up to £200,000 | 25 August | UK researchers of Black, Bangladeshi and Pakistani heritage.

• EDCTP3 CSA calls ×2 | 2 September | Digital innovation & AI; ethics, regulatory & pharmacovigilance networks.

• UK Parliament Global Health Inquiry | 4 September | 500 words of written evidence. Read why this matters →

• Royal Society APEX Awards | Up to £200,000 | 8 September | Cross-disciplinary; UK host.

• ERDERA Clinical Trial Call | 10 September | SCD eligible as a rare disease. UK now a member.

• MRC Early Independence CDF | Salary + 80% FEC, 5 years | 15 September | Any nationality; UK host required.

• Wellcome Snakebite Innovation Prize | Share of £1.25M | 16 September | SSA and South Asia high-burden settings.

• IHI Call 13 | Up to €35M | 8 October | Short proposal. Industry partner required.

Positioning notes on most of the above are in the subscriber database.

This week’s picks — free

98 live opportunities. Entries marked ★ carry a Funder’s read in this newsletter; entries marked → carry a fuller positioning note in the subscriber database. All opportunities, all deadlines, no login.

→ Access the free picks sheet

On Substack

Coming Wednesday 16 July — free:

• Where to find research funding when your institution doesn’t pay for a database

A comparison of every major funding-discovery service — free and paid, government, institutional and independent. Which one to use, when, and what each costs. Includes the ones that compete with us.

Already live — free:

• Wellcome Early Career Award — Funder in Focus — deadline 21 July

• NIHR Innovation Catalyst & i4i — Funder in Focus

• The Free Certification Guide for Global Health Researchers

• UK Parliament Global Health Inquiry — Your Evidence Is Needed

• EIC Accelerator — Funder in Focus

• Work With Me

Work with me

One-to-one funding strategy, application review, or a workshop for your team. I work with researchers, institutions and health innovation organisations across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and the UK. Paid subscribers receive 20% off. LMIC rates negotiable.

→ View services and rates

Not subscribed? Paid subscribers get the newsletter every Monday, early access to all deep dives, the full opportunity database, and positioning notes on 38+ funders. Subscribe →

Dr Catherine N. Kibirige

Biomedical scientist; research funding (formerly Wellcome Trust), IP and global health

Weekly funding intelligence for global health researchers in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and LMICs worldwide · Issue 4 · 7 July 2026

September feels a long way off from early July. It is not. The major September deadline cluster closes in eight to twelve weeks — and for consortium-based calls like EDCTP3, Horizon Europe, and IHI, that means consortium conversations need to start now. This issue maps the full September landscape, flags the August calls that will catch you first, and surfaces new resources that went live on Substack this week.

This week’s funding highlights — September deadlines in focus

Closing in August — act now

• ANeSA — SRHR in sub-Saharan Africa | IDRC / Global Affairs Canada / CIHR | Up to CAD 1,200,000 | Deadline: 23 August 2026 | Implementation research on sexual and reproductive health and rights in SSA. African-led teams required. Two-stage: Letter of Interest by 23 Aug. Informational webinar 15 July 2026. | Apply →

• Hopkins IS Hub — HIV Fellowship in Implementation Science (8th Cohort) | NIH/NIAID | Fully funded | Deadline: 23 August 2026 | Virtual mentored programme Oct 2026 – May 2027. Early-stage faculty, postdocs, PhD candidates. NIH-defined ESIs only. Funded in-person workshop Baltimore May 2027. | Apply →

• IGNITE Social Venture Competition | Up to £20,000 equity-free | Deadline: 9 August 2026 | Mission-led UK-based ventures. 6-week accelerator + Grand Final 12 November London. | Apply →

• JLA Priority Setting Partnerships Rolling Call | NIHR | Deadline: 5 August 2026 | Research addressing James Lind Alliance PSP priorities. | Apply →

The September cluster — mark your calendar

• EDCTP3 CSA — Digital Innovation & AI in SSA Healthcare | Global Health EDCTP3 | Deadline: 2 September 2026 | African-led consortia strongly positioned. | Apply →

• EDCTP3 CSA — Ethics, Regulatory & Pharmacovigilance Networks | Global Health EDCTP3 | Deadline: 2 September 2026 | Apply →

• EDCTP Prizes 2027 | Global Health EDCTP3 | Deadline: 2 September 2026 | Four categories: Dr Pascoal Mocumbi Prize; Outstanding Research Team Prize; Outstanding Female Scientist Prize; Scientific Leadership Prizes. | Apply →

• EDCTP Forum 2027 — Abstracts, Symposia & Workshops | Deadline: 2 September 2026 | Madrid, 5–9 April 2027. | Apply →

• UK Parliament Global Health Inquiry — Call for Evidence | Deadline: 4 September 2026 | Written evidence invited from researchers and practitioners with LMIC field experience. 500 words is enough. | Submit evidence →

• Novo Nordisk Foundation Global Science Summit | DKK 50,000,000 | Deadline: 1 September 2026 | Cardiometabolic disease research. Global. | Apply →

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions — Postdoctoral Fellowships | Full salary + costs, 1–2 years | Deadline: 9 September 2026 | Any nationality; European host required. Strong route for LMIC researchers to UK/EU institutions. | Apply →

• MRC Early Independence Career Development Fellowship | Salary + 80% FEC, 5 years | Deadline: 15 September 2026 | Any nationality; UK host required. | Apply →

• Royal Society APEX Awards | Up to £200,000 / 24 months | Deadline: 8 September 2026 | Any nationality; UK host; co-applicant from different discipline required. | Apply →

• Wellcome Snakebite Innovation Prize | Up to £1,250,000 (up to 15 teams) | Deadline: 16 September 2026 | SSA and South Asia high-burden settings. | Apply →

• ERDERA Clinical Trial Call 2026 | Deadline: 10 September 2026 | Rare diseases including SCD. UK-based lead required. | Apply →

• IHI Call 13 — European HealthCare Incubator Network | Up to €35,000,000 | Short proposal deadline: 8 October 2026 | UK eligible. LMIC partners in scope. TRL 3–5. | Apply →

On Substack this week

New this week — free:

• NIHR Innovation Catalyst & i4i — Funder in Focus — The UK’s most ambitious health innovation funding: uncapped, milestone-driven. Pilot deadline 14 July — most readers will miss this round. This guide is for the round after. | Read free →

• The Free Certification Guide for Global Health Researchers — OpenWHO, Coursera Financial Aid, Google AI, LinkedIn Learning. Get certified in global health, data, and AI from Nairobi or London. Prize draw: 5 free one-month subscriptions — enter by 18 July. | Read free →

• UK Parliament Global Health Inquiry — Your Evidence Is Needed — Deadline 4 September. 500 words is enough. | Read free →

Already live — free:

• Wellcome Early Career Award — Funder in Focus — Up to £400,000, holdable at an LMIC institution. Deadline 21 July — act now. | Read →

• EIC Accelerator — Funder in Focus — Up to €2.5M grant-only. Next cut-off 2 September. | Read →

• NIHR Research Support Service — Free funding help most researchers don’t know they have. | Read →

• Work With Me — Grant strategy, application support, and workshops. Subscriber discounts. LMIC rates negotiable. | Read →

This week’s picks — free

The full opportunity list with live links for everything closing by 31 August. No subscription needed. New this week: Fellowships tab, Certifications & Training tab, and Writing Tools tab.

→ Access the free picks sheet

Work with me

Looking for one-to-one funding strategy support, a grant application review, or a workshop for your team? I work with researchers, institutions, and health innovation organisations across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the UK. Paid subscribers receive 20% off all services. LMIC rates negotiable.

→ View services and rates

Not subscribed yet? Paid subscribers get this newsletter in their inbox every Monday morning, plus early access to all deep dives and the full opportunity database. Subscribe →

Dr Catherine N. Kibirige

Biomedical scientist; research funding (formerly Wellcome Trust), IP and global health

IP Strategy Officer, Imperial College London · Project Coordinator, IoPPN, King’s College London · Project Coordinator & Qualitative Researcher, Sickle Cell Alliance London · Honorary Senior Research Fellow, MUHAS Tanzania · Chief Scientific Advisor, Afromics

Consultancy enquiries: reply to any digest email or write to ckibirig@outlook.com

For paid subscribers — your full database

Your complete weekly-updated funding intelligence resource. 90+ live opportunities with full details — award amounts, eligibility criteria, direct application links, Closing Soon tab, Trusted Funder profiles, Watch List, and new Fellowships and Certifications tabs.

→ Access this week’s full database

The link above always carries the most current version of the sheet. Updated every Monday. The paid Google Sheet URL is accessible only via this post.

Also for paid subscribers — EDCTP3 deep dive

The full deep dive on Global Health EDCTP3 — the most important funder for clinical research in sub-Saharan Africa. What it funds, how to win it, what the 2026 calls are, and how to position for 2027. Full guide available now for paid subscribers.

→ Read the EDCTP3 deep dive

A free preview of this deep dive will open in August for all readers. Paid subscribers have the full guide now.

A free Funder in Focus deep dive. The NIHR has just launched the most ambitious innovation funding stream in its history, with no cap on award size. The 2026 pilot deadline is 14 July — most readers will miss it. This guide is for the round after that.

A note on timing. The inaugural NIHR Innovation Catalyst pilot closes on 14 July 2026 at 1:00 PM. That is just over a week away at time of publication. Building a competitive full application from scratch in that window is not realistic for most readers. This article is written for the next round — because the scheme will return, and because the preparation time for NIHR funding is measured in months, not days. If you do have a developed community care innovation at TRL 4 or above and a UK partner already in place, the application portal is at nihr.ac.uk/funding/nihr20/nihr-innovation-catalyst-june-2026/2026447. For everyone else: read on.

At a glance — the NIHR innovation funding family

NIHR Innovation Catalyst (pilot, June 2026): uncapped funding; no stated maximum award size; milestone-driven; community care / neighbourhood health services theme for the 2026 pilot; UK-based lead organisations only; TRL 4 to 9 for medtech and digital health; Phase IIa/b onwards for biotech and pharmaceuticals. Pilot deadline: 14 July 2026, 1:00 PM. Shortlisted applicants invited to interview in November 2026. [VERIFIED — nihr.ac.uk, July 2026]

i4i Product Development Award (PDA): capped, competitive grant; past awards typically up to £2 million; medtech, diagnostics, devices, digital health, biotech; TRL 4 and above; standard cycles and rolling commissioned calls. Standard PDA and FAST cycles are currently closed until late 2026. [VERIFIED — nihr.ac.uk]

i4i FAST (Funding At the Speed of Translation): faster, lighter-touch route for innovations closer to NHS adoption; shorter application; quicker decision timeline. [VERIFIED — nihr.ac.uk]

Rolling commissioned calls (open now):

• NICE Rolling Funding Opportunity — projects meeting specific evidence gaps in published NICE guidance. Rolling intake, no fixed deadline. [VERIFIED]

• James Lind Alliance Priority Setting Partnerships Rolling Call — proposals based on research priorities from JLA PSPs. Rolling intake, deadline 5 August 2026 for the current window. [VERIFIED]

Who can apply: UK-based lead organisations — NHS and social care providers, higher education institutions (HEIs), SMEs (fewer than 250 staff, turnover under €50M), and not-for-profit organisations including charities and CICs. All applications must involve collaboration of at least two organisations. [VERIFIED]

LMIC relevance: the Innovation Catalyst and i4i are built for NHS and UK social care adoption. Direct applicant eligibility is UK-gated. LMIC-based researchers with a UK partner institution or HEI affiliation can participate as named co-applicants or collaborators, and the methodological framework the NIHR applies transfers directly to international applications to EDCTP3, Wellcome, and MRC. See the read-across section below.

What the Innovation Catalyst is, and why it matters

The NIHR Innovation Catalyst is new and genuinely unusual. In nearly 20 years of NIHR funding, there has been no programme without a stated maximum award size. The Catalyst changes that: it will fund whatever the evidence case justifies, with funding released in milestones rather than as a single upfront award. The logic is that milestone-driven release removes the gap between grant cycles — if you hit your milestones, the next tranche follows without delay, in contrast to the stop-start pattern of standard grant funding.

The 2026 pilot has a specific theme: interventions built for community care and neighbourhood health services. This is not a general innovation fund. The NIHR is explicit that the intervention must be genuinely designed for community settings — not a secondary-care device retrofitted for portability, not a hospital-focused tool seeking a broader audience. The community care framing is a real eligibility gate, not a framing exercise.

Three structural pillars define the Catalyst:

• Continuous lifecycle funding — a single entry point with milestone-driven progression, reducing downtime between grant cycles.

• Expert project delivery — rapid mobilisation of expertise across NIHR and external partners to resolve critical development and delivery challenges.

• Holistic wraparound support — peer learning, commercial readiness mentorship, and ecosystem connectivity through the health innovation networks and the NIHR Research Support Service.

Shortlisted applicants from the July 2026 round will be invited to interview in November 2026. No further details on the next round have been confirmed at time of writing. Watch nihr.ac.uk/funding-programmes/nihr20/innovation-catalyst for announcements.

The i4i family — the established innovation funding route

While the Catalyst is new, the Invention for Innovation (i4i) programme has been the NIHR’s primary route for health technology funding for over a decade. Understanding its structure matters both because the standard PDA cycle will return in late 2026, and because the Catalyst has been designed to complement rather than replace it.

i4i Product Development Award

The PDA is a competitive grant for health technology innovations at TRL 4 and above, covering medtech, digital health, diagnostics, devices, and biotech. It supports development, engineering, clinical evaluation, and real-world evidence generation — the full journey from validated prototype to adoption-readiness. Awards have historically been capped, with most funded projects in the hundreds of thousands to £2 million range. The application is comprehensive: it requires a clinical research design, a health economics case, patient and public involvement evidence, a regulatory strategy, a commercialisation plan, and a sustainability argument. The standard PDA cycle (Call 29) is currently closed; the next standard cycle is expected late 2026.

i4i FAST

FAST is the lighter, faster route for innovations where the remaining evidence gap is targeted and well-defined, and where the pathway to NHS adoption is already clear. The application is shorter and the decision timeline quicker. It is not a substitute for a PDA where the development work is substantial.

Rolling commissioned calls — open now

Two i4i commissioned calls are open on a rolling basis and do not require a standard cycle deadline:

• NICE Rolling Funding Opportunity: for projects generating evidence to fill specific gaps in published NICE guidance. If your intervention addresses a NICE evidence recommendation, this is a direct route in.

• JLA Priority Setting Partnerships Rolling Call: funds research addressing priorities from James Lind Alliance PSPs. The current window closes 5 August 2026. This funds the priority-setting process and associated research, not product development.

How applications are judged — and where they fail

The NIHR evaluates i4i and Catalyst applications against published criteria, but the distance between reading those criteria and building a proposal that actually clears them is wider than most applicants expect. These are the places where consistently strong innovations fall short.

1. Fit before everything — and fit is narrow

The Innovation Catalyst requires that your innovation be built for community settings. Reviewers ask not whether the product is good, but whether it is genuinely in scope for this call, at this TRL, for this population. Leaving that question to the reviewer to infer is the first failure mode. For the i4i PDA, fit means matching the evidence stage the call is designed to fund — arriving at TRL 2 for a TRL 4 call is a disqualifying mismatch regardless of the quality of the science.

2. Impact that is specific and credible

Generic impact claims are among the most common reasons a technically strong application does not convert. The NIHR wants to know what will change, for whom, in what time frame, and how your evidence base demonstrates it. For the Catalyst, it also wants to know how the intervention will meet NHS Net Zero and DHSC Design for Life sustainability requirements by the time it reaches adoption. These are scored criteria, not background sections.

3. Health economics — the most frequently undercooked section

Every substantive NIHR application requires a value case — not an assertion of cost-effectiveness, but a structured health economic argument with numbers. The NIHR Research Support Service has specialist health economists in its network. If you engage the RSS early, those specialists can support your model. If you arrive at the RSS two weeks before a deadline, there is not enough time for this to be meaningful.

4. Patient and public involvement — structural, not decorative

PPIE is not a box-tick. Reviewers look for evidence that people with lived experience of the condition or setting shaped the research design — not that they were consulted after the design was finalised. For community care innovations, community involvement in design is part of the coherence argument: if the intended users did not help shape the approach, the community care claim is weakened from within.

5. Methodology that serves every objective

The sample size and study design must credibly serve all of the objectives you set, not just the primary one. A calculation that powers the main endpoint but leaves secondary objectives underspecified is a visible gap. In multi-site or multi-platform applications, the quality assurance plan across sites is scrutinised. These are substantive questions, not presentation issues.

How to prepare — starting now, not when the next call opens

The NIHR Research Support Service is free, nationally available, and consistently underused by the organisations that most need it. It provides one-to-one advisory meetings, specialist referral, application workshops and writing retreats, and active signposting to the wider health and life sciences ecosystem. The single thing the RSS emphasises most strongly is timing: arrive early.

The practical instruction is to maintain what the RSS calls a content-ready application — a drafted case for your innovation, covering the problem, the product, the evidence base, the methodology, the value case, and the patient involvement — that can be adapted for a specific call theme when one opens. For the next Catalyst round, that means having the community care framing, the sustainability sections, and the milestone structure in usable shape before the call opens, not after.

To access the RSS: register with your nearest hub at nihr.ac.uk/rss, or contact any hub nationally — you are not restricted to your region. Identify your specific support needs (health economics, PPIE, trial design, or plain English) when you register. Both the NIHR Industry LinkedIn page and the generic NIHR LinkedIn page carry call announcements — follow both.

For a fuller account of what the RSS provides and how it supported a £2.1 million i4i PDA application, see the free signpost article published earlier this week: The free funding help most researchers don’t know exists.

What to do — next round preparation timeline

Now (July 2026):

• Register with the NIHR RSS. Do not wait for a call to open.

• Map your innovation against the TRL criteria. TRL 4 requires quantitative evidence of validation in a controlled environment — if you are below that, target next year.

• Identify a second UK collaborating organisation. Solo applications are not eligible.

• Check the JLA PSP rolling call (closes 5 August 2026) and the NICE rolling call if your innovation has a clear evidence gap alignment.

Autumn 2026 (when standard i4i PDA cycle reopens):

• Standard PDA Call 30 expected late 2026. Begin draft applications now.

• Book an RSS advisory meeting before September — demand is highest immediately after deadline periods.

• Commission or draft your health economic model early. This is the section with the longest lead time.

Before the next Catalyst round opens (date not yet confirmed):

• Have a content-ready application: a complete draft covering all sections, in good enough shape that you are refining not starting.

• Engage PPIE partners early — ideally before the draft is written.

• Begin regulatory pathway mapping if your product is a medical device or IVD. The Catalyst is explicitly open to in vitro diagnostics.

• Watch nihr.ac.uk/funding-programmes/nihr20/innovation-catalyst and follow @NIHRresearch on X for the announcement.

The read-across for global health and LMIC researchers

If you are based at an African institution, the Innovation Catalyst and i4i PDA are not your primary funding routes. But the standards the NIHR applies map closely to what the major international funders require.

The EDCTP3 Joint Undertaking, the Wellcome Trust, and MRC Global Challenges all probe the same underlying questions: does the methodology serve every objective stated; is the impact pathway technically credible rather than aspirational; have the communities being served shaped the design; and is there a realistic route from research to real-world use? The vocabulary differs across funders; the structure of a strong application does not.

Specific read-across points:

• Health economics and value case: EDCTP3 and Wellcome both require credible impact pathways. A health economics model built for NIHR is close kin to the value argument those programmes require.

• PPIE and community involvement: EDCTP3’s capacity-building requirement includes genuine community engagement in design. The NIHR’s PPIE standard and the EDCTP3 capacity framing are structurally similar.

• Methodological rigour: the NIHR’s CTU-embedded review model applies the same scrutiny that Horizon Europe peer review applies. If your methodology passes NIHR RSS review, it will hold up under EDCTP3 or MRC review.

• Co-applicant route: LMIC-based researchers with a UK HEI or NHS partner as lead can participate as named co-applicants in i4i PDA applications, with costs fully fundable.

For LMIC researchers specifically, the NIHR Global Health Research programme operates separately from the domestic i4i and Catalyst streams. Watch nihr.ac.uk for calls with explicit sub-Saharan Africa eligibility.

A Funder in Focus deep dive. Most of the funders this newsletter covers are routes into UK or European money. This one is different: it is the major partnership built specifically to fund health research in sub-Saharan Africa, led wherever possible from Africa itself. If your work sits anywhere near infectious disease, diagnostics, clinical trials or he…

Read more

Your evidence still counts

The UK Parliament has examined the global health funding cuts — and your experience still shapes what happens next

The numbers are on the table. The UK is cutting its aid budget to 0.3% of gross national income by 2027 — its lowest this century. FCDO health spending has already fallen by around 45% in a single year. The Fleming Fund, which built antimicrobial-resistance surveillance across 25 countries in Africa and Asia, is closing. The pledge to Gavi has been cut.

Behind each figure is a laboratory that has lost its reagents, a trial that has paused, a research post that will not be renewed, a clinic that has stopped seeing patients. If you work in global health in a low- or middle-income country, you may be living one of these already.

Parliament has not been silent

The International Development Committee examined the cuts and has published its report, “UK Aid and Development Assistance in a Fracturing World,” together with the Government’s response. Its Chair, Sarah Champion, was blunt: the cuts mean “no winners, just different degrees of losers.” The Committee singled out the likely end of health programmes in Sierra Leone and Malawi — including modern family planning for around a quarter of a million adolescents in Malawi each year.

The formal window has closed — the case has not

The written-evidence call for that inquiry has closed and the report is out. But the case is far from closed: the Government’s response is published, the cuts are being implemented through 2028, and the Independent Commission for Aid Impact has a review of how the reductions were carried out still to come. Scrutiny continues — and evidence still shapes it.

And here is the gap

Most of the evidence that reaches Parliament on this comes from UK-based NGOs. The voice consistently missing is the one that matters most: the researcher, clinician or scientist in the country where the cut actually lands. You do not need permission, an institution, or a communications team to be heard. Most researchers in well-resourced institutions get an email from a colleague pointing them to openings like this. Most researchers in lower-income settings do not. Consider this that email.

How to put your evidence on the record now

• Write to the International Development Committee directly. Committees receive correspondence on matters within their remit at any time. Contact the Committee.

• Contact your MP, who can table written questions and put your case into the parliamentary record.

• Feed the Independent Commission for Aid Impact’s forthcoming review of the cuts.

• Add your evidence to a civil-society coalition — Action for Global Health and Bond compile and submit collective evidence.

• Add your experience to the record we are building here (below).

Add your experience

I’m gathering evidence from across this community — a short, anonymous poll on how the cuts have affected your work. I’ll compile it into a submission to the Committee and its Chair, share it with the coalitions above, and publish the aggregate picture. If you’re willing to be named as a contributor, there’s an optional field for that. Add your experience to the poll.

The cuts are done; the scrutiny is not. What comes next — how the reductions are implemented, and whether they are revisited — will be shaped by whose experience is on the record. For once, the barrier is not money or eligibility. It is knowing the door is still open, in more ways than one.

Dr Catherine N. Kibirige

Biomedical scientist; research funding (formerly Wellcome Trust), IP and global health

IP Strategy Officer, Imperial College London · Project Coordinator, King’s College London · Honorary Senior Research Fellow, MUHAS Tanzania · Chief Scientific Advisor, Afromics

Consultancy enquiries: ckibirig@outlook.com

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