In November we convened our Annual Network Meeting in Johannesburg, hosted by the SAMRC/Wits Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science (PRICELESS SA) at the University of the Witwatersrand. This was our 7th annual meeting as a network, bringing together our research partners from Brazil, Cameroon, Jamaica, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and the United Kingdom to explore the critical topics of urban health, physical activity, diet, and climate change.

The future of GDAR research

The morning of Day 1 started with parallel Early Career Researchers (ECRs) and Principal Investigator (PI) meetings to brainstorm the progress of GDAR so far and ideas for future areas of research. Both groups noted that we have rich data available from GDAR work and plans need to be in place to maximise its utility and ensure that findings are shared and communicated – particularly so that it is useful to local policy and community groups.

In the afternoon, Professor Karen Hofman, Founding and Outgoing Director of PRICELESS SA, officially opened the Annual Network meeting, which on its first day focused on making sense of the research conducted by the GDAR network since 2017. The question of the day was “What are the cross-cutting insights from GDAR and how can we leverage them to support action?”

Nina Abrahams, from the Cambridge team, led the sense-making session. This included breakout groups, posters, sticky notes, and lively discussion, as we considered how best to put together our work in a digestible and informative way. Lots of comments were collated, particularly around knowing our audience, bringing in design skills, and ensuring we clearly articulate the syndemic nature of insights throughout. Watch this space as we continue to develop our GDAR sense-making outputs.

The day finished with a look at papers that are in line to be published from GDAR work. Three ECR-led papers have been published already from GDARSpaces, with more submitted for journal review and other analyses on the way.

Research