Making research count: introducing the new uptake and learning team

Sightsavers’ new research uptake and learning advisors share their efforts to make sure our research makes a real difference to the lives of people across the world.

In January 2020, Sightsavers celebrated its 70th birthday. We’re proud of the reputation the organisation has established over seven decades of working to eliminate avoidable blindness, promote disability rights, and treat and prevent neglected tropical diseases around the world. Day to day, our different teams do the work that most international NGOs do: working with partners to effect change through programmes in low- and middle-income countries, fundraising to support our goals, and monitoring and evaluating our work to ensure that we are operating at the highest possible standard and continually learning from our experience.

But at Sightsavers, one thing that sets us apart from most NGOs is our in-house research capacity. And the three of us who make up the new research uptake and learning team – Anna Ruddock, Anne Roca and Susan D’Souza – are dedicated to making sure the work of the research team makes a real difference in the world.

We also strive to be a key voice in the conversation on global health research. In a letter published in The Lancet Global Health, we call for more evidence on the prevalence of disability and the effectiveness of interventions to promote greater inclusion, and point to the need to mainstream disability within global research. At the recent International Centre for Evidence in Disability (ICED) conference, which we co-hosted with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), presentations from our researchers demonstrated that Sightsavers is making a significant contribution to this effort.

We also contribute to the scientific knowledge base by publishing our research results in peer-reviewed journals and reports, all available on our research centre, which offers a full library of our research activities, including our evidence gap maps – a useful resource for academics, research institutions and policymakers.

But doing research and sharing findings, no matter how compelling they might be, is not enough to have a real impact on lives. To make sure the work of the research team makes a real difference in the world, Sightsavers created a small team of global advisers dedicated to research uptake and learning (that’s us).