Why going ‘broad brush’ on big bids can (sometimes) pay off
Matthew Baylis, Oxenhale chair of veterinary epidemiology at the University of Liverpool, has an enviable history of winning funding for major projects.
He set up the Liverpool University Climate and Infectious Diseases of Animals group—which he still leads—in 2007 with support from the Leverhulme Trust, and he has since won funding from just about every major funder in his remit.
Earlier this year, he enjoyed success with the Wellcome Trust and in a call on vector-borne diseases from the national funder UK Research and Innovation and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
Among his largest grants so far was an £8.8 million capacity-building project called the One Health Regional Network for the Horn of Africa, or just Horn, which was supported by the Global Challenges Research Fund and involved research and teaching institutions in Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somaliland.
Horn ran from October 2017 until it ended prematurely in March 2022 following the UK government’s decision to curtail Official Development Assistance funding.
Here, Baylis looks back on that project and explains why a little calculated vagueness on big applications can be a positive attribute.
How did you prepare for your Horn bid?
That was a huge project because of the funding level, and there were multiple countries involved. At the same time, it was the first call of its kind—a really big call—from the Global Challenges Research Fund.
Putting it together was definitely a challenge. I went to Africa to visit two countries to meet people and sound out ideas. And then there was a lot of work putting the proposal together. But we were able to be a little bit vague.
We put together a proposal where we would be making decisions about what to do during the project rather than at an early stage, because I wanted to consult people in Africa and jointly decide on what we should be doing, rather than deciding that myself, sitting back in the UK. We ended up funding about 40 different projects.
Can you expand on that vagueness?
With most project proposals, you might specify the studies you’re going to do and you may leave out some of the detail because you haven’t thought it all through properly, but you say what the scientific question is and then give some idea of how you’re going to address it.
For this project we said we were going to hold week-long events in Africa with local early career researchers to develop ideas, then we would help turn them into formal proposals and allocate funding to the best ones. In the proposal, we provided an overall heading for the events—they needed to address UN development goals for poverty or food security, say—but we didn’t say what science we were going to be doing and what the scientific questions were within that.
Do you think being vague had advantages?
We got challenged during the interview for it. The panel wanted to push us on details because they could see there were gaps. But I had to resist that because it is important to jointly decide what you’re going to do, rather than just a principal investigator doing it, particularly for an international project.
Where it really played well for us was when the project was disrupted by something as huge as Covid-19. Because we hadn’t decided exactly what we were going to do, we were able to pivot and actually direct some of the project towards research related to that disease in Africa. It gave us the flexibility to deal with events, and in no way would I say we didn’t achieve what we set out to achieve, because we had built that flexibility in.
Would you do it that way again?
I think for an international project, even in some cases a national one, this approach is good. If a project is around capacity building then enabling less experienced researchers to take part in the whole process of devising a project, having a project idea and turning it into a credible proposal is a real positive.
How do you feel about the early termination of the project?
It was painful, given that the total funding awarded to all projects in the call was £220m. Much of that had already been spent and most of the projects would still claim their successes, but it did seem to be cutting off your nose to spite your face. The Official Development Assistance cuts were about saving money, but ongoing projects were harmed in the process—which displayed a willingness to waste money.
Have you built on Horn with funding from other sources?
Yes, we’ve got smaller projects building on what we achieved, including funding from Wellcome, and we have ongoing National Institute for Health and Care Research funding involving teams in Ethiopia and Kenya. We also worked in Somalia and we have a few initiatives there as well. So there are things that are still ongoing and others where we are still in the process of applying or waiting for outcomes.
This is an extract from an article in Research Professional’s Funding Insight service. To subscribe contact sales@researchresearch.com