The newly-established UWC HIV and AIDS Research Centre will be a world-class hub for sharing, developing and implementing engaged policy and practice-related research that tackles HIV and AIDS prevention, treatment and care within a comprehensive, systemic, inter-sectoral and interdisciplinary perspective.
Director, Professor Christina Zarowsky, speaks with passion about future plans. “The Centre will develop major new research efforts, building on existing HIV/AIDS programming, research and teaching capacity and strengthening efforts already underway at UWC to build an African and global centre of excellence. It will actively engage communities, schools, the health system, and gender and social equity advocates in developing, conducting, sharing, and applying research and teaching. Visiting scholars, students, staff and others will participate in its seminars, public events, workshops, and research projects”.
The Centre builds on existing funding and thematic pillars to contribute to the vision of understanding and strengthening the “dynamics of building a better society” in relation to a critical public health and societal challenge of our time in this region — that of HIV. The specific objectives of the Centre are:
- To conduct and promote multidisciplinary research in the areas of integrated HIV and AIDS prevention and care, with an initial focus on health policies and systems, education, and gender based violence;
- To develop sustainable HIVrelated research capacity at the University, through providing a research base at the University for staff and student fellows in multidisciplinary research and capacity strengthening related to integrated HIV and AIDS prevention and care;
- To contribute, through research, to the transformation and strengthened capacities of health and education policies and systems and of broader community and social systems to decrease the burden of HIV and related conditions, including effective responses to gender-based violence;
- To harness, encourage and coordinate demonstrated multidisciplinary research potential related to HIV across the faculties of the University through seminars and workshops;
- To fundraise for and develop research partnerships around planned projects that are in line with the Centre’s broad aims and objectives.