About Us 

A global consensus as evidenced by the 2021 UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science and the various reports which emerged from the 2022 UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education has emerged that in order for higher education institutions to best contribute to meeting the many global challenges as articulated by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the Climate Crisis and other challenges, that changes in the ways in which knowledge is understood, created, managed, validated and used needs to happen. The call for community engagement, transdisciplinarity, openness to Indigenous knowledge, openness to community knowledge, and community-based learning are all to be found in the numerous global reports now circulating.

The K4C Global Consortium on Training for Community-Based Participatory Research was launched in 2017 in response to training needs revealed by two state-of-the-art global studies on community-university research partnerships. The K4C Consortium is a strategy for building institutional capacity in the field of CBPR in the Global South and the Excluded North. Launched in 2017 there have been eight cohorts which have supported the creation of 25 hubs in 16 countries. 150 mentors have been trained through a 21-week online, field work and face to face ‘training of trainers’ programme. Each of these hubs is now offering opportunities for other university and community workers to learn about CBPR. The MTP was designed by and led by Rajesh Tandon and Budd Hall, the co-chairs of the UNESCO Chair. 

A decision was taken in Barcelona in May of 2022 in the context of meetings with K4C Hub coordinators, higher education heads of institutions with an interest in the K4C and UNESCO colleagues that the way forward to continue building the K4C Consortium was through regionalising the training programmes. The three global training centres are hosted by the Islamic Science University of Malaysia (USIM), Gulu University in Uganda and the University of Ibague in Colombia.

The MTP is an online course offered through the Centre and coordinated by Gulu University. The MTP program is oriented in establishing new hubs and building their capacity to contextually integrate CBPAR in their local places. The course will be collaborative, student centred and experiential. It will provide multiple forms of demonstrating learning and involve team clusters to access the learning together with mentors. This is to recognise that not everyone will be able to access the internet, not everyone will be able to present their learning in traditional academic writing, and we want to give the opportunity for mentors to express themselves in their own language and way. The course is meant for community engaged participants, however it will meet each cohort of students at their spectrum of understanding and practice of knowledge democracy, community university engagement and participatory research. Thus time will be spent at the beginning of the course doing self-reflexive work, bringing in discussions about development, the role of universities and research, ethics and knowledge democracy. It will then move into developing hub strategies, teaching community-based participatory action research, and developing individual CBPAR proposals. This will all be furthered in the residency, and arts based inquiry methods will be practised. The participants will then have time to complete some community research and present reflections on it. 

Application form:

https://forms.gle/P5EmC1FnoCzFQxhj9