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Outgoing Director, Prof. Lawrence Ikamari,
Colleagues and Friends,
As you are already aware the Vice Chancellor, appointed me to take over from Prof. Ikamari with effect from today, June 3, 2014. I have already thanked the Vice Chancellor for entrusting me with the responsibilities associated with the position of Director and I am committed to serve with dedication. I take this opportunity to thank him once again for giving me the opportunity to serve the Institute, the University and our country. I am also most grateful to you all for your kind words of encouragement following the appointment. I consider this new appointment as an assignment from God, and I have prayed that He blesses me with the wisdom that is necessary for me undertake the responsibilities associated with the position. I seek your prayers too as well.
During the last three weeks, I have been working closely with Prof. Ikamari to ensure a smooth transition. This handing over ceremony thus has been organized to serve as a forum for the outgoing director to share with us on achievements during his tenure and for the incoming director to share on his vision for the Institute. I hope that we will achieve this during this first ceremony and we will institutionalise it for future ceremonies. I should clarify though that this is not the send off party for Prof. Ikamari; at a later date we plan to hold a proper send off. In the meanwhile, we thank Prof.
Ikamari and wish him well.
I want to, at this juncture, share with you what I see as our immediate priorities at PSRI in line with our mandate as a population training and research institute, providing technical backstopping to population programmes in Kenya. I will also suggest strategies that we can adopt to fulfil this mandate.
Before I share on my vision, I would like on behalf of the Institute and the
University to once again thank Prof. Ikamari, the outgoing Director, for his contribution to the growth of the Institute during the 12 years that he served as the Director. During those years we witnessed the expansion of our programmes. In particular we started two new academic programmes:
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the MA in M&E and the PhD by course work which were launched at the beginning of the 2013-2014 academic year. We also operationalised the
M&E short course which has been very successful. In addition, the Institute increased its visibility, by providing technical backstopping to the government and other agencies.
I believe that our academic and training programmes, with the on-going changes that are being introduced through the training committee will be enhanced and the effectiveness of these programmes will in turn improve their quality and thus I do not intend to discuss this beyond that.
My focus today is on research. You will agree with me that we have faced challenges in fulfilling this mandate, indeed, in our Strategic Plan 2013-
2018, this challenge has been recognized. As I take office, research will be my priority area of focus , I pledge to ensure that we generate the desired research outputs in both quantities and quality even as we continue to improve on our academic training programmes and the backstopping activities we are engaged in. In the coming days, I would like us to work together to establish the structures and partnerships that will enable us achieve this. In particular, I will work with the Research Committee to establish viable research, mentoring and PhD supervision teams. Given the current staffing levels, of a complement of 11 staff, we can set up at least four such teams, each with potential of generating 2 publications in refereed journals and supervising 2-3 PhDs each academic year. With administrative support, each team can develop one proposal ready by the end of June 2014 based on DHS or other secondary data. This structure, you will be happy to observe has also been envisaged in the University of Nairobi Research Policy.
Still on research, I would like to mention the Rusinga DSS site, which as you recall, was established to support the training and research mandate of
PSRI. It was expected that this would be achieved through the design and implementation of innovative demographic research projects. However, we have faced challenges in realizing this goal and hence the full potential of this site has not been realized. I would therefore like us to transform the site making it a platform for innovative demographic research with a link to the community demonstrating how the data we collect can be utilized to address their development needs. The Rusinga committee, of which I serve as chairman should guide on the way forward. As it does this ,I suggest that we begin with small innovative research/development projects with visible impact. Let me share two such potential examples with you.
Some of the identified causes of infant and child deaths is lack of immunization and lack of medical attention for sick children. Similarly lack
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of prenatal care and post natal maternal care during delivery, contributes to maternal deaths. Through a DHS type of baseline we can determine the extent of the utilization of maternal health services and the coverage of immunization as well as the extent to which curative services are utilized in the site. A family planning (FP) intervention can, similarly be conceived.
Thus, we can spearhead the initiation of simple interventions within the communities with impact that can be monitored and assessed using the data that we collect through our DSS and verbal autopsy. We can determine if there are any changes in mortality arising from such interventions or in fertility in case of FP. This can be achieved by working within the current
GOK health care system and current policy initiatives in the above areas.
During the next Rusinga DSS committee meeting, I intend to propose the formation of two research teams to develop proposals in the two areas. We will use the proposals to engage the county government of Homa Bay and other partners to implement such mutually beneficial collaborations as proposed above. I believe that they would be interested in working with us to operationalise such ideas. Again we will provide the administrative support so that these two proposals are developed ready by end of June, 2014. These two proposals, together with the four proposals developed by the research teams should form the core of our research programme for the 2014-15 PC period.
Another area of focus is Monitoring and evaluation. At PSRI we conduct
M&E training and yet we have not operationalized this to our programmes.
It is important that we establish structures which will fully operationalize M
&E as a management tool so that we can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of our programmes through monitoring of the key identified indicators and in addressing key evaluation questions about our programmes. Indeed our Strategic Plan has identified a number of such indicators and it is my desire to oversee a fully operational system to monitor such indicators and evaluate our programmes. The existence of such systems will also provide us with teaching materials for our M&E training programmes. In working with both the short course and training committees we will be able to devise strategies to enable us achieve this.
Generating world class products also requires world class facilities such as staff, equipment, computers, space etc. Currently our facilities are limited and as you already know PSRI does not have an operational vehicle although we expect the one donated by UNFPA to be available soon. We require at least an additional three vehicles to serve the Rusinga site and the
Nairobi office. I have already inspected the status of our offices for academic and administrative staff, as well as our teaching facilities and we are
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working towards ensuring that we convert our teaching and research facilities to world-class standard. I will seek your inputs on this and once we have established what needs to be done, we will engage the university and our partners; seeking their support for our infrastructure program.
In summary, my strategy will be to progressively introduce the necessary administrative changes required to create a more conductive working environment in our Institute so that PSRI can initially generate world-class outputs in research and in its other mandates, in turn we will market these outputs properly so that our image is enhanced and we can further attract more resources. This strategy will be implemented within the broad framework of a work-programme for 2014-2015 covering July 2014-June
2015, which I expect us to have completed developing by the end of June
2014. The strategy document, I expect, we will use to engage our potential partners.
I know that a motivated work force is the greatest asset that an organization can have. I will ensure that staff at PSRI is adequately motivated. Indeed the plans that I have outlined above can only be achieved if we are all motivated and work as a team. For now I would like to say that I am working on a comprehensive motivation plan for staff covering promotions and other aspects and we will have an opportunity to discuss it once fully thought out.
Three other aspects I would like to mention briefly before concluding are: the role of private sector, the current administrative structure at PSRI, and the long-term professional succession plan at PSRI. On the administrative structure, I would like to note that under the existing structure, below the
Director, are various committees that have been created internally. There have been suggestions that the position of Deputy-Director would be important. However, as a way of ensuring that those who qualify gain the necessary administrative experience, the current administrative structure gives us more flexibility and thus I would rather it is left as it is. We will however ensure that whenever the Director is informally or formally not in the office there is an internal mechanism to ensure that the duties pertaining to the office of Director are undertaken.
Turning to the role of private sector, I would like to mention that we need to explore the roles that the private sector can play towards helping the
Institute to attain is mandate and the mutual benefits that accrue from such a relationship. Finally, it is important for the Institute to start thinking of sustenance; most of the current staff members exit within the next 10-20 years. A strategy of succession planning needs to be in place and
I would like all of us to explore the best options available.
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In conclusion, I want to assure you all that I intend to implement only those decisions that have been endorsed by staff in meetings and other similar forums and which are not in conflict with the university Statues and procedures.
Colleagues, it time to come together and transform PSRI to a world-class institute of population training and research.
Thank you.
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