The Global Research Alliance: a Knowledge Pool for Global Good.

No single player has the funding, research and delivery capabilities required to solve problems on a global scale. With increasing globalization and the many problems being faced by all, particularly developing countries, it is clear that alliances and the pooling of knowledge play a central role in development.

In light of the recognized importance of alliances, a study of their success was commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, in the domain of health. As part of the conclusions reached in this study, the researchers state that "global health alliances, having a clear and compelling overall goal, stand to achieve higher levels of success". Broadening the concept of alliances to sectors in addition to health had been the driving force in the formation of the Global Research Alliance (GRA).

The GRA developed its compelling overall goal through the "meeting of minds" of nine leaders of knowledge-intensive technology organizations from around the world: Battelle Memorial Institute, United States; Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia; Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India; CSIR South Africa; Danish Technological Institute; Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Germany; Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO); Sirim-Berhad, Malaysia; and the Technical Research Centre of Finland. These organizations already had a history of collaboration among its members. The concept is not to limit the Alliance to these organizations but rather to map out a new model of science and technology alliance that can be expanded upon a sound foundation.

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The first meeting to explore ways of exploiting the cumulative knowledge and expertise of these organizations was held in South Africa in April 2002. It culminated in the signing of the "Pretoria Declaration", which serves as a charter for the collaborative activities and combined strength of more than 50,000 scientists and technologists. As host to that first meeting, Sibusiso Sibisi, President and Chief Executive Officer of CSIR South Africa, said: "Taking into account the rapidly changing societal needs around the world, the growing convergence in many domains and the transformation of international markets, it has become imperative to explore the synergies between the various knowledge-intensive research and technology organizations". He added: "It is our belief that a global research alliance will foster dialogue within and across various international organizations and will generally encourage international cooperation in the field of science and technology".

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Ramesh Mashelkar, Director-General of CSIR India, said that his Council "is proud that the momentous meeting in Delhi of like-minded science and technology organizations, which it hosted in January 2003, resulted in the formal launching of the GRA. I believe the GRA members were privileged to have an audience with the technocrat President of India (APJ Abul Kalam). His sanguine advice to the members to work towards a peaceful, prosperous and secure world was in complete harmony with the GRA motto of Global Knowledge for Global Good through Global Funding. His words set the context for the vision: 'The world is competing for resources; the GRA will contribute to thinking of the world as a planet and not as individual countries'."

As part of the agreement reached in New Delhi, the decision was taken that a nerve centre be established at CSIR South Africa to coordinate communication and promote the activities of the GRA with international funding agencies. Anthos Yannakou, GRA Principal for CSIR South Africa, was requested to undertake the day-to-day performance management of the Centre, conforming to all the accepted standards of accounting and governance, and reporting annually to the GRA Principals group.

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) address some of the serious challenges facing the world: 1.7 million deaths a year, of which nine out of ten are children, are attributed to unsafe water, sanitation and hygiene; between 5,000 to 6,000 people die every day from tuberculosis; about 1.4 billion will still lack access to electricity in 2030; the Internet connects 120 million computers, but less than 2 per cent of the world's population; and mobility systems need to become more efficient, more equitable and less environmentally and socially disruptive.

Such statistics highlight the importance of the MDGs, which aim to: reduce by half the proportion of people suffering from hunger and living on less that $1 a day; ensure that all children complete a full course of primary schooling; eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2005 and at all levels by 2015; reduce by two thirds the mortality rate among children under five; reduce by three quarters the maternal mortality rate; halt and reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; integrate the principles of sustainable development, and reverse the loss of environmental resources; reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water; achieve significant improvement in lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers; and develop a global partnership for development.

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It was in this context that the guiding principles for the GRA were defined, taking into account the human dimension. "It is essential for science and technology to have a human face, and efforts must be devoted to the upliftment of all humankind, not only the advantaged--it must be shared by all", said Murli Manohar Joshi, Minister of Human Resource Development, Science and Technology and Ocean Development, India, at the 2002 GRA Principals Meeting. These guiding principles are: undertaking large-impact projects for the benefit of society; creating synergy by pooling the energies, skills and facilities of participants; promoting projects with high innovation content; and developing global knowledge networks for industry and industrial sectors to enhance their competitiveness.

The initial focus areas chosen by the GRA to implement the guiding principles, in the context of the MDGs, are water, energy, transportation, digital divide and health. It is also recognized that integration across these themes would be a key priority to make serious inroads to global problems. The GRA mode of operation emphasizes the practical implementation of science and technology advances, and necessitates bringing together expertise in each of these focal areas. In order to ensure that technical experts in member organizations are afforded the opportunity to explore areas of cooperation and strength in their combined capabilities, a process of technology fusion was initiated. This process encourages the experts, in workshop mode, to explore areas where the biggest impact could be made in solving global issues by combining the considerable power of the GRA through innovative solutions. According to Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, "it's exciting to see that some of the world's major science and technology research organizations are committing to undertake some joint projects to help address the world's most pressing social problems".

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Fusion workshops in each of the five focus areas were held successively during 2003 and 2004, each hosted by a different GRA organization. The learnings from the first three held in 2003 were incorporated into the other workshops.

The first of the fusion workshops, on water, had its "kick-start" in Australia, soon after the India GRA Principals Meeting that formalized the Alliance. Fifteen experts from six member organizations met in March 2003 to establish a framework for moving the GRA water programme forward. "The water agenda is extremely important internationally and to Australia, and I look forward to synergistic development of opportunities between the GRA partners", Peter McGauran, Australian Minister for Science, said. Beginning with the MDG to reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water, the capabilities and priorities of members were distilled into six themes where they believed the GRA was best positioned to address their combined science and technology capability for the integrated issues around this MDG: groundwater management development; development of a global competency for strategic analysis of water systems; urban water infrastructure development; drinking water and waste treatment technologies; provision of safe drinking water; integration of policy, strategic and hydrological imperatives; and sanitation-breaking the faecal to oral loop.

The GRA Water Action Council, chaired by CSIRO Australia, steers the strategy for project design with a focus on implementation. It has already succeeded in securing an important water project: developing the strategic action plan in water resources management for the Association of South East Asian Nations.

The energy fusion workshop in June 2003 was attended by 18 representatives from eight Alliance members. Hosted by Battelle in Columbus, Ohio, it produced five themes: sustainable rural electrification, biomass, demand reduction, market conditions and decentralized power. Project implementation and strategy development have been tied together in the business plan drafted by the GRA Energy Council. In just over a year since the first workshop, the integrative nature of the five themes will be highlighted in a project assigned to the GRA by the World Bank to assess the solar thermal renewable energy portfolio in four countries.

Thirteen representatives of six member organizations met in Durban, South Africa in October 2003 to establish a framework for the GRA transportation programme. A scoping exercise was conducted which identified four focus areas, addressing transportation challenges in developed, transitional and developing nations that best matched the capabilities of the GRA. These are:

* Development of pro-active offerings, such as corridor planning and operations, freight logistics (including the future of rail), transport security and rural connectivity and accessibility;

* Key account development with multilateral agencies such as the World Bank;

* Rapid responses to current opportunities in sustainable public transport and infrastructure financing and funding; and

* Development of enabling mechanisms such as knowledge bases, decision-support systems for large capital projects and discussion papers.

Based on the principle of technology fusion being necessary to address complex transportation systems, the group identified science and technology needs and applications to meet the goals of sustainable access, which include global logistics infrastructure, the future of railroads, and improved modelling and decision-support tools. A community of practice will be established and TNO in the Netherlands will lead this initiative to guide and direct the GRA engagement in transportation. Dr. Mashelkar and Vijay Bhatkar, a leading information technology expert from India, prepared two papers that outlined the challenges and needs in this domain. Both position papers address the gap between individuals, businesses and geographic areas at different socio-economic levels with regard to their opportunities to access information and communications technology.

The technology fusion workshop was one of the most recent for the GRA. Held in June 2004 and hosted by Sirim-Berhad in Kuala Lumpur, it coincided with the Malaysian National Innovation Summit, the launch of the second phase of the Multimedia Super Corridor and a call by Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi of Malaysia to his people to embrace innovation as a culture. The workshop sketched out the GRA contribution in education and knowledge transfer, accessibility, local content and applications, and sustainable environmental management with specific reference to food security. The GRA Digital Futures Expert Group was formed and integrated projects such as "Wireless Africa", involving community and private sector groups, are under exploration.

The last of the technology workshop, hosted by CSIR India, was held in July 2004. A position paper outlining health issues and opportunities relevant to the GRA has identified the key issues in global health, particularly in light of the MDGs. Globalization has raised the level of interest about the possible causes and consequences of the uneven spread of disease, particularly of emerging infections, which has directed increased attention to the need to reduce global disparities in health. The GRA is currently formulating new approaches to combine and integrate across indigenous knowledge, traditional medicine, modern medicine and modern science in the development of faster, better and safer medicines, diagnostics and the link to nutrition. The GRA institutes in Malaysia, India, South Africa and Australia were recognized as having a predominant role in guiding the GRA to better understand the needs and opportunities in these areas.

The GRA is embarking on the next stage of integrating and implementing cross-cutting initiatives between the five focus areas to foster creative synergies to address whole issues. For example, those relating to water, energy, transport and the digital divide, all with an impact on health, are fundamental to moving toward a step-change in solutions and form the basis for integrated thinking and the challenging steps toward project design for implementation.

Under exploration is the link between energy and poverty alleviation. It is recognized that sustainable local economic activity can provide the "activation energy" needed to uplift poor communities. Thus, affordable services can be used as a catalyst for this development to enable productive economic activities and improvement in the quality of life. But this deeper kind of integration and synthesis require that other challenges that communities face, such as access to water, health, connectivity, and transport and logistical constraints, should also be included. They also need to be informed by historical analyses to reveal the details and history of the regional population, culture and economy; resource pressures and biodiversity; what determines the reigning population patterns, its growth rate and demographics; and why is the population growing (or not) the way it is, and what is influencing this phenomenon?

Graham Harris, Chair of GRA Water Action Council, CSIRO Australia, said: "Clearly, such high-impact, integrated programmes are about doing new kinds of science in a socially-engaged manner, and also doing trans-disciplinary projects linked by the spatial, temporal, social and economic climate in which they are set. There is an essential emergent context for science and technology which will have recursive overtones; as we proceed, we will change the context through the development and transfer of new knowledge, and the context will change the science and technology solutions." This integrated approach and new ways of thinking about the role of science and technology for the MDGs was the focus of the GRA Principals Meeting in March 2005, hosted by CSIRO Australia.

Vijoleta Braach-Maksvytis (left) is Director of global development at Australia's CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization), one of the world's most diverse scientific research institutions. She recently headed the Office of the Chief Scientist of Australia and was Convenor of the country's National Nanotechnology Network. Ms. Braach-Maksvytis has a doctorate in biophysics.

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Reinie Biesenbach is Manager of the Global Research Alliance (GRA) Nerve Centre at South Africa's CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research), the largest research and development organization in Africa. Mr. Biesenbach has a doctorate in industrial engineering.

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