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Summary

The dynamics in the scientific quest has advanced at a time when complexities of problems mounted across the world. The challenge for researchers is vivid. Policy makers who are rather believed to the community blame researchers for the research result doesn’t offer solutions for the problems the study has focused on. As a result, the dilemma of research relevance mainly between research agencies and the public represented by policies has remained an outstanding agenda. This is particularly so in research activities in the LMICs. There is global advocacy now to engage research community as key stakeholders in order to address such discrepancies.
We carried out a scoping study in Ethiopia to identify researchers and research institution’s understanding of the role of ‘community’ in research, experiences roles of stakeholders and challenges. The result from the study is expected to provide evidence informed direction to improve research relevance thereby bridging the gap between policy makers and researchers.
Multiple methods were used to generate data. Available literature on community engagement were collected using different search engines as well as grey literature. Besides, primary data was collected from over thirty senior researchers in the academics, PhD students, and ethical review board members were employed. Such data were abstracted, thematized and interpreted to illustrate the current practices and challenges of community engagement in research as well as offer the way forward to improve.
Findings from the literature irrevocably underpins the indispensable role of research community in research. Evidently, the recognized autonomy of the researched is found to help the research process and its outcomes including facilitation of the research process to ownership of the evidences. Data from the interviews reinforced the unique opportunity community engagement could offer in the research process. However, equivocal positions were found at all levels on what could be done to engage research community in the research process and by whom? More particularly, the alignment with IRB was found to show clear gaps with concern presented by participants from IRB.
The finding calls for concerted institutional efforts to institutionalize mechanisms to enhance community’s role in the research process with defined indicators to track research community’s contribution to the research as well as on how this may have facilitated the ethical principles in research undertaking.

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