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The Essence on Health Research initiative, part of WHO-TDR, have released a pragmatic guidance document suggesting seven principles for how to strengthen research capacity in low and middle income countries. 
The WHO Essence web pages say:
The guidance has been broken down into a number of principles and accompanied by illustrative examples to show how they have been adopted in practice, as well as some of the most commonly encountered barriers to their effective implementation. The ultimate goal is to better support researchers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to identify and address these health barriers. Rather than being prescriptive, or staking any claim to being the gold standard of practice, the document has been developed as a tool for further discussion.
TDR Director John Reeder says the process of bringing together funders to identify shared strategies and approaches has been valuable. “Really important foundations are being laid that should have strong impacts in the coming years,” he added.
“We want to share learning accumulated over many years by our individual funding agencies and by the award holders themselves,” said Val Snewin, International Activities Manager at the Wellcome Trust. “We hope producing this document will help shape future programmes".
To visit the information about ESSENCE's new guidelines, visit:
http://www.who.int/tdr/news/2014/new_guidance_for_rcs/en/
For the guidelines themselves, visit:
http://www.who.int/tdr/publications/Essence_report2014_OK.pdf?ua=1