As part of the closure of the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) Research Technical Assistance Center (RTAC) after more than six years, RTAC held its final Consortium Partner Meeting on September 11, 2024, in Washington, DC.

The meeting provided an opportunity for RTAC’s consortium partners and USAID counterparts to provide an overview of RTAC’s accomplishments and impacts across its main seven activities, including but not limited to:

• The Development of the Research Network: As of July 2024, the Research Network had 1,048 members across 468 universities in 75 countries, of which 11% are affiliated with a minority-serving institution, 55% are non-U.S. based researchers, and 38% identify as women.
• The Breadth of Research Conducted Under the Project: over the course of the project many of the 40 major research activities conducted focused on global and regional issues but others included a focus on 28 specific countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East, were implemented by 55 partner institutions.
• A Summary of Research Translation Activities: Work included 11 capacity-building Research-to-Action workshops, 97 targeted communication products in multiple languages and on diverse topics, and one robust comprehensive Research Translation Toolkit.
• An Overview of the Project’s Convenings and Trainings: Over 1,335 attendees at RTAC’s in-person convenings and multi-session virtual convenings and 616 people trained by RTAC over the 6 years of the project.

The morning sessions of the Consortium Partner Meeting were capped off with a discussion led by RTAC’s Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Lead Rachael Jackson on USAID performance metrics and reflections on RTAC outputs and impacts. Rachel Yavinsky, PRB’s RTAC Lead, led the room through highlights from the evolution of the Research Translation Toolkit during a working lunch.

The afternoon sessions provided additional opportunity for attendees to hear about RTAC’s additional work on assessments of research translation, successes in localization and building capacity among LMIC researchers (led by Dr. Roy William Mayega from ResilientAfrica Network at Makerere University, Uganda), and reflections on working with USAID (led by RTAC’s U.S.-based academic partners: Arizona State University, the Pulte Institute for Global Development at the University of Notre Dame, and the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.)

RTAC – along with this website- will formally close on September 30. We encourage visitors to explore this site one last time and download any of our many resources. In the coming weeks, many of our resources will be migrated to the RTAC project page on the NORC website.