Researchers and Innovators have been called upon to put mentorship at the centre of their work if they are to attain success and contribute to the growth of Uganda’s economy.

This call was made by the Associate Professor of Maternal and Child Health Epidemiology at Busitema University Dr David Mukunya today at Kabale University in Kabale Municipality during the Multidisciplinary Research Dissemination Workshop focused on Enhancing Research Utilization through Multidisciplinary Research Dissemination. He said that mentorship is key in overcoming challenges arising from failure to mentor the inexperienced generation of people such as insecurity, success philosophy and people forgetting where they came from because success seeds blindness.

Dr Mukunya further called for collaboration as another way of promoting research because it ensures effective communication,respect, trust and transparency among researchers hence overcoming lack of trust, perfection, selfishness and despising local people which may lead people to lose morale of involving themselves in research, by saying that “one does not necessarily need to have love for research for them to innovate in it but the desire and ability to start doing it.”

Finally he called upon people who do research writing to see each other as one, teach one another, have a spirit of volunteering, to focus on seed not the fruit or the harvest, sharing ideas and having priorities in order to uphold mentorship appraisal and overcome attrition of staff, lack of continuity, mediocrity, institutional memory and suffering of the next generations as a result of failure to mentor those in need of mentorship.