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Dr Romina Istratii was shortlisted for the inaugural UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship Impact Awards.
The awards are organised in four categories: research and innovation impact, leadership, advancing culture and public engagement.
Dr Istratii and the Project dldl/ድልድል team submitted two entries to the categories of leadership and public engagement, both of which were shortlisted and showcased at the Fellows’ Conference in Manchester, UK between the 6 – 8 February.
The project was established by Dr Istratii to promote decolonised, religio-culturally sensitive and research-based domestic violence interventions in Ethiopia and migrant communities in the UK. The project’s annual conference ‘Domestic Violence-Gender-Faith’ held in 2022 in Ethiopia was a major public activity for the project that was submitted as a public engagement impact entry. The conference was delivered with Ethiopian indigenous organisation EMIRTA and brought together over 100 secular and religious stakeholders from the UK, Ethiopia and East Africa. It resulted in outputs presenting evidence from 13+ countries, which were disseminated to policy makers, practitioners and universities through the project’s multilingual digital library – to-date accessed by thousands of readers in at least 113 countries.
In the past three years, Dr Istratii’s project has also facilitated Ethiopian partners’ participation in SOAS trainings, invited collaborators to co-deliver projects, co-author and present project outputs, and to apply to new funding opportunities. Three formal partnerships were achieved with Ethiopian indigenous organisations, two at the early stages of their organisational development. Additionally, three female community-based practitioners from migrant communities in the UK were supported to research domestic violence to promote ‘by and for’ research leadership. Two volunteer associated researchers benefited from research and career development mentoring, and two female staff have progressed to new positions, achieving professional growth.