To solve today’s most pressing development and sustainability challenges, academics need to work with industry, government and the public to build trust, design appropriate solutions and scale their uptake. The Transforming Systems through Partnership programme builds engineering teaching, research and innovation capacity within partner countries' universities to collaborate with local stakeholders and UK academics in meeting local and global development challenges.

This grant programme aims to evolve and build upon the Academy’s existing Industry Academia Partnership Programme (IAPP), using the mechanisms that have worked to connect industry and academia around shared research challenges, but expanding them to create partnerships with a broader range of stakeholders across national and international systems to jointly address more complex development and innovation challenges. We propose to run calls in 19/20 and 20/21, each supporting two-year partnership projects. These partnerships must reflect a ‘Systems Thinking Approach’ to tackling the following challenges, with a large engineering dimension but also heavily interdisciplinary in character (themes to be chosen selectively depending on alignment with Newton Fund country strategy): Water, Oceans and Environment; Agriculture and Food; Energy and Infrastructure; Industry and Manufacturing; and Health & Care.