Family AIDS Caring Trust (FACT and the Collaborating Centre for Operational Research and Evaluation (CCore) under UNICEF are in the course of initiating the Brown Bag Concept in Manicaland Province. The concept endeavours to encourage dissemination, peer review and general analysis of ongoing research studies pertaining to the province and beyond. Target for dissemination are fundamentally people from the province as the starting point and may broaden to other researchers and participants beyond Manicaland Province as the process progresses and considering the demand generated by the Brown Bag dissemination platforms. It is hoped that the creation of such a dissemination podium for findings of such studies and ongoing research will go a long way and have the potential to profit the people in Manicaland Province and Zimbabwe as a whole. It has been noted with great concern that there is a huge gap in interaction between researchers and the researched. Over and over again, researchers perform studies of various forms in communities and upon finishing, they just disappear without giving feedback of the findings to the communities; yet the key aim of conducting studies is to provide feedback to the communities so that acute measures and decisions are taken to correct problematic situations. Researchers often grumble about the unavailability of an organized platform devoted to the dissemination of their study findings. The creation of the Brown Bag Concept has a potential to ease such concerns and excuses from researchers. The main focus of the Brown Bag Concept is on research studies/ papers that scrutinize general development issues, health-related concerns, education, gender and other social subjects like water and sanitation (WASH) generated in and beyond Manicaland Province. Such topics will generally be targeting children and women as these two groups are considered susceptible to external forces. Overall aim is to make available a dais to advance the sharing of imperative and more often difficult to access information generated through research. In this concept, FACT has been mandated to coordinate the process by bringing the pool of researchers and their respective studies together for systematic dissemination at a public forum. UNICEF’s role is to provide FACT with the necessary technical and financial support when need arises.Following this line of thought, FACT successfully conducted its first Brown Bag presentation in April 2014. This first Brown Bag presentation attracted fifty participants from various government ministries (Education, Health and Local government), Non-Governmental Organizations and independent researchers. The topic for presentation was entitled: “Preferential treatment against the girl child in secondary schools: The case of Sakubva High Density Suburb in Mutare- Zimbabwe”.
