These budget items will equip a vehicle that will give us access to Madawachchiya, a remote area. Lab materials and tools will help us to collect and control the sand flies. The field staff will also assist with community education, sand fly collectionand control. We will provide healthier food for community education events. Lastly, we will also be cultivating vegetable seedlings to distribute among the community as added incentive to attend workshops and to encourage them to keep their gardens clean which will reduce the amount of sand fly breeding spots. Our preliminary data suggests that our comprehensive intervention will reduce the adult sand fly population and reduce sand fly bites by 20%.

Additional Information

We will allocate approximately 1/3 of the funds to each of the 3 stages of our research. Stage 1 will help to equip a vehicle to act as a mobile vector clinic. Stage 2 will help to conduct community education work for sand fly vector control measures. Stage 3 will examine the progress of the community awareness regarding the sand fly and their control, the success of the sand fly control program through MVSU.

Activities of the field scientific staff will include research design, materials preparation, data analysis, paper write-up, and results dissemination. When each stage is complete, full lab notes will be provided via our Experiment page.

Additional Information on Crowdfunding for Science

With more and more constraints on scientific funding worldwide, researchers are having a difficult time securing supports for their work, especially among those relatively early in their career like PhD students, postdoctoral fellows or young principal investigators. Funding is crucial at this stage where new investigators can establish their career path.

With many startups turning to crowdfunding to help complete their projects, you are now seeing new campaigns offering all these fun gadgets and technologies almost every day. What crowdfunding does here is to bring you, as potential customers, closer to the companies. It generates buzz for the biz, and you get a glimpse of the products you will likely purchase. Crowdfunding connects the startup owners with broader audiences who are as passionate about the projects as they are. In turn, these audiences have a chance to be a part of the projects through small donations. While the money raised from crowdfunding may not entirely replace the more traditional routes like angel funding or venture capital, it allows the people who make the campaigns to take their first few steps.

Just like crowdfunding for business, crowdfunding for researches allows scientists to connect with the people they are helping. With the traditional route of research grants, you share your ideas with limited circles of people--grant reviewers, experts in the fields, and that friend you asked to proofread your proposal in exchange for freshly-baked cookies. Now, with crowdfunding campaigns, you, as scientists, are sharing your ideas, hope, and goal with the public. These are the people who are likely going to benefit from your next discoveries firsthand, whether it be a cure for cancer or a new anti-malaria drug, or a new strain of rice with a higher yield.

To give back to your backers, you, the science guys, are updating them on your progress, letting them know that even just a small amount of donations can drive your experiments towards the next big discovery. In a way, this is your product to give back to your backers. With the magic of the internet, crowdfunding campaigns can bridge the gap between the lab bench and the public, thus increasing transparency and building trust between scientists and the general public.

It is true that fundraised through crowdfunding is often far from the traditional research grants, and its success is not guaranteed. However, a small amount of money can allow researchers to conduct some preliminary experiments, set up a new space for future projects, or generate enough data to make that Figure 1 for their grant proposal. Everything counts.

Crowdfunding is relatively new and unexplored territory for scientific research communities. TDR, the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, at World Health Organization recognizes this as a great opportunity to help researchers fund their projects given the increasing difficulties to secure research funding.