If you want your research to have impact, don’t underestimate the power of communication

Martha Wakoli 새 탭/창에서 열기, who won the 2024 Kathleen Gaffney Prize 새 탭/창에서 열기, has reason to believe that communication is a powerful tool for researchers looking to make a difference.

Starting her career as an electrical engineer working on railways and powerlines, Martha is now a manager at CLASP 새 탭/창에서 열기, an international appliance efficiency nonprofit. By examining the ways people interact with their appliances, she determines how their usage can affect energy policies aimed at improving the lives of billions and reduce the impact of climate change.

To make that happen, she said, communication is key.

“I think of research communication as a core function for a researcher,” she said, highlighting two key areas.

Getting ahead of misinformation

One reason Martha believes communication is vital is that it helps fight misinformation:

There’s that very common saying about how before the truth is out the door, a lie is halfway round the world. So there’s an obligation for researchers to provide reliable, referenceable information on topics like climate and health. If there’s not enough good information out there, then people will turn to whatever is there, even if it’s of questionable quality.

The second reason relates to a key aspect of Martha’s work.

Making sure decision-makers are informed

As an applied researcher, her objective has always been to contribute to evidence that can influence either investment or policy:

The end goal is closing the energy access gap, and research is the vehicle that helps us get there. For the people who make the decisions that close the gap, I need to make sure they’re aware of the best information all the time.

Joining CLASP represented a shift from working on the supply side of electricity to the user side. That change brought with it a new understanding of what energy policy might mean to people’s daily lives.

Seeing how people interact with electricity — how it gives them cooling, how it allows them to pump water, watch TV and get informed — required a lot more than what my engineering training could provide. It needed a kind of high-level mathematical analysis blended with some qualitative nuance for understanding user-centric insights.

For Martha, that emphasis on how policy affects people in day-to-day life is an essential part of making a difference. Where she works, in Kenya, it takes on a different aspect to other parts of the world, she explained:

“In Europe or America, you can design products and test them in the initial stages so that they are more suited for the end user; they can ask whether drivers want a seatbelt to go left to right or how they can make steering more comfortable and design accordingly,” she said.

However, because Kenya imports a lot of is appliances — as do most African countries — part of Martha’s work is to act as a bridge between users in Kenya and those product designers who are often based in India, China or Europe. As Martha explained: “We relay people’s feedback to manufacturing and design partners so that when those products eventually come to be used in markets like ours, they’re better suited for the way people use them.”

Naturally, one of the most important elements of this process is hearing from people who use these products and who are affected by policy and products. Listening, Martha argued, is a vital part of communicating:

I have a lot of privilege. I grew up in Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya, and when I was growing up there, it was mostly electric even though we experienced frequent power outages. So to pick an example, my day-to-day experience of high temperatures is that because I have access to electricity, I can potentially plug in an AC when necessary.

Bringing in a more diverse range of voices, such as people who live in unelectrified parts of the country, is necessary because it helps fill in the gaps that privilege might cause you to miss, Martha said.

It improves research outputs, but it also helps with buy-in, with communicating changes. You get a lot more investment from communities where you work when you’re willing to learn from them, and it also builds our credibility with manufacturers. They’re not designing solar water pumps for someone who lives in Nairobi, they’re designing them for someone who has less access to electricity than I do, so that’s the feedback that is most relevant.

One of those people is Doris Chuwa, who owns a small store in Nigeria.

In Nigeria, record-breaking temperatures and inconsistent power supplies lead many homes and businesses to rely on expensive, polluting diesel generators for electricity — a system not everyone can afford, according to CLASP. Doris said the solar refrigerator she bought has boosted her business’s income while allowing her to sell cool drinks to her customers. In a testimonial for Kookboks, she wrote:

Since I [bought a Koolboks fridge], I noticed the business has changed. When my customers come to me saying they have no power supply and ask how I have electricity, I tell them I am using Koolboks to chill my drinks. If you have this [fridge], your business will change.

Driving inclusion in STEM

The messaging, both from a societal perspective and from what we consume in media, is that science is masculine and uncool. And so most people then choose the alternative and don’t even give it a chance.

Martha’s solution was to engage adolescent girls between 13 and 17 and explain her work in everyday terms: “I’d say ‘I fix a train. I open part X and do Y.’” But as much as her audience may have found that interesting, they didn’t always make the connection between that work and subjects such as physics. There was a disconnect, Martha said:

A friend of mine and I decided came up with the idea of an online magazine about female engineers in Kenya. The thing that struck me about young girls in Kenya is they were really interested in reading magazines. So we created this platform that has very cool pictures of women, and they're talking about their day job. And that then meant we could use that as a tool to say, ‘You’ve heard me today, and I’ve told you about what I do. Here are 50 more people, right, who do interesting things in engineering.’

Now, the magazine has about 8,000 readers, and Martha has reached around 600 students through in-person events.

From a small seed, it’s become a really impactful example of how we can use communication to make young people more interested in science.