May 12, 2014
Nga Pae counts cost of funding loss
Maori researchers are determined not to go backwards despite the loss of funding for the only Maori centre for research excellence.
The Tertiary Education Commission has announced which centres will get the extra funding once the current contracts expire in December 2015.
Nga Pae o Te Maramatanga acting director Tracey McIntosh says missing out on the $5 million a year in CORE funding will make it hard to maintain the infrastructure needed to support good Maori research on a national basis.
She says Maori have had a taste of what is possible, as the centre’s 2013 annual report makes clear.
"We can’t go back to fragmented Maori research, so what we had before is that there would be pockets of money here, pockets of money there, and we often found Maori research was added on to bigger research projects which meant the ability of Maori to identify issues they wished to look at, and for them to be Maori-centred and Maori-led, was quite difficult," Associate Professor McIntosh says.
In its decade of existence Nga Pae o Te Maramatanga has funded 95 projects from the hard sciences to the humanities.
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