This paper explores how the precarities of funding shape what ends up getting known in global health science, drawing on nine months ethnographic fieldwork in two scientific research institutes in Uganda. Scholarship has pointed towards the important role that funding uncertainties play in shaping practice in the fields of global health and development, but far less attention has been paid to the implications of such uncertainties for knowledge production, particularly in global health science. This field, in common with development practice more broadly, is profoundly shaped by turbulence in the amount and foci of funding available for it. Such funding is usually in the form of soft grants, which has implications for how, what, and where knowledge is made. This paper addresses these neglected components of knowledge-making in global health. In so doing, I argue that, despite the good intentions of Northern scientists, the realities of the soft-funded, fragile system of transnational scientific research financing mean that scientists prioritise maintaining funding for their research projects and institutes above all, and that they thus adhere to the priorities of global health funders, rather than deviating from them. Consequently, questions of relevance to public health and development policymaking in Uganda are often relegated beneath the prevailing priority of maintaining funding. This results in a research agenda that is understood by many Ugandan scientists to be insufficiently relevant to their national context, with implications for policymaking both by global health actors and branches of the Ugandan government.
