Short-term rates of success after cadaveric renal transplantation are significantly inferior to those from living related or unrelated donors. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the characteristics in the cadaveric donor that may affect the short- term outcome (7 months) of renal transplantation. A retrospective study was conducted for the year 2003. Donor characteristics such as age, gender, cause of brain-death, duration from admission to harvesting and creatinine at admission/harvesting, were correlated with recipient characteristics including period from transplant to discharge from hospital, creatinine at discharge, delayed graft function, episodes of acute rejection, graft loss and patient survival. Age: Since most donors were in the middle-age group with a mean age of 32.2 years, comparison could not be done. Sex: Since there were only 3 female donors, statistical comparison was not performed. Cause of Brain-death: The outcome at short-term was worse in recipients from donors with non-traumatic cause of brain-death, including graft dysfunction (p 0.007) and patient mortality (p 0.008). Duration from admission to harvesting did not affect any recipient parameters although there was a statistically insignificant trend towards increased delayed graft function in recipients of donors who had >7 days gap between admission to harvesting. Serum creatinine at admission of donors to the ICU of >160 µmol/L caused a significant increased duration of hospitalization of recipient after transplantation (p 0.03). No other parameters in the recipient were significantly affected. Serum creatinine at harvesting of >160 µmol/L caused a significant increase in numbers of acute rejection episodes after transplant (p 0.03) and a trend, although statistically insignificant, towards an increase in delayed graft function. Our findings suggest that recipients of donors with trauma causing brain-death and having serum creatinine level of <160 µmol/L at admission and hasting, as well as duration of stay in ICU of <7 days from admission to harvesting have the best short-term outcome after cadaveric renal transplantation. However, studies in larger number of patients are needed to validate this observation.