devinitorg/iati-policy-markers huggingface dataset:
A comparative study of effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of alternative poverty eradication interventions in extremely poor areas of Northern Ghana The study will assess effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of three poverty reduction programmes implemented in deprived areas of Northern Ghana, which share the goal of eradicating poverty over the long term by unlocking poverty traps: 1) the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme implemented by the Government of Ghana, a cash transfer programme targeted to extremely poor households; 2) the SADA-Millennium Village Project implemented by the Earth Institute, consisting of a package of interventions directed to address multiple failures in the health, education and production domains; 3) the BRAC-inspired Poverty graduation programme implemented by local NGOs, which targets the poorest of the poor and provides households with a productive asset grant, cash consumption support, and other services.

The research has three main goals. First, we intend to inform choices between alternative poverty eradication programmes. This information will particularly benefit the funders and the implementers of the projects considered, but the lessons learned will have a wider application to similar projects implemented in low-income countries. Second, we intend to make a methodological contribution by developing methods of cost-effectiveness analysis of complex interventions. These methods are currently under-developed and no obvious methodology exist to account for the complexity of the institutional environments, the presence of synergies among different project components, and the presence of economies of scale when interventions are scaled up. Third, we intend to improve our understanding of poverty by investigating the mechanisms underlying extreme poverty and by analysing under what conditions specific interventions can unlock poverty traps. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Social Movement Learning and Knowledge Production in the Struggle for Peace with Social Justice: Case Studies from Four Conflict-Affected Contexts This participatory, co-produced research seeks to understand how social movements, in some of the most complex and conflict affected contexts in the world, build knowledge, develop strategy, and educate in the pursuance of peace with social justice. Four participatory case-studies of four very different types of social movement, in Colombia, Nepal, Turkey and South Africa will be explored through a process of participatory, collaborative research that is carried out in close collaboration with the respective social movements. The case studies will then be synthesized to draw out comparative insights on the learning and knowledge production strategies of social movements in contexts of conflict. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Investigating 'pockets of effectiveness' in developing countries: a new route to building state capacity for development A major challenge for achieving poverty reduction is that the capacity of states to deliver development is in short supply, particularly in Africa. However, 'pockets of effectiveness' (PoEs) offer important clues concerning how developmental forms of state capacity might emerge and be sustained in difficult contexts. PoEs are public organisations that function effectively where this is not the norm, with history suggesting that they have proved critical to developmental state success in the global south. Examples include national banks that can maintain macroeconomic stability and establish the conditions for pro-poor growth; regulatory agencies that can effectively govern key development resources; and policy delivery units capable of providing basic social services, all of which are central to improving the lives of poor people in Africa.
Recent research on PoEs has suggested that both external (e.g. political context) and internal factors (e.g. organisational leadership) shape their performance. However, this emerging subfield of governance research lacks a comparative study which systematically identifies how PoEs emerge and are sustained in different contexts and sectors, and the role that domestic and international actors can play in this. This absence has ruled out developing a theory of change concerning how PoEs emerge and are sustained and the generation of policy recommendations beyond specific cases. The key objectives are therefore to:
(a) Undertake a comparative analysis of the institutional and political conditions through which PoEs emerge and are sustained in different contexts and within different sectors
(b) Identify the role that domestic and international actors play in developing and sustaining PoEs
(c) Directly inform and improve efforts by governments and development agencies to support PoEs in Africa, and developmental governance more broadly
(d) Strengthen the capacity of early-career African researchers to undertake governance research and policy engagement. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Learning outcomes and teacher effectiveness for children facing multiple disadvantages, including those with disabilities: India and Pakistan The project aims to identify strategies to raise learning outcomes for all children, regardless of their background. It is widely recognized that teachers are central to a child's educational experience. Yet, in low income countries, disadvantaged learners often face poor quality teaching: many teachers are recruited without having a basic subject knowledge themselves, receive inadequate training with limited attention to strategies to support children from diverse backgrounds, and weak incentives and poor teacher governance can lead to low motivation and high levels of teacher absenteeism. The research will, therefore identify which aspects of teaching are most important for improving all children's learning, and so inform governments on the strategies needed to support children who face multiple disadvantages.

The research will be conducted in India and Pakistan, countries characteristic of other poor countries in terms of wide learning inequalities. India shows some advances in identifying strategies to tackle disadvantage, while Pakistan is similar to many other low income countries in not yet having such strategies. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
The Promise of Science: Deliberating on biomedicine, health and democracy in the Ugandan parliament The proposed research explores science and democracy through the lens of scientific capacity building in Uganda. While scientific capacity building is often cast as a common good, its practices and implementation at the level of local institutions are little understood, and yet it broaches concerns about the globalisation of science and health governance, the spatialisation of development practices, and the relationship between liberal democracy and scientific knowledge. These concerns are contrasted against urgent calls to secure the health needs of poorer populations, and through international research networks, advance knowledge and understanding of major health issues affecting world populations, such as how to mitigate the health effects of environmental change, how to cope with growing populations, and how to contain infectious diseases. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
The Literacy Laboratory Project (LLP) under the Northern Uganda Literacy Program The Literacy Laboratory Project (LLP) will scale up and evaluate the Mango Tree literacy program, whose model delivers better-quality teacher instruction, access to relevant literacy materials, inclusive approaches to learner assessment, parental and community engagement in schools and strengthening literacy infrastructure so that reading and writing, especially in local languages, becomes a meaningful part of daily life in households and communities. This scale-up will test a piloted and improved model to evaluate its effectiveness and test the mode of program delivery. Under the LLP, researchers from the University of Michigan will conduct a rigorous randomized control trial of the program in the Lango Sub-region over 4 years to measure the effectiveness of the instructional model, teacher training and support supervision innovations and literacy materials and methods on Primary 1- Primary 3 pupils' literacy achievement and explore public-private avenues for scale-up. We will study 128 schools, which are randomly assigned to either the full LLP implemented by Mango Tree's field officers, a partial-program implemented by Government Teacher Tutors, or a control group. The study will also randomize instructional materials to evaluate their contribution to effective teaching. The study will collect a rich set of pupil, parent, teacher, classroom, and school-level longitudinal data. Learning will be measured principally in terms of improvements in EGRA and Early Grade Writing Assessment scores.
Our goals are to: 1) demonstrate that big effects on learning are possible (as the 2013 pilot evaluation results point toward); 2) show that with the right combination of training, teaching and learning materials and correct support, teachers can be supported to effectively teach literacy - even in rural, under-resourced, overcrowded classrooms; and 3) to test and evaluate economic approaches to implementation at scale to determine value-for-money impacts on pupil learning and teacher performance in African schools. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Privatisation and Productivity Growth Research Questions

We suggest that the operation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) may lock an economy into an inefficient allocation of resources. We seek to understand when and under what conditions privatisation policy can serve as an instrument to restore allocative efficiency and improve aggregate productivity by releasing resources to more innovative sectors of the economy. This proposal therefore addresses the "Innovation and Productivity Growth" theme of the call.

We propose to conduct the first empirical analysis of the effects of privatization on the allocation of productive resources in an LIC, addressing the following questions: 

1. How does privatisation impact the productivity of other private enterprises that have labour and input market linkages with the privatized SOE? 

2. How do the market and regulatory environments interact with privatisation? We will examine a number of policy features that are likely to condition the effects of privatisation, including labor legislation and trade openness.

Methods and Data

Our empirical strategy makes use of large episodes of privatization in India, starting in the early 1990s. We will utilize data from annual industry surveys, as well as data from household employment surveys, and combine these with data on privatisation in India. We argue that the episodes of privatisation in India can be thought of as exogenous shocks to firms that were proximate to the privatized entities. To identify labour market effects, we take advantage of the fact that geographically, labor mobility in India is low, and labour markets are distinct. A comparison of changes in productivity and labour market outcomes for factories in districts that saw a reduction in the public sector due to privatization, with the corresponding changes in productivity and labor market outcomes in districts that experienced no changes will allow us to identify and estimate the effects of privatization. Similarly, to identify effects arising through input market linkages, we will compare productivity in industries that were exposed to privatisation in their input markets to industries that were not exposed. 

Dissemination Plan

The expected outputs of this project will include 2-3 academic papers presenting our analysis of the effects of privatisation in India. We will then build on these findings to develop a policy paper that applies the lessons learnt to provide recommendations that can guide privatisation policy in Bangladesh. This policy paper and related policy briefs will be disseminated widely in the policy and academic community in Bangladesh. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Equipping Lesotho's primary school teachers for educating and motivating rural children The Brunel University-led research project on "Education systems, aspiration and learning in remote rural settings" found that primary school children in rural communities in Lesotho, India and Laos tend to see their education as being useful only in relation to formal sector careers (teacher, nurse, policeman, soldier etc). Such careers can be achieved by only a minority of learners and, as a consequence, many young people are left disillusioned, and disengage from schooling. In Lesotho, this is despite a new integrated curriculum that explicitly seeks to equip children with knowledge and skills for alternative futures. Part of the problem is that teachers in rural schools also see education as preparation for a formal sector career, and have not themselves fully embraced the integrated curriculum. Relatively few teachers have received any training in the new curriculum and it is not currently introduced in initial teacher education at Lesotho College of Education (LCE). Moreover, issues of teaching in specifically rural contexts, or the needs of rural children, have little prominence either in the new curriculum itself, or in teacher education.

The proposed project will seek to equip Lesotho's primary school teachers better for engaging rural children with education. It will aim to produce a school experience that connects more meaningfully with rural children's lives and prepares them for success in a future life that might not be in a formal sector job. Rural children will as a consequence engage more actively with schooling. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Towards a Relational Approach to Agency for Mapping Pathways Into and Out of Poverty Global poverty looks radically different in the 21st century as climate-related events, political-religious conflicts and economic growth-inequality nexuses add to persistent forms of social exclusion based on gender, race, and class. In this uncertain and unpredictable context, we require new approaches to understand complex pathways into and out of poverty, directing attention to poor people's collective capacity to bring about transformative change i.e., their agency, as constituted by social networks and relations with nature, and mediated by science and technology. Our aim is to develop the concepts and methods of an innovative 'relational agency pathways approach', drawing on theories from Science, Technology and Society studies and the 'pathways approach' to poverty reduction and social justice, which emphasise interactions between social, technological and environmental change.

We will develop this new approach to understand diverse pathways out of poverty for smallholders and the landless in agriculture, in two arenas. First, we will study how small farmers and farmworkers adapt new technologies on the farm, as their cultivation practices are transformed due to technological and environmental change. Second, we will study how farmers turn a harvested crop into a commodity for the market, negotiating their relationships with credit providers and traders. Both these arenas played out dramatically under the 'Green Revolution', from the 1960s onwards, when technology, markets and government support were used to intensify agricultural production.

The first geographical focus of our work will be on the North Arcot region of Tamil Nadu, India, a classic exemplar of the Green Revolution in Asia, where extensive historical data since the early 1970s are available. Collaborating with our co-investigators at Madras Institute of Development Studies, and collecting new life history data in the field, we will map long-term agency pathways into and out of poverty constituted by changing technologies, natural resources and social worlds, as lived by people of different genders, classes and castes. We will test the approach in Machakos County in Kenya (in collaboration with our co-investigator at African Centre for Technology Studies), where several attempts have been made to get a Green Revolution off the ground, but none have been sustainable. In addition to relying on archival data and collecting life histories using ethnographic engagement with the study's participants, we will use a workshop format to collect data on how people evaluate diverse pathways out of (and into) poverty along a range of criteria derived from conventional indicators of welfare and well-being as well as those designed by the participants themselves. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Basic Entrepreneurship: A Means for Transforming the Economic Lives of the Poor? The proposed research examines a new set of interventions, pioneered by the world's largest NGO BRAC in Bangladesh, which simultaneously tackle the capital and skills constraint in an attempt to encourage occupational change amongst the world's poorest women. We use randomised control trials of this type of program in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India to look at whether providing capital and skills can encourage basic entrepreneurship. The issue at hand is whether one can create successful female entrepreneurs - who acquire skills and make use of productive capital - out of poor women who started out with neither. Key to this question is whether asset and skill transfers can induce the poor to alter their occupational choices and permanently exit poverty, as opposed to simply enabling them to increase their consumption in the short term. These questions are highly salient as the world is littered with examples of anti-poverty programs, which despite their best intentions, fail to have any appreciable impact on their intended beneficiaries.

The proposed research thus speaks directly to the first overarching question posed in the ESRC-DFID Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation Research 2012-13 on finding effective means to allow the poorest to exit and stay out of poverty. It also addresses directly the crosscutting issues on structural inequalities (particularly as regards gender) and measurement and metrics (particularly as regards measuring empowerment and the social dynamics and general equilibrium effects induced by the program). Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Explaining and Mitigating Electoral Violence The aim of this project is to develop conceptual, methodological and practical tools to facilitate an enhanced understanding of electoral violence and the behavioural interventions best suited to preventing it, with a view to sustaining fair and vibrant societies. The project will involve the construction of two databases of electoral violence and will make these data available to those engaged in electoral assistance, electoral administration and electoral observation as well as academic and other researchers. The project will also use the resulting data to develop and test a series of theoretically-driven propositions about the causes of electoral violence and to assess a range of interventions designed to prevent violent behaviours. Finally, the project will generate an online electoral violence early warning tool that can be used to provide relevant information about current electoral risks. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Multi Donor Trust Fund for HighPriority Roads Reopening and Maintenance Project in the Democratic Republic of Congo(DRCPro Routes) TO ESTABLISH LASTING ACCESS TO MARKETS, AND SOCIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES IN A WAY THAT IS SUSTAINABLE FOR PEOPLE AND ENVIRONMENT
Increasing access, enrolment and retention in primary education, through increased birth and death registration, for children in Bulawayo and Matabeleland Provinces, Zimbabwe. Working in the Bulawayo and Matabeleland provinces of Zimbabwe, in association with our project delivery partner Trinity Project Trust, the project will engage communities in a dialogue about the ways in which the non-registration of births and parental deaths can hinder a child’s access to education and other services. By increasing awareness of these issues, and through the provision free legal services and advice, it will help orphans and other vulnerable children access these important documents. This will enable children to enrol in education and improve their access to inheritance and government support, which will allow them to finance their education and bring them out of poverty.;
COVID-19 Response Project The Program Development Objective is to prevent, detect, and respond to the threat posed by COVID-19 and strengthen national systems for public health preparedness in Turkmenistan.
Ligada: DFID Mozambique Support to Adolescent Girls and Women - Project Delivery To identify, test and ensure uptake of sustainable solutions for urban female economic empowerment (FEE); generate, disseminate evidence and build capacity on gender to drive improvement in policy, programming and budgets.
Rapid Response Fund (RRF) This activity (Rapid Response Fund (RRF)) is a component of Forestry, Land-use and Governance in Indonesia reported by FCDO and a budget of £170,718.This project benefits INDONESIA.And works in the following sector(s): Biodiversity, Forestry policy and administrative management.
Strengthening the Kyrgyz political system This activity (Strengthening the Kyrgyz political system) is a component of Governance in Action reported by FCDO and a budget of £5,983,985.This project benefits KYRGYZSTAN.And works in the following sector(s): Public sector policy and administrative management, Democratic participation and civil society.
COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, Wellcome Trust This activity (COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, Wellcome Trust) is a component of Epidemics and Global Health Security Research Programme (Epidemics and GHS) reported by FCDO and a budget of £0.This project benefits Developing countries, unspecified.And works in the following sector(s): Medical research.
Support to a consortium of NGOs to provide Ebola communication, surveillance, contact tracing and monitoring This activity (Support to a consortium of NGOs to provide Ebola communication, surveillance, contact tracing and monitoring) is a component of Emergency support to respond to the Ebola Virus Disease in Sierra Leone 2014 reported by FCDO and a budget of £18,388,610.This project benefits SIERRA LEONE.And works in the following sector(s): Relief co-ordination and support services.
Programme management, monitoring and evaluation This activity (Programme management, monitoring and evaluation) is a component of Child Protection Fund Phase II for the National Action Plan for Orphans and other Vulnerable Children (CPF II for NAP) - Zimbabwe reported by FCDO and a budget of £41,358.This project benefits ZIMBABWE.And works in the following sector(s): Ending violence against women and girls, Social Protection.
Short term policy focussed research project to study the drivers and implications of the structural shift of the private sector in Zimbabwe This activity (Short term policy focussed research project to study the drivers and implications of the structural shift of the private sector in Zimbabwe ) is a component of Policy Research Fund reported by FCDO and a budget of £56,605.This project benefits ZIMBABWE.And works in the following sector(s): Research/scientific institutions.