devinitorg/iati-policy-markers huggingface dataset:
Migration, Transformation and Sustainability This research integrates comprehensive insights on migration into theories of transformation to sustainability. There is unprecedented concern over involuntary migration globally affecting insecurity and human rights. But both domestic and international migration has enormous transformative potential for individuals and societies. Transformation theories assume static populations and fail to recognize both positive and negative impacts of the movement of people. This gap limits explanations and intervention strategies for sustainability. The objective is therefore to use theory and rigorous empirical research to expand knowledge of transformations to sustainability by incorporating migration dynamics. These specifically include: the impact of aggregate flows of people on sustainability; the individual lifecourse dimensions of sustainability; and the governance of migration and sustainability. The research will develop a comprehensive migration-sustainability model, and develop insights on sustainability strategies at local, national and international scales. It will build global capacity of social science to explain and engage with migration dimensions of transformations to sustainability. The interdisciplinary social-science led consortium from Europe, North America, Asia and Africa builds on on-going methodological innovation and deep collaboration. The research design involves modelling, observations and action research at global scales and in research sites representing the full range of so-called migration transitions. The outcome will be co-designed advances in theory and salient and workable sustainability strategies reflecting real world migration dynamics.

The project research findings will contribute to increased resilience of poor and insecure migrant communities in developing countries, especially in Bangladesh. The research aims to promote and enable joined-up and transformative approaches to inclusive development, informed by analysis of outcomes and behaviour putting poor people’s experiences, aspirations and capacities at its core. Specifically, the planned activities will provide new insights into the impacts and experiences of migrant populations, including ethnic minorities, in highly urbanized areas of Bangladesh. It will do so through co-production between researchers, migrants and planners of new empirical data on how migrant perceived wellbeing, place-attachment and adaptive capacity intersect with poverty, security and the environment. Hence a series of activities has been designed to establish and strengthen networks and relationships with research users and to involve them at all stages of the project. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Rising Powers, Labour Standards and the Governance of Global Production Networks With the growth of leading manufacturing firms from the Rising Powers and the rapid expansion of middle class consumption within these economies there is a persistent fear that there will be a 'race to the bottom', marked in particular by declining global labour standards and diminishing concerns with working conditions in global production. We intend to examine this. Our hunch is that rather than a race to the bottom, we are likely to observe a new era of more differentiated labour and social standards as the Rising Powers take an increasingly more active role in the global economy. This will have consequences not only for Rising Power states, workers and consumers, but also for us in the UK and OECD economies.

We aim to study this through research undertaken in Brazil, China, India, the UK and the EU. We focus our attention on a range of actors. First, we will study the ways in which large firms (including the new multinationals) as well as small and medium enterprises from the Rising Powers engage with, and shape, labour and social standards in their systems of globalised production arrangements. Second, we will investigate how civil society bodies in these countries affect this process and if and how they shape local attitudes and norms on working conditions. Third, we will examine the ways in which governments in the Rising Powers define and implement labour standards within the domestic economy as well as how they interact in leading global institutions where many such international standards are formulated. Fourth, we will identify what these developments imply for the ways in which globalised production arrangements will most likely be organised in the future and how subsequent generations of global labour and social standards are likely to be shaped. Finally, we will consider what the implications are of the dynamism of the Rising Powers, and the ways in which they interact with global labour and social standards, for other developing countries, and in particular for us in the UK and for the competitiveness of UK and EU firms. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
LEARNING TO MANAGE THE FACTORY FLOOR IN ETHIOPIA: SKILLS, WORK CULTURES AND ORGANIZATIONAL CAPABILITIES IN ETHIOPIA'S LIGHT MANUFACTURING The initial 2015-2019 project focused primarily on the experiences and working conditions of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, i.e. the bulk of workers employed by companies in the construction and manufacturing sectors. However, our qualitative research and interviews with factory managers stressed the equal importance of skilled and management labour force for the success of these industries. These interviews corroborated the importance of and constraints in finding and retaining high-quality local managers for factory floor operations. This is consistent with similar findings from other studies of industrialization in developing countries and diagnostic research by ILO in Ethiopia.
We there propose to extend our current research to deepen the understanding of the current and past experiences of existing and especially new emerging industrial firms in finding, developing and retaining a skilled and managerial workforce, in order to improve the sustainability of the firm in the country and labour relations at the workplace. We will ask questions and do qualitative research about the constraints on hiring and retaining Ethiopian managers and the processes of skill transfer that have worked best to incorporate this labour force at the factory floor level. We will also compile relevant data from existing datasets emerging from other studies that have been conducted in the last 5 years in Ethiopia. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Waterproofing Data: engaging stakeholders in the sustainable governance of flood risks for urban resilience Waterproofing Data investigates the governance of water-related risks, with a focus on social and cultural aspects of data practices. Typically, data flows up from local levels to scientific "centres of expertise", and then flood-related alerts and interventions flow back down through local governments and into communities. Rethinking how flood-related data is produced, and how it flows, can help build sustainable, flood resilient communities.   To this end, this project develops three innovative methods around data practices, across different sites and scales: 1) we will make visible existing flows of flood-related data through tracing data; 2) generate new types of data at the local level by engaging citizens through the creation of multi-modal interfaces, which sense, collect and communicate flood data, and; 3) integrate citizen-generated data with other data using geo-computational techniques. These methodological interventions will transform how flood-related data is produced and flows, creating new governance arrangements between citizens, governments and flood experts and, ultimately, increased community resilience related to floods in vulnerable communities of Sao Paulo and Acre, Brazil.  The project will be conducted by a highly skilled international team of researchers with multiple disciplinary backgrounds from Brazil, Germany and the UK, in close partnership with researchers, stakeholders and publics of a multi-site case study on flood risk management in Brazil. Furthermore, the methods and results of this case study will be the basis for a transcultural dialogue with government organisations and local administration involved in flood risk management in Germany and the United Kingdom. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Redefining Development and the Environment in an Era of Global Norms III: Putting norms to work in Sudan The objective of the project is to assist those who have suffered or appear likely to suffer from the most from national 'development' projects that disregards people's lives. As experienced with the Merowe Dam in northern Sudan, displacement and inadequate compensation appear to form part of a pattern that may yet extend to similar dams that are on the drawing-board. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
A Comparative Analysis of the Documentation of Torture and Ill-Treatment in Low-Income Countries In many Low Income Countries (LICs), violence is endemic. Among urban populations, the poor are the most vulnerable to torture and ill-treatment. They are also the least able to access forms of accountability. As such, the documentation of torture and ill-treatment can play a key role in improving access to justice and human security. However, recent research demonstrates that routine torture and ill-treatment is difficult to document. In addition, the instruments used for the documentation of torture and ill-treatment assume a level of institutional capacity that is often not available in LICs. They are relatively weak at identifying forms of torture and ill-treatment that are not already reported to NGOs or public bodies. There is therefore a need to develop techniques that can be effectively used to document torture and ill-treatment in situations with limited clinical and legal resources.

This project has three key objectives.
A. A comparative analysis of the challenges faced by those attempting to document torture and ill-treatment in LICs.
B. The development of a survey technique for the documentation of torture and ill-treatment.
C. The development of policy recommendations for the most effective methods for the documentation of torture and ill-treatment in LICs.

The broader objectives of the research is to contribute to wider debates about the most effective ways to document violence and to help marginalised populations enforce accountability. Structural inequalities and poverty have a key impact on both the vulnerability of marginal populations to state violence, and their ability to seek redress. Case studies will be drawn from three countries: Kenya, Bangladesh and Nepal. All three countries have histories of state led violence and urban poverty. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Large development investment and local peacebuilding in rural Africa: building and sustaining peace at the margins. Across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), many of the largest development projects currently underway are in remote rural areas. These include the £15 billion Lamu-South Sudan-Ethiopian Transport Corridor Project, which will connect a new port facility at Lamu on the Kenyan coast with northern Kenya, Ethiopia and South Sudan through rail and road links as well as an oil pipeline and related refinery capacity. In the interior of Sierra Leone, a UK-Chinese consortium has launched a multi-billion pound operation in the Tonkolili mining complex, one of the world's largest defined reserves of iron ore. These projects are part of a modern scramble for Africa's land and resources and entail unprecedented levels of new investment. They are often in marginal rural areas that were long neglected by states and have a legacy of conflict and violence. The vast majority living at the rural margins have been only minimally captured by market and state institutions and instead rely on informal relations and institutions to promote peace and regulate land and resource access. While it is widely assumed that big development will transform the lives and livelihoods of rural populations, there are many examples that large development investment can be deeply destabilising and actually lead to new violence while doing little to create new jobs, spur local entrepreneurship or promote peace.

This project relates to the third theme of the call that is concerned with how to minimise the risk of violence and its impacts on the poor. It examines how and why local peacebuilding efforts succeed in minimising violence in contexts where there are large new investments, focusing on the remote rural areas of Kenya and Sierra Leone.

Through rigorous fieldwork in different settings of local politics and governance in northern Kenya and northern Sierra Leone, it tests the assumption that efforts to reduce the threat of violence and its impacts on the poor are more likely to succeed where they support local institutions and relations to build and sustain peace. A combination of methods will be used including a survey of households in the study sites, semi-structured interviews as well as informal discussions and interactions to develop a nuanced understanding of the institutions and relations that communities use to solve their problems and negotiate for better outcomes. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Reading and socio-emotional skills in challenging school contexts: Evidence from South African primary schools Learning to read for meaning is the most important skill that children learn in primary school. Yet children in 90% of South African schools are not acquiring this skill by the end of grade 4 (Spaull & Pretorius, 2019). The most recent Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (2016) (PIRLS-Literacy) indicates that almost one in every eight grade 4 students in South Africa cannot read for meaning in any language, despite the curriculum assuming that students can read in both their home language and English by the end of grade 4 (Howie, et al., 2017). Against this context, 'reading for meaning' among young children has recently been identified by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa as a top five national priority (South African Government, 2019). In adopting this new priority goal, South Africa needs to significantly advance the local body of knowledge on reading in African languages, identifying why children can't read, how reading could be improved, and how much improvement we could reasonably expect.

In this study, we aim to fill some gaps in this body of knowledge. First, we will explore reasons for why children are failing to read with comprehension in African languages and English. Comprehension is what reading is all about - and this is what is measured in nationally representative surveys. However, reading comprehension is just the 'tip of the iceberg' with respect to underlying skills required to read (Spaull, et al., 2018). Necessary but not sufficient skills for comprehension include oral language, vocabulary knowledge, print awareness and decoding components such as phonemic awareness, letter-sound knowledge, word reading and oral reading fluency (Hoover & Gough, 1990). Using new emerging datasets on reading in African languages in South Africa, we will identify to what extent children can master these basics of reading across different languages. We will be able to construct a clearer picture of which of the reading 'building-blocks' children do and don't have, how these differ by language and whether reading skills systematically differ by poverty levels and gender. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
People, animals and infectious disease transmission: A new synthesis We aim to understand whether countries with pre-emptive mechanisms grant fewer patents on secondary innovations than they otherwise would, and we want to understand how pre-emptive mechanisms function in practice. We complement the quantitative analyses with case studies of three countries that aim to understand reasons for the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of these policies and the sources of any gaps between laws on the books and laws in practice. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
EVI-MED - Constructing an evidence base of contemporary Mediterranean migrations "EVI-MED - Constructing an evidence base of contemporary Mediterranean migrations" seeks to conduct urgent data collection and essential analysis on the Mediterranean migration crisis and to make these swiftly and publicly available to policymakers, practitioners, migrant community support organisations, and the research community.

EVI-MED will provide insights into the major humanitarian, social, economic and political implications for the principal countries of arrival - above all Italy and Greece - as well as Malta which is a central pillar of the search and rescue effort. The project is also relevant to other potential countries of reception and settlement in Europe, including the United Kingdom. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Choice, constraints and the gender dynamics of labour markets in Bangladesh The aim of this project is to explore the changing gender dynamics of labour markets in the specific context of Bangladesh. Bangladesh provides a particularly salient context for such research. Described as a 'test case for development' in the early years of its independence and as an extreme form of patriarchy, the country has experienced moderate rates of both growth and poverty reduction as well as considerable progress on gender equality in education and health. Quantitative studies from the Bangladesh context have suggested that access to paid work serves to promote women's empowerment (as measured by a range of indicators) while qualitative research testifies to the value that women themselves place on access to employment opportunities. Despite this, women's labour market activity remains low and largely concentrated in unpaid family labour and home-based self employment. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
RELIEF 2: Refugees, Education, Learning, Information Technology, and Entrepreneurship for the Future Since 2017, the RELIEF Centre has worked with citizens, NGOs, and other stakeholders to deliver a programme of research and action towards social inclusion, sustainability and better quality of life for communities in Lebanon. During this time, however, Lebanon experienced a number of radical changes and tragedies: destabilisation of government following the 2019 political protests; the horrendous blast in the port of Beirut on August 4, 2020; an economic collapse and currency devaluation; widespread failure of public services and infrastructure; and a series of Covid-related lockdowns that have exerted further pressure on the economy. In this context of compounded crises, RELIEF's work proceeds from the view that future recovery in Lebanon must follow principles of inclusive growth and prosperity, whereby the starting point and primary focus is not aggregate GDP-growth but the things that people need for better quality of life -secure livelihoods, clean and affordable services, good education, and safe, healthy and inclusive environments. In the Lebanese context of economic and political turmoil, however, 'bottom-up' initiatives are essential for developing solutions. RELIEF's work thus focuses on the sustained development of capabilities that can help citizens and communities acquire skills and organise into communities of practice that address emergent challenges. Over the next 5 years, the second phase of the RELIEF Centre (RELIEF II) will focus on strengthening existing capabilities for citizen-led research, action, and transformation.  COVID-19 Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Facilitating Innovative Growth of Low Cost Private Schools: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan The current project is a RCT that seeks to explain how alleviating these constraints one at a time or simultaneously would affect learning outcomes, enrolment and school profitability. The randomized component means that schools are randomly allocated to either receiving offers of a loan product or an equity product to alleviate financial constraints, and/or receive access to buying ESS such as teacher training, improved curricula or student testing services. The controlled component of the trial means that some - randomly chosen - schools do not get any of these treatments, which allows us to compare the treatment outcomes with the counterfactual.
The two financial products were developed together with one of Pakistan's largest microfinance banks. The equity product represents an innovation in the type of financial product offered to SMEs, and it is particularly relevant to LCPS since its revenue-contingent interest rate (if the school earns more, it will pay a higher interest rate) effectively shifts some of the risk of an investment over to the bank, and LCPS tend to have to make more lumpy investments than other SMEs. Our theory is that a less risky financial product would allow schools to take on more risky investments, such as investments in quality-improving ESS services. Our earlier studies have shown that schools are, under most circumstances, more prone to undertake capacity-improving investments such as buying more chairs when they get access to finance, perhaps because the school owner can more accurately predict and advertise the result from buying new chairs than from buying teacher training services. This results in a stagnant quality development of learning outcomes, which are already very poor in rural Pakistan. In conclusion, the present study will broaden the knowledge about what policy makers and providers of financial and ESS products can do to facilitate the improvement of learning outcomes in challenging rural contexts where LCPS are present. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Return from Peacekeeping: Mission Effects on Veterans, States, and Communities The project uses a multi-method approach including an in-depth series of qualitative interviews with peacekeepers, life histories, key informant interviews with military, government, and donor leadership and document/media analysis of relevant material related to provisions for returned peacekeepers. It will provide cross-country comparative analysis through three field research sites: Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Uganda. Individuals participating in the first year will be re-interviewed approximately 2 years later to observe changes across time. The proposed methodology allows for the investigation of post-peacekeeping to move beyond a snapshot in time to envisage the experience as one which may have long-term effects. The three country comparison provides the opportunity to examine how different political environments and framings of peacekeeping may impact the expectations of the soldiers involved and their experiences upon their return home. It also allows the chance to explore military institutions with diverse experiences and former peacekeepers at various stages since their return from deployment. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.