devinitorg/iati-policy-markers huggingface dataset:
Transformation as Praxis: Exploring Socially Just and Transdisciplinary Pathways to Sustainability in Marginal Environments (TAPESTRY) The objective of TAPESTRY is to examine how transformation may arise from below in marginal environments with high levels of uncertainty. Climate change uncertainties, especially at the local level, constitute one of the main challenges to the sustainability of societies and ecosystems, calling for systemic transformative changes. While uncertainty can exacerbate anxieties about the future, it can also provide an opportunity to create transformation and deep structural change. TAPESTRY focuses on three patches of transformation in India and Bangladesh - vulnerable coastal areas of Mumbai, the Sundarbans and Kutch - where hybrid alliances and innovative practices are reimagining sustainable development and inspiring societal transformation. TAPESTRY is organised in a transnational and transdisciplinary consortium across the UK, India, Bangladesh, Norway and Japan. Its conceptual innovation lies in studying transformation as praxis, by putting bottom-up change and the agency of marginalised people at the centre and by analysing how co-produced transformations can be scaled up and out. The project is particularly relevant to theme 1 and 3 of the call, i.e. governance, wellbeing, quality of life, identity and values in relation to transformations to sustainability. All these lie at the heart of the welfare and development challenges faced by India (a lower middle income country) and Bangladesh (least developed country). The project's outcomes and impact will inform processes to improve the quality of life of marginalised people affected by climate change related uncertainties, build action and capacity amongst all partners whilst generating evidence of how bottom-up transformation can take place in marginal environments. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Pathways out of poverty for Burkina Faso's reservoir-dependent communities Effective community-based management of common pool resources (CPR) in contexts facing environmental degradation and social conflict is urgently required to sustainably move people worldwide towards a decent level of human well-being, as sought in the Sustainable Development Goals. In the seasonally dry tropics, water stored in reservoirs. co-managed by communities and state water management agencies, can transform the lives of people in areas of persistent poverty by providing dry season income and food security through fish, livestock and crop production. Yet the inequitable distribution of water and other agricultural resources leads to stark inequalities in costs and benefits of reservoirs among households and communities.

This project will convene stakeholders around two reservoirs in Boulgou province, Burkina Faso, through 'Innovation Platforms' (IPs) that provide spaces for face-to-face learning, exchange and negotiation. Through the IPs, differentiated stakeholders with conflicts of interests related to reservoirs will identify, compare and implement community-driven innovations to make management of and access to land, water and associated benefits more equitable and sustainable. In collaboration with local communities and water management institutes, we will co- design and test locally relevant indicators and novel data collection techniques to establish a reliable, locally owned reservoir resource monitoring system. Students, extension workers and government technicians will be trained on automatic weather stations, mobile phone based surveys, and easily measured indicators of soil and water quality. The project will fill gaps in knowledge regarding factors and approaches that enable the resolution of conflicts related to the management of CPR and the development of participatory monitoring systems. Academic beneficiaries include scientists working on participatory approaches, conflict resolution, social equity, and CPR management. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Disseminating Innovative Resources and Technologies to Smallholders (DIRTS) in Northern Region, Ghana The DIRTS project will use a randomized controlled trial to measure the impact of improved flows of extension information, access to agricultural input packages, and rainfall index insurance on agricultural intensification, specifically the use of fertilizers and improved seeds. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
From Walls to Corridors: The Global Logistics of Israel's HaEmek Railway This project shifts focus to the infrastructures Israel has developed to bypass its own built-up fortresses, unseen and under-the-radar: rather than the walls that keep people and violence in or out, it examines the corridors being built to channel goods, capital and people through them.
The need to shift focus away from walls to corridors goes beyond Israel/Palestine. Wall infrastructures have engulfed populist politics throughout the globe. Yet, as states develop new means and technologies to control their borders, corridors are built alongside them, surreptitiously reconfiguring national and regional lines, opening territories to the needs of an ever-mobile capitalism. The most prominent of these is China's 'One Belt One Road' project that connects over 10,000 km of sea and land corridors across Asia and Europe; but other significant examples include the Kenya-South Sudan-Ethiopia transport corridor (that connects ports, pipelines and airports across some of East Africa's most volatile terrain), or the Asia Pacific Gateway, that treats Canada as a corridor between the US and Asia. These operate through both soft and hard infrastructures, made possible through a revolution in technological and logistical capacity. The logistics industry organises the information, technology, customs regulations and security operations that link global transport hubs, and keep these chains moving past potential human, legal or physical obstructions. The 'corridor', a narrow archipelago of physical and virtual transport links that cut across national boundaries, is the material partner to the logistics industry:
together, they ensure that the right capital, goods and people keep flowing at any cost, in large part by ensuring threats are contained. While few are looking, these channels are changing global economic and political relations. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Preparing Women for Leadership in Garment Production: Early Career Interventions The overwhelming majority of the 4 million workers in the Bangladeshi garment sector are female, but managers at all levels are almost exclusively male. In a series of projects, we have examined the challenges of transitioning women into supervisory roles. The first of the projects was funded through the DfID-ESRC Growth Research Program (ES/J009466/1). Our research has helped factories select better female candidates for supervisory positions, helped training providers hone the content of their training, and led to an increase in female supervisors in the sector. Long-term follow-up data from 44 project factories indicates that the percentage of female supervisors doubled from four percent to over eight percent between 2016 and 2017. In this project, we aim to build on both the momentum toward female leadership and the lessons learned from the earlier research to help training providers deliver more effective training over a longer training window, while preparing women for leadership positions from an early point in their careers.

We will evaluate a pilot training program that aims to intervene earlier in the women's career in the sector, with training spread over a longer period of time. We aim to understand if the earlier and more sustained intervention induces women to invest more in the skills necessary to be effective supervisors; increases their confidence when they are working as supervisors; increases retention rates in the factory and sector; and makes them more effective supervisors after they are promoted. We will work with factories to identify candidates for the training program and work with trainers to customise a training program covering both soft skills - leadership, communication and confidence - and hard skills - line balancing, performance measurement, etc. Training will be spread over a period of one year, with half-day sessions fortnightly. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Supplementing measures of social accountability and enhancing understanding of accountability and students' achievement during the COVID-19 pandemic The primary goals of the proposed study are to collect measures of i) public expenditure and service delivery, ii) the impact
of school disruptions during COVID-19, iii) School Education Examination (SEE) scores, and iv) link these to parent project
data to estimate associations between social accountability and student achievement before and during the COVID-19
pandemic. COVID-19 Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Sustainable Consumption, the Middle Classes and Agri-food Ethics in the Global South The research is essential to understand how sustainable food consumption is mobilised and practised in distinct global South contexts, how this might be affected during times of increasing political instability and social precarity, and how this relates to the wider context of global population growth and globalising consumerism. Pilot research in the case study countries suggests that digital technologies are increasingly interwoven into societies and food systems as follows: consumers share, receive information about, purchase and review food online; food retail companies optimise their distribution with the help of IT technology; and state procurement systems increasingly move online. Recognising these realities, the research provides an innovative investigation of the interconnectedness of online and offline spaces of sustainable food consumption in the global South. The research is organised into four phases. The first focuses on institutional and cultural drivers of sustainable food consumption. It analyses policy and media reports, business strategies, codes, campaigns and initiatives in the policy and popular domain. Key informant interviews are conducted with government departments responsible for food procurement and standards, campaigners, and leading food retailers, wholesalers and restaurateurs. The second phase, focusing on consumer habits and everyday trends, comprises ethnographic research in middle-class residential areas of Guangzhou, Rio de Janeiro and Johannesburg. Interviews address household food consumption practices, judgments about 'good' food, and popular influences on food ethics and environmental values. Digital ethnographies examine the online practices of consumers, including how they collect information, shop or review online, and the influence of social media on ethical judgment and creating markets for sustainable foods. Accompanied shopping interviews and co-cooking sessions capture the nuances of food choices, moral judgments, engagement with government and corporate ethical initiatives, and the ordinary ethics of food purchase and use. The third phase, focusing on fashion and trends, uses text mining of social media to trace lines of influence in sustainable food consumption. To widen the reach of the research, and provide material with traction with policy and commercial actors, the final phase gathers quantitative data through a web-based survey of the drivers of sustainable food consumption and the behavioural intentions arising from these. The research is an innovative analysis of different global South contexts in which shifts towards sustainable food consumption are likely to have global impact. The three case studies offer comparisons of the potential of different drivers of food sustainability. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Financial Market Frictions, Beliefs, and the Macroeconomy; An Application to the Case of China The research proposal aims at understanding the relationship between the financial system and the macroeconomy. The new aspect is that financial market frictions interact with beliefs of market participants, which will play an important role in our analysis. The empirical application has a particular focus on the case of China. This emerging economy has attracted a lot of attention, but its financial markets are still subject to various frictions and are particular vulnerable to variations in market confidence. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Improving school governance and learning outcomes at scale: A randomized evaluation of the Madhya Pradesh School Quality Assessment program We propose to conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of one of the most ambitious recent attempts by a developing country government to improve education governance at scale. The evaluation will have a particular focus on the state of school governance, processes and learning outcomes in rural tribal areas, which have been one of the most challenging contexts to improve education in India.

The Madhya Pradesh (MP) School Quality Assessment (MPSQA) intervention is a comprehensive program that aims to improve school governance and outcomes through a combination of (a) regular monitoring of schools, (b) creation of school report cards, and a customized school improvement plan, (c) quarterly follow-ups on progress against this plan, and (d) leveraging of ICT tools to collect and report real-time records of all assessment results, school improvement plans, and follow-ups to a dedicated online system. The PI's have worked with the project implementation team and have successfully randomized the rollout of the program across ~20,000 schools in the 2015/16 school year. The government is currently hoping to universalize the program to cover all 120,000 schools in MP by 2019. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Security on the Move: Everyday security of IDPs in rapidly growing Somali Cities This research project addresses the nexus of poverty, environmental sustainability and conflict in Somalia from the perspective of the most vulnerable in-migrants to cities, people who were internally displaced (IDPs). The interplay between violent conflict and droughts is described as one of the main drivers of internal displacement in Somalia, but rapid in-migration to cities further increases pressures on the urban and rural environment. The research focus is on the capacities of IDPs to cope with the effects of violence and displacement and to mitigate vulnerability. The study is conducted in four cities in Southern Somalia (Mogadishu, Baidoa), Puntland (Bosasso) and Somaliland (Hargeisa), which have quite different histories pertaining to in-migration and violence. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Women Empowerment, Social Norms and Domestic Violence Domestic violence (DV) affects 30% of women worldwide and more than 50% of women living in conflict or post-conflict communities. The prevention of DV is important, not only because it is a violation of women's rights and freedoms, but also because DV negatively affects economic growth and perpetuates structural poverty. An important mechanism driving this effect is the interaction between DV and low cooperation between spouses, resulting in less than optimal health, education and economic outcomes. This dynamic is exacerbated in conflict-affected zones, where household cooperation is essential for post-conflict recovery. The aim of this project is to better understand how to design effective and efficient interventions aimed at reducing DV, especially among vulnerable groups in conflict-affected areas. Our research advances goal three of the ESRC-DFID Joint fund for poverty alleviation research: 'What measures can be taken to reduce the risks and impact of violence and instability on the poorest and increase the effectiveness of peace-building, state-building and wider development interventions in fragile and conflict-affected situations?'
In order to design interventions to reduce DV that actually work, it is necessary to understand the specific factors driving it. To date, research on DV interventions has only provided preliminary and often contradictory evidence. Our project aims to substantially advance our understanding of DV, its causes and how interventions can better reduce it. Egypt is chosen because it is one of the few post-conflict countries where several DV interventions are being implemented simultaneously, allowing us to test the effect of all factors. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Examining Effective Teaching in Rural Honduran Secondary Schools Honduras is one of the poorest and most violent countries in Central America. In this context, education should offer an escape; a path to a better future. However, the quality of Honduran schooling is abysmal, and few youth are able to study in secondary schools.. Despite these challenges, in our previous research we have discovered what one Honduran educational authority described as a "light in the path," a way for rural youth from disadvantaged communities to have access to high quality education. This "light" is the Sistema de Aprendizaje Tutorial program (Tutorial Learning System or SAT). In the proposed research we will build upon the positive findings of our recently completed impact evaluation (see McEwan et al., 2014) to examine a number of remaining questions regarding the elements that support effective teaching in poor, rural, geographically isolated communities. Furthermore, by collecting follow-up data collection with a cohort of youth from 94 villages that we began tracking in 2008, we will be able to examine whether learning gains fade over time as well as whether there are linkages between improved quality education and successful transition to adulthood (e.g. enrollment in tertiary education, labor market outcomes, delayed marriage and pregnancy). In doing so, this research will also provide a unique opportunity to develop improved measures of educational quality and adolescent girls' empowerment in low-income countries. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
At the end of the feeder road: assessing the impact of track construction for motorbike taxis on agrarian development in Liberia This research will answer questions which directly fall under the remit of 2 of the 3 research questions of the ESRC-DFID Poverty Alleviation Research call, focusing on 'factors shaping pathways into and out of poverty ...' and 'measures that can be taken to reduce the risks and impact of violence and instability on the poorest...'. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Impact of social pensions on multiple dimensions of poverty, subjective wellbeing and solidarity across generations This research seeks to generate robust, urgently needed evidence to address the critical knowledge gaps in order to inform policy debates and thinking on the further development of the OPCTP and similar schemes in SSA, and to advance academic debates on poverty dynamics by contributing new theoretical perspectives on the ways in which family inter- generational relationships and transfers shape younger and older individuals' opportunities (or a lack thereof) for moving out of poverty. Evidence generation will focus on two informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya, in which one of the project partners, APHRC, runs a demographic and health surveillance site, and will comprise both (i) quantitative analyses of existing data on older residents' households, to identify how the wellbeing of OPCTP beneficiaries has changed since receipt of the pension and (ii) extensive interviews with community informants and a sample of older pension beneficiaries and key members of their kin-networks, to explore their experiences and perspectives on the OPCTP and the ways in which it has impacted their lives. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Development frontiers in crime, livelihoods and urban poverty in Nigeria (FCLP) This mixed-methods research aims to bring together key development concerns related to sustainable livelihoods, social vulnerability, and poverty to build an alternative account of 'insecurity and crime' in African cities where the lines between legality and illegality, formality and informality, licit and illicit work, are often blurred in practice. We argue that the study of insecurity and crime in African cities requires a more nuanced understanding of African urbanisation patterns and historical legacies of uneven development. Situated at the nexus of population modelling, criminology, African studies, and urban geography, this project aims to challenge prevailing Euro-centric narratives of crime and victimisation through an innovative mixed-methods study. Combining statistical modelling, geovisualisation and ethnographic insights, the research aims to develop location appropriate approaches to investigate perceptions and seasonal trends of crime and victimisations in a West African city, situating the research within the broader context of African urbanisation, environment-induced seasonal migration, youth un-employment and informal economies. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Earthquake resilience in Nepal: Impact enhancement through inter-community learning and a TV documentary This application is to support work to enhance the impact of our previous project, 'Resilience Policymaking in Nepal: Giving Voice to Communities' (Grant Ref: ES/R000514/1). This proposal involves all of the investigators from the original project (both UK and Nepal-based), and adds new collaborators and communities in Nepal with whom we hope to broaden the impact of our findings through inter-community dialogues between villages that were and were not affected by the earthquakes of 2015, policy workshops, and a professionally produced television documentary to be broadcast free-to-air, nationwide. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.