devinitorg/iati-policy-markers huggingface dataset:
Choice constraint and the gender dynamics of labour markets in West Bengal This research project addresses the first overarching research question in the call specification: the factors which shape pathways into and out of poverty, how people experience these factors and the role of policy in creating sustained routes out of poverty. It is premised on the recognition that well-functioning labour markets are a key institutional channel through which the sustainable reduction of poverty can be achieved. They are also significant from a gender perspective. There is a substantial body of evidence to suggest that gender equality in labour market opportunities has a positive impact on survival, wellbeing and human capital of family members. And where these opportunities relate to regular and reasonably well paid work, they enhance women's agency and bargaining power within family and community.

This research project is motivated by the following puzzle: The Indian economy has experienced extremely strong rates of economic growth in recent years. This has been accompanied by declining rates of fertility and rising levels of education, including female education. These are changes that have been associated with an increase in women's labour force participation rates in much of the world. Yet women's labour force participation has not only remained low in the Indian context, but has declined in recent years. Moreover, women continued to be concentrated in a more limited range of labour market activities than men. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Hidden Narratives of Transnational Organised Crime in West Africa This project asks whether crime of a transnational and organised form exists in West Africa, and investigates the understandings of it held by people on both sides of the line between crime and control. The project assumes that the ways criminal and state actors speak about and understand their roles, i.e. their 'narratives', provides a helpful entry point into a better understanding of the everyday reality of participating in and seeking to counter criminal activities. The project is built on the investigators' observation that much of our understanding of transnational organised crime (TNOC) in West Africa is based on official reports, statistics and other largely detached assessments about this phenomenon. Using the cases of drug trafficking and people smuggling, the project seeks to uncover the 'hidden narratives' of TNOC in West Africa in order to better understand the practices around TNOC. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Towards Convivial Conservation: Governing Human-Wildlife Interactions in the Anthropocene CON-VIVA is grounded in the premise that conservation is critical to transformations to sustainability but that its practices need to change radically. Conservation can be effective in protecting biodiversity in places, but in toto has failed to halt global biodiversity loss. Continued habitat fragmentation and reduced funding during times of austerity compound this problem. Many conservationists now acknowledge this, leading to vigorous 'Anthropocene' discussions on how to reconfigure human-wildlife relations, protected areas and the role of economic development in conservation. CON-VIVA's key objective is to conceptually refine and empirically test the prospects for one proposal emerging from these debates: convivial conservation. This new model responds to the T2S themes by moving beyond protected areas and faith in markets to build landscape, governance and funding pathways that integrate conservation and poverty reduction, while enhancing prosperity. CON-VIVA investigates the prospects for convivial conservation by comparing cutting-edge conservation cases that address human-wildlife conflict involving apex predators in Finland, USA and DAC-countries Brazil and Tanzania. Our hypothesis is that if 'living with' apex predators can be effectively combined with new forms of economic development, a transition to convivial conservation can be boosted significantly. By organising the project around integrated academic-practitioner networks on local and global levels, we will better understand the conditions for this transition, while conceptualising and popularising a new model for conservation. This allows CON-VIVA to contribute to SDG15 and to inspire and enhance broader transformations to sustainability.  CAN YOU READ THIS? Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Narratives of violence: the impact of internal displacement on violence against women in Nepal and Myanmar Myanmar and Nepal are countries in transition. Both have recently emerged from long-term civil conflicts, and their populations have been afflicted by natural disasters. As a result these two countries have seen rates of internal displacement among the highest in the world (e.g. in 2015, 9200 per 100,000 residents in Nepal, and 3000 per 100,000 in Myanmar). We will document women's explanations of how displacement has affected gendered relations and women's resultant experiences of violence. This will involve collecting unstructured narratives and quantitative data from women who have experienced rural-urban displacement. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Governance of Sociotechnical Transformations The Governance of Sociotechnical Transformations (GoST) project will focus on transformation processes in three areas of crucial relevance to sustainable development, relating in particular to pressing imperatives in countries of the Global South: energy systems, agriculture, and urban digital infrastructures. Each implicates intricate North-South linkages that must be better understood for global sustainability efforts. Adopting a systematic comparative approach, GoST will use sociotechnical imaginaries as a conceptual tool to make sense of how collective imaginations of transformation have determined present conditions.  Many challenges in the three focal areas are related to the prevailing imaginary, and solutions may require radically new imaginaries. Through analysis of two interlinked parameters of transformation (dimensionality and temporality) across five nations (Germany, India, Kenya, UK, US), leading research centers in each will examine, in cooperation with key stakeholders, the differences between imagined and experienced states in each focal instance of transformation in each country. By rethinking transformation through these lenses, GoST presents a methodologically innovative, integrative, empirically grounded approach that goes beyond usual characterizations of transformation as a linear process of development.  Expected outcomes and impacts: GoST will demonstrate feasible choices among alternative pathways for enacting socially progressive transformations towards sustainability, producing insights of immediate practical importance regarding how such transformations can best be governed in each selected area: by whom (Call Theme 1), to what ends, by what means (3), and with what welfare consequences for affected groups (2). Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Predicting urban food insecurity under climate change in Brazilian Amazonia The ultimate goal of climate policy is to mitigate climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, this is a strategy with decadal or centurial timescales. An equally important and more urgent concern is to reduce the impacts of climate change by improving the adaptive capacity of poor, marginalized populations to severe weather events such as droughts and floods. Extreme events such as floods and droughts cause significant economic losses, and threaten human health and food security. Droughts probably have the greatest negative impacts in regions such as the Amazon, where river transport is the main way of distributing food. For example, Amazon droughts in 2005 and 2010 disrupted food distribution and led to dozens of deaths from malnutrition and declarations of state of emergency. Increased journey times and transport problems leads to higher food prices. When food prices are high, poorest families suffer most and lack access to adequate food and nutrition. The danger that droughts pose to food security in these regions will increase in the future because of climate change causing reduced rainfall, which leads to lower river levels. This project will develop a computer-based tool for predicting where and when food security of city-dwellers will be threatened by droughts, because of higher food prices. The tool will be based on data that we collect in small cities in the Amazon, including prices of important foods (meat and rice, for example). We will also use a series of questions to establish whether urban families have sufficient access to nutritious and affordable food. We will combine this information with information on river levels and poverty distribution across the whole Amazon (collected by the Brazilian government) and analyze data using statistical techniques normally used to predict disease outbreaks. The outcome of this analysis will be a tool that can generate maps to show the level of Food Security Risk for each of the hundreds of municipalities in the Amazon. This will help the Brazilian government to be strategic and invest their resources in the cities that are predicted to have most people suffering from malnutrition during droughts. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Graduation as Resilience Stage Two Important development programmes such as microfinance often do not reach the very poorest households. A new set of initiatives, called Graduation programmes, have targeted these very poor households. Their objective is to graduate them out of poverty in a sustainable manner and make them resilient so they do not fall back into poverty.
Most of these programmes target women and use some form of asset transfer, and perhaps stipends for a fixed period. In addition to this material support they often help clients to strengthen their social network. Typically, programmes expect to work with clients for two years before they are ready to graduate.
In addition some programmes provide psychological support to these poor women who are often marginalised socially and often have very little confidence to engage even in petty business. But not all programmes include this component. The question is should they?
How important is psychological support such as life planning, confidence building and strengthening social awareness in helping poor women to graduate in a resilient way? Surprisingly, no research has actually addressed this question. It is a development frontier and we do not know for sure what the answer is.
This research is stage two of a project seeking to answer this question. In stage one, the research team adopted a well-known model of psychological wellbeing and tested it on a sample of women from a BRAC programme called 'Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction: Targeting the Ultra-Poor' (CFPR-TUP) There has been a lot of economic and social research on this programme and almost all the evidence shows that it is effective in bringing poor women and their households out of poverty and that is also efficient in terms of cost. However none of this research has really focused on the relative importance of the different inputs -material, social and psychological. In particular the psychological dimension has had no research. We do not know whether these softer inputs provided through informal counselling and through confidence building workshops make any difference. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Resilience policymaking in Nepal: giving voice to communities An intensive resilience policy-making process is currently underway in Nepal, a country with a recent history of conflict and disaster that also faces future risks resulting from environmental change. This ground-breaking project will utilise a participatory video (PV) approach to create new and potentially challenging interventions in that process, whilst simultaneously developing methods and approaches that could have broader applicability. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Resilience in West African Frontier communities Small-scale communities in the border regions of Southern Senegal, Western Mali and Eastern Guinea have developed longstanding strategies allowing them to adapt to recurrent deep changes in political structure and social stratification that are typical of Frontier societies. Yet, from a national and international development perspective, these communities are seen as marginalised; their mobility patterns as an obstacle to civic participation in nation states and their multilingualism in small languages as a barrier to participation in education.
This project aims to generate a better understanding of resilience strategies and local knowledge as developed in those frontier communities to respond to ongoing ecological, economic and political stresses. By looking at mobility, multilingualism and social stratification reconfigurations as interrelated resilience strategies, the project aims at improving development initiatives in the region.
The overarching research question is: how have frontier societies responded to situations of ecological, economic and political stress on a micro level by developing specific resilience strategies, notably by sharing their own ideas and practices and producing specific knowledge? Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Succeeding Against the Odds: Understanding resilience and exceptionalism in highfunctioning township and rural primary schools in South Africa The aim of the present study is to understand resilience and exceptionalism in high-functioning township and rural primary schools in South Africa. Previous research has shown that a large part of the explanation behind these schools' success is the leadership and management practices of teachers and particularly principals. Despite this near universal acceptance of the pivotal role of school leadership and management (SLM) for student achievement, accurate quantitative indicators of these practices remain elusive. Put simply, we do not currently have appropriate questionnaires that can accurately capture the school leadership and management practices among schools in challenging contexts in developing countries. One of the reasons for this is that these instruments are designed primarily with a developed-country-context in mind and do not account for possibilities that are prevalent in developing countries and typical in challenging contexts. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Disadvantage and Participation Accountability Processes: Theory and Evidence from School Development and Management Committees in Karnataka, India In this project, we will, first, develop a conceptual framework (use insights from education research, behavioural economics and game theory. to examine, both theoretically and empirically, how poverty, marginalization and exclusion (collectively referred to as "disadvantage") impact on the beliefs and agency of parents. This will help us understand in detail the mechanism explaining the passive participation and lack of voice in the accountability processes within their local schools, which potentially amplify, across generations, the disadvantage imposed by disadvantage.
Second, we will collect evidence, combining both quantitative (baseline/endline surveys, Randomized Control Trials (RCT)) and qualitative methods (focus groups, semi-structured interviews), on the potential impact of a pro-poor accountability framework. The baseline survey will lead to a Citizen Report Card+ (CRC+ which includes an analysis of supply side constraints as well) and the Community Score Card (CSC) (both pioneered by the Public Affairs Centre (PAC), our collaborators). The fieldwork will implement and evaluate a training programme (based on "Reflect" and "Reflect!on Act!on", developed by Action Aid ) to encourage active participation and critical engagement by disadvantaged groups. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Crossing the Mediterranean Sea by Boat: Mapping and Documenting Migratory Journeys and Experiences Current policy interventions urgently need assessing in light of unprecedented levels of migration and a catastrophic increase in refugee and migrant deaths across the Mediterranean Sea. While refugee and migrant deaths en route to the European Union are by no means new, the level and intensity of recent tragedies is unprecedented. More than 1850 deaths were recorded January-May 2015, demanding swift action on the part of EU Member States. This project produces a timely and robust evidence base as grounds for informing policy interventions developed under emergency conditions. It does so by assessing the impact of such interventions on those that they affect most directly: refugees and migrants themselves. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Understanding and supporting sustained pathways out of extreme poverty and deprivation Getting to Zero' extreme poverty involves ensuring that the policies, institutions and politics are right for the poorest people to escape poverty. As the reduction in the global number of people in poverty illustrates, there are widespread stories of success. We know much about how, and why, some households escape poverty and others do not. We know less, though, about what happens to those individuals and households after they escape poverty, and why some are able to stay on an upward trajectory well away from the poverty line, while others escape poverty only to be thrust back again into it after a few years or less.
This research addresses the first two of the overarching call questions. The first is: 'what factors shape pathways into and out of poverty and people's experience of these, and how can policy create sustained routes out of extreme poverty in ways that can be replicated and scaled up?' The second: 'what political and institutional conditions are associated with effective poverty reduction and development, and what can domestic and external actors do to promote these conditions?' Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Care networks in later life: A comparative study of five communities in Indonesia using ethnography and surveys How can acceptable care for older people in rapidly changing societies be developed without creating unsustainable or unfair burdens on those providing the care? In order to answer this, we first need detailed answers to these questions: What care needs do older people have? Who provides care and why? What does acceptable care look like, and how are people who need care perceived? Who doesn't get appropriate care and why?

This project addresses these questions for Indonesia, the fourth largest population in the world. It is a rapidly changing, multi-ethnic country. Some areas have nuclear families, as in the UK; others have complex families, as in India or China. Many families are poor, and there are large wealth differences. These aspects make it an interesting country for comparative research from which wider lessons about care provision in later life can be drawn. Our approach is to first do ethnographic research in five different communities. This involves a researcher living among the study population, observing daily life and repeatedly interviewing older people who need care and their carers. We chose the communities because they are already being studied for another project, funded by Australia, to which we are linked. This means the researchers know the communities, and we can share data. Once we know what kind of care needs older people have, who provides care, what acceptable care looks like and what the burdens of care are, we will design questions for a household survey done in the same communities. This will allow us to analyse how common certain arrangements or problems are, and whether there are differences between men and women, rich and poor, and the different communities. By including questions used in national Indonesian surveys, we can also compare our findings to those surveys. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Acts/Crimes of solidarity: an ethnographic study of illegalisation and criminalisation amongst pro-migration activists and other citizens The project has been co-designed and will be co-delivered with two international Project Partners: GADEM and PSMigrants.
GADEM (Groupe Antiraciste de Défense et d'Accompagnement des Etrangers et Migrants, or the Antiracist Collective of Advocacy and Support for Foreigners and Migrants) was established in 2006 by migration activists and researchers in Morocco. GADEM produces regular reports to monitor practices and policies on migration and human rights and delivers capacity building for other organisations. GADEM takes an active part in national and international networks, (e.g. Migreurop, a Euro-African network on migration).
PSMigrants (Plateforme de Service aux Migrant.e.s, or Migrants' Support Platform) is a network set up in 2011 by local (e.g. L'Auberge des Migrants), national (e.g. Cimade) and international (e.g. Doctors without borders) civil society organisations working on migration in the northern French region Hauts-de-France and along the Channel French coastline. The platform exchanges resources, knowledge, skills, practices and experiences to enhance the defence of migrants' rights. It supports civil society organisations in advocacy work, including building awareness amongst decision-makers, the media and the wider public about migration issues, compiling reports, and developing legal actions.
The partnerships with GADEM and PSMigrants will be crucial to: 1) foster collaboration with other research projects on migration in Morocco and France; 2) facilitate access to other organisations and activists (including foreign activists such as British citizens in northern France) in the two field sites for research; 3) to enhance the impact of the project beyond academia through the co organisation and co-delivery of impact activities and the dissemination of outputs via their extended networks Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.