devinitorg/iati-policy-markers huggingface dataset:
Abortion Mobilities: Travel and transport for reproductive rights across Latin America In this research project, examining the experiences of Latin American women who are forced to travel across borders for abortion care or transport abortion medication due to barriers preventing them from receiving care close to home. It will be exploring the barriers that prevent women from receiving safe, legal abortions in three countries in Latin America (Mexico, Peru, and Guatemala) and the strategies they devise to resist these barriers to seek reproductive healthcare through travel. The abortions women find on their travels may not be safe; women can face death, long-term health issues, or imprisonment as a result. But they often have no other option. The strategies to provide abortion access and to raise awareness include abortion hotlines, boats that sail women into international waters where they can escape the national law of their country, and activist networks that transport abortion medication. These tactics help women to travel to find an abortion or deliver the abortion pills to them. it will conduct this research by undertaking fieldwork in Mexico, Peru, and Guatemala where it will interview reproductive health organisations and women who have travelled for abortions and analyse legal and policy documents to understand the 'official' barriers in place. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Partnership Schools for Liberia: Impact on Accountability Mechanisms and Education Outcomes Liberia's public education system is moribund. The civil war of 1999-2003 and the Ebola epidemic of 2014 have left the Ministry of Education with little capacity to run a national school system. An effort to clean thousands of ghost teachers from Ministry payrolls was cut short (New York Times, 2016), and while systematic data is scarce, teacher absenteeism appears common (Mulkeen, 2009). Nearly two-thirds of primary aged children are not in school, including over 80 percent of children in the poorest quintile, placing Liberia in the lowest percentile of net enrollment rates in the world, and at the 7th percentile in youth (15-24) literacy (EPDC, 2014).

Faced with these dire statistics, the Liberian Ministry of Education announced in early 2016 that it would contract the operation of government primary schools to a group of private companies. Key features of this public-private partnership are that (a) all schools will remain free to students, and (b) teachers will be unionized civil servants, drawing from the existing teaching corps.

We propose a large-scale field experiment to study the effect of this new Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL), comparing 120 schools that have been delegated to management by private operators to 120 control schools under government management.This proposal seeks support for a follow-up study to track the longer-term effects of the PSL program in years two and three of operation (2017/18 and 2018/19) focused on scalability and sustainability. A separate evaluation of the first year PSL pilot (2016/17) is already underway and will be nearing completion when DFID-ESRC funding decisions are made. The longer-term follow-up study is of paramount importance for several reasons. First, it is important to document whether any learning gains achieved in year 1 can be maintained over a longer horizon. Second, the year 1 pilot has been heavily subsidized and disproportionately concentrated in Monrovia, whereas years 2 and 3 will focus on more cost-effective and sustainable models, including new schools in more remote and underserved areas. Third, in years 2 and 3 the program will introduce new top-down results-based accountability measures mentioned above, which are a major focus of our current proposal. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Political Settlement in Somaliland: a gendered perspective Recent research recognises the importance of political settlements -ongoing, adaptable political processes- in determining the equitability of development and the level of stability in societies. However, little research on political settlements analyses the different roles that women and men play in determining a given settlement. Political settlements themselves frequently and systemically exclude women, despite the fact that they are the majority in post-conflict situations, and high levels of gender inequality and violence against women and girls (VAWG) make local instability more likely.
It is thus critical that policy makers understand both specific settlements and their gender dimensions, so that development interventions can be designed in a way that works within and on them to enhance equitable and consequently more sustainable development. This would reduce the risks and impact of violence and instability, increasing the effectiveness of interventions in fragile states.
This project focuses on Somaliland as an excellent case for analysis of power relationships between formal and informal actors in a relatively stable environment, but with strong applicability across a wider area: the Somali Horn of Africa, and with insights that are also useful elsewhere. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Zero Hunger  Zero Emissions: Enabling the debate on how to feed the world whilst mitigating climate change There is an urgent need to find means by which societies can engage in difficult debates about how to ensure food security in a world threatened by dangerous levels of climate change, at the same time as making drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. There will be conflicts, trade-offs but also potential co-benefits between these twin objectives depending very much on the pathways chosen. Decision-making though is often highly technical and top-down and omits sections of society, especially the poorest.
Food systems and the people in them are at the intersection of hunger, poverty and environmental goals. Creating resilient food systems is central to climate change adaptation, but changing agriculture, land use and food systems to contribute to GHG mitigation will likely assume much greater importance particularly in light of the commitments in the Paris Agreement.
Bangladesh is an example of a country that has made great strides in food security whilst facing enormous challenges from climate change. The country made various emission reductions commitments but its current policies and future development trajectories contain contradictions that might endanger these goals. Agriculture - which provides the livelihoods for the majority of people - is responsible for 40% of overall emissions and may come under increasing pressure to deliver reductions. The planned revision of the country's Nationally Determined Contribution to GHG emissions reduction offers an opportunity for debate on choices and their implications.
This research aims to design and test an inclusive and replicable process based on participatory scenario methodology to enable those debates to take place in ways that involve broad swathes of society, including people at the sharp end who often have least voice. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Emerging Technologies, Trajectories and Implications of Next Generation Innovation Systems Development in China and Russia The advance of "Rising Powers" - including Brazil, China, Russia, and India - promises to be one of the major forces in global economic, political and social development in the 21st Century. Shifts in the distribution of technological and innovative capabilities underpin these changes. During the 20th Century, the United States along with Western Europe, Japan, and other established economies, led in the application of science and technology in fostering economic growth. In the present century, the Rising Powers are seeking to move beyond low-wage or resource-based strategies for development by expanding their science and technology capabilities. Critically, progress on this front requires not only building up R&D capacities and commercial applications, but also developing appropriate governance systems and institutional and corporate structures, building financial, human capital, management and related complementary assets, facilitating technological entrepreneurship, fostering demand and accessing international markets, and ensuring environmental, societal and political sustainability. If these countries are successful, it is likely that there will be major implications for the established developed countries. These include new opportunities through expanded markets, growth of talent pools and inventiveness, and prospects for scientific collaboration in addressing global environmental and societal challenges. The implications also include potential threats in terms of loss of technological leadership, increased international trade competition, shifts in the balance of military capabilities, and competition for scarce resources. Yet, if the Rising Powers (or at least some of them) fail in their efforts to develop and broadly apply advanced scientific and technological capabilities to further their economic and social development, growth expectations will be unmet or will proceed wastefully and societal tensions might rise, contributing to internal and international political instabilities.

This project aims to address scholarly, management and policy issues related to the causes, sustainability and competitiveness of advanced technological development in driving the growth of Rising Powers, and in so doing also explore associated issues of governance and equity. Our technological focus will be on the emerging domain of nanotechnology. Our Rising Power country focus will be on China and Russia, with significant consideration of not only internal developments but also the interactions and implications of the growth of nanotechnology in these two countries for the UK and other developed and developing economies. The project will be undertaken by an interdisciplinary team, involving units of the University of Manchester in partnership with colleagues from China and Russia, with attention to capacity development, building a new research network, fostering training, and engaging users. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Explaining Patterns of Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa This project will explore the drivers of these patterns in Africa. We will use updated data to assess whether the patterns of growth observed in Diao et al. (2017) hold in more recent years and in more African countries. We will then apply the theoretical model from Diao et al. (2017) to explore the drivers of these patterns. The model theorizes that the East Asian growth is consistent with supply shocks caused by productivity growth within nonagricultural sectors. On the other hand, it suggests that patterns observed in Africa may be driven by demand side factors. As demand increases (possibly from foreign transfers or increasing agricultural incomes), the nonagricultural sector expands, and growth-promoting structural change takes place. At the same time, labor productivity in the nonagricultural sector is driven down, producing the observed trends. Part of this decline in nonagricultural sector productivity may be due to an expansion of informal sector activity and an influx of unproductive firms; however, it may also be caused by poor performance of the formal sector. These alternate possibilities have very different policy implications. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Organizational Perspectives on Accountability and Learning: Cases Highlighting Innovative Practice (OPAL-CHIP) This project conducts further work related to Organizational Perspectives on Accountability and Learning (OPAL), a three-year project that examines the relationship between school funding models, accountability, and learning outcomes in Mumbai and Kathmandu. Preliminary results from OPAL show that there is a substantial overlap in the literacy and numeracy outcomes in public and private schooling when taking into account students' home backgrounds. OPAL-CHIP takes this finding as a point of departure, investigating school management practices and relationships in those public schools with higher than expected literacy and numeracy outcomes.

OPAL-CHIP surveys high performing public schools in Mumbai and Kathmandu, looking at schools with high learning outcomes and those that are undertaking innovative change programmes to improve learning. From this survey, it selects six schools for case study research, with data collected from interviews, focus groups, and school observations. These are analyzed using thematic analysis both within and across cases. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Transcapes: transient populations transforming the European political space Transcapes is a collective research project using what Europe's mainstream political and media discourse has framed as a refugee crisis, in order to understand wider transformations in the geopolitical body of Europe itself. Situating ourselves in the island of Lesbos, we examine the key actors on the island - humanitarian, social, political - and the contestation over fields and spaces of action opening in the midst of this emergency and the greatest population move in the continent in decades. Broadening our scope, we also look at Greece as a vector of its own contradictions and as the object of political decisions which will inevitably compromise its already weak position within the EU. In the third and largest of our cognitive concentric circles (Lesbos, Greece, the EU), we are trying to understand the crisis of Europe's own decision-making and executing mechanisms as a whole: to read through the inconsistencies and gaps in these and to follow and map out what emerges out of these transformations. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation - Phase 3 - Development Frontiers Cohort Event Pretoria The conference was focused on the ESRC DFID Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation as it approaches its final phase. This was an ESRC DFID event coordinated by The Impact Initiative with logistical assistance from Gung Ho event management services. This was a valedictory activity designed to both capture learning from the Fund, help secure its legacy and provide phase 3 and Development Frontiers grant holders support to maximise the impact of their research. This builded on the Joint Fund ten year anniversary in Pretoria held in 2015 which was also supported by the then new Impact Initiative. Held in Pretoria. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
The potential of Land Value Capture to secure sustainable urban development supporting air quality enhancement Research Grant to enhance urban governments' capacity to improve air quality through Land Value Capture (LVC). Part of Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) Urban Europe 2018. This pilot call is a joint initiative of ten European funding agencies participating in JPI Urban Europe and NSFC as the Chinese funding agency, with the aim to launch and implement a joint call for proposals as a pilot for long-term cooperation. This initiative has been launched following a series of joint European-Chinese workshops. Proposals are invited for joint projects addressing key issues where true added value can be gained from collaboration. The cooperation is based upon the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) of JPI Urban Europe and the 13th Five-Year Plan of NSFC. As the main theme for this pilot call the issue of ‘Sustainable Urbanisation in the Context of Economic Transformation & Climate Change’ has been selected. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Engaging teachers in peacebuilding in postconflict contexts: evaluating education interventions in Rwanda and South Africa This research seeks to answer the question: To what extent do education and peacebuilding interventions in the two countries promote teacher agency and capacity to build peace and reduce inequalities? The proposed study is anchored within the third of the overarching questions of this call, and aimed at understanding the conditions under which education interventions focused on teachers can promote peace, and mitigate and reduce violence with a view to identifying measures and processes that can increase the effectiveness of such programmes in conflict-affected situations. The research seeks to critically evaluate a series of programme interventions aimed at improving and enhancing the peacebuilding role of teachers through a multi-scalar, mixed method study that seeks to link the everyday practices of teachers in conflict affected contexts with the local, national and global actors and factors that shape their practices and behaviour.

South Africa and Rwanda have been selected because both countries have emerged peacefully out of intense and violent conflict in the 1990s and now have two decades of postconflict experience to draw from. Secondly, they have been important sites for a range of postconflict interventions in the education sector, and in particular on teacher related interventions. Thirdly, they allow for a comparison of similar interventions across two countries which have since 1994 has put in place important policy interventions to promote peace and social cohesion which warrant close scrutiny. Fourthly, both countries enable examination of the complex interrelationship between inequality and peace and social cohesion in education.


The overarching aim of the study is to identify elements of education policy interventions that have enabled teachers to become active agents of peacebuilding in postconflict countries and that may inform future interventions. These objectives will be achieved through an empirically grounded evaluation of the nature, implementation, and impact of large-scale interventions that are designed to support teachers as peace-builders in schools in postconflict contexts. We will look at specifically at interventions focusing on teachers, found in both South Africa and Rwanda, including interventions related to 1) Teacher training 2) Teacher recruitment, deployment and management 3) Teacher performance and practices 4) Curriculum and textbook reform. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Inside the Production Function: The Effect of Financial Contracts on Growing Firms' Technology Use. Evidence from a field experiment in Uganda We examine how key aspects of the most common form of financing-debt-may inhibit young firms' expansion. Starting a business entails learning and risk taking, implying that project returns to investment can start low but increase over time (in other words, be "backloaded") or be uncertain. Also, indivisible start-up costs often require large investments. Meanwhile, standard debt contracts available for micro-entrepreneurs from the formal or semi-formal financial sectors of many developing countries (such as microfinance) stipulate a constant repayment stream and caps on the initial loan size. The interaction of such features of the loan contract and the firm's production technology, may distort investment toward inputs that involve less learning, less uncertainty, and smaller projects; hampering firm growth. To shed light on the extent to which these theoretical mechanisms limit the effectiveness of microloans, we plan to collaborate with BRAC Uganda's Small Enterprise Lending Program to study the effect of the credit terms on starting firms' input use, profits, and repayment performance. As such, our project contributes to the DFID-ESRC Growth Research Programme's focus on Finance and Growth in Low Income Countries. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Urban Africa Risk Knowledge (Urban ARK) Urban Africa: Risk Knowledge (Urban ARK) is a three year programme of research and capacity building that aims to reduce disaster risk in urban sub-Saharan Africa by identifying how and where to break cycles of risk accumulation. Urban ARK is motivated to respond to three core challenges to urbanisation and risk in sub-Saharan Africa: limited data; limited understanding of urbanisation and risk relationships, and limited risk management capacity. It will explore these questions in six urban centres across sub-Saharan Africa: Dakar (Senegal), Ibadan (Nigeria), Karonga (Malawi), Mombasa (Kenya), Nairobi (Kenya) and Niamey (Niger). Research is organised in four work packages (WPs): 
•	WP1 focusses on vulnerability; four approaches will be deployed based on: household livelihoods (Niamey), epidemiology (Nairobi, Mombasa, Dakar), participatory approaches (Karonga), conflict-vulnerability linkages (Nairobi) and historical event mapping (Ibadan). 
•	WP2 focusses on multi-hazard interactions and climate downscaling for urban planning in Karonga, Nairobi and to a lesser extent Ibadan. 
•	WP3 brings a historical lens to urbanization and risk coevolution in Nairobi, Mombasa and Ibadan and disaster event root cause analysis in Nairobi and two other cities yet to be selected. 
•	WP4 focuses on planning and governance in Nairobi, Karonga, Ibadan and Niamey.
Additional WPs support Impact (WP5) and Management (WP6).
The Urban ARK consortium brings together researchers from Africa (African Population and Health Research Centre, University of Ibadan, Mzuzu University, Université Abdou Moumouni and University of Cape Town) with practitioners (ARUP, International Alert, Save the Children and UN-HABITAT) and international research partners (King’s College London, Development Planning Unit at University College London and the International Institute for Environment and Development). Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Multi-level governance, REDD+ and synergies between climate change mitigation and adaptation This research project seeks to understand the extent to which policy processes related to forest mitigation and adaptation should be integrated at different scales (global, national and local) in order to deliver effective emission reductions and development compatible outcomes. It will identify existing governance constraints to such integration and explore how they can be overcome.

Policy processes addressing forest mitigation and adaptation of forest dependent communities to climate change operate at multiple scales. In addition, the scale dimension differs across the two policy domains. REDD+ policies are developed at the national level, yet need to be informed by local level realities in order to be effectively implemented. Adaptation of local communities occurs locally, yet national policies need to be in place in order to support adaptive capacity of these communities and reduce their vulnerability. In investigating multi-level governance processes, this research contributes originally to the interdisciplinary literature on multi-level forest governance as well as the literature on climate change mitigation and adaptation. In examining the governance constraints and opportunities for integration, this project will inform ongoing global and national policy processes about how to improve effectiveness of policy formulation and implementation.

The study will be undertaken in two countries - Brazil and Indonesia - that are at the forefront of REDD+ policy formulation and that contain among the most extensive remaining tropical forests in the world. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.