devinitorg/iati-policy-markers huggingface dataset:
Accountability for gender equality in education: Critical perspectives on an indicator framework for the SDGs The Framework of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the UN in 2015 set ambitious targets for achieving an expansion of education provision worldwide and enhancing gender equality. The Policy Document Education 2030 sets out the detail on this. Some new indicators to monitor, evaluate and build accountability for this framework have been developed and others are under discussion by a number of technical committees. This project aims to contribute to this work. We propose to i) review the scholarly literature refining insight into what is entailed in definitions of learning outcomes linked with gender equality, ii) discuss some of the critiques and limitation of indicators as a technique for building accountability, and iii) develop an indicator framework for gender equality in education that can support the work of Education 2030, particularly the monitoring of the SDG targets on gender and education (Target 4.7 and 4a) , while also responding to concerns of organisations that work at international, national and local levels. South Africa and Malawi have been selected as research sites for detailed work reflecting on a proposed indicator framework for accountability for gender eequality in education. Both have policies in place in support of an expansion of education provision and addressing aspects of gender inequality. Howevever, both face complex challenges of implementation. Through a series of key informant interviews in each country with partipants who have knowledge of the needs of the education sector, women's rights and gender equality issues, we aim to refine the proposed indicator framework we wish to develop . We also plan a number of interviews regarding the proposed indicator framework with key informants located in global women's rights networks and who work at the global level in multilateral, bilateral, NGO and large donor organisations. Outputs from the project will include a revised indicator framework on gender equality in education, with particular relevance for monitoring for SDG targets 4.7 and 4a. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Teacher Instructional Practices and Processes System: Cultural extension and testing as a feedback tool to improve pedagogical practices In our previous RLO grant (Toward the Development of a Rigorous and Practical Classroom Observation Tool: The Uganda secondary school project), we developed and validated the Teacher Instructional Practices and Processes System (TIPPS) with learning outcomes in secondary schools in Uganda. Using this observational tool, we examined the quality of teaching practices and classroom processes through live observations. Subsequently, we developed a pre-school version of the TIPPS in Ghana that was found to have meaningful associations with both learning and socio-emotional outcomes. We also piloted a primary school version of the TIPPS in India, where an NGO is using the TIPPS as a guide to provide teacher feedback. To date, we have not had the opportunity to systematically employ TIPPS as a feedback tool in a supportive fashion to improve teaching practices, student learning and teacher outcomes. Creating this cycle of continuous improvement is the goal of the present investigation, albeit in a new cultural context.

To test this in the Honduran context is an idea that grew organically, thanks in large part to the yearly gatherings of RLO colleagues that allowed for cross-pollination of ideas and discussions on topics of interest. Since our first RLO meeting in London, we have been speaking with Erin Murphy-Graham and her team about how we could join forces to augment the impact of the Sistema de Aprendizaje Tutorial program (Tutorial Learning System or SAT) in Honduras. The current proposal represents one-half of two parallel, collaborative but separate investigations. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Shifting In/equality Dynamics in Ethiopia: from Research to Application (SIDERA) As part of its ambitious Growth and Transformation Plans (FDRE 2010, 2015), Ethiopia's government has allocated 175,000 hectares to the sugarcane project (more than the entire area under irrigation in Kenya), and aims to increase national sugar production from 17 million to 42 million tons. Pastoralists who, according to the government, do not use the land optimally, have had their "underutilized" lands repurposed for sugarcane plantations and industrial sites that will produce sugar worth 661.7 million USD and produce alternative energy sources (304,000m3 of ethanol per year and 607 MW electricity). This scenario raises urgent questions about the social justice dimensions of current development models, and their implications for socio-ecological resilience. The following interlinked research questions will structure our exploration of the on-going changes and their consequences:
1. How have recent developments affected the spatial and temporal availability of and access to natural resources in the region? (Environmental sustainability / degradation)
2. How are changing resources affecting conflict dynamics in the region? (Conflict and resilience)
3. How are these changes influencing relations of material in/equality? (Wealth and poverty / resource security)
These questions will be addressed by three Working Groups with expertise in the fields of environmental sustainability, conflict studies, and poverty research respectively. The group will first conduct Research involving knowledge generation across disciplines and stakeholder groups, and second work towards Application in the form of knowledge exchange and synthesis. The first step in the research design will accommodate a cycle of stakeholder identification, scoping and testing of research assumptions; followed by an intensive period of data collection using both conventional (survey, focus group) and participatory research methods. Crucially, our tools will include participatory video methods that will be used to stimulate conversations about current models of development that are rarely possible due to barriers of language, distance, and power. The project will thereby facilitate knowledge sharing, processing, and utilisation, and explore how knowledge regarding the environmental changes and their implications for poverty, peace, and security is best integrated in decision-making for diverse stakeholders. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Improving research infrastructure on social assistance This research project focuses on improving research infrastructure on social assistance, in terms of concepts, indicators and data. This is urgently needed to support comparative analysis of emerging social assistance institutions. The project will identify indicators to assess social assistance programmes and will collect information on these for 2000 to 2015 for all developing countries. The database will be made available online to researchers and policy makers globally.
As part of the project, the database will be analysed to examine patterns or configurations in social assistance programmes and institutions. Our interest is in identifying ideal types, broad features of social assistance programmes or institutions which enable reducing the large diversity of programmes and interventions to their core characteristics. These ideal types are social assistance regimes. Further analysis will test for potential combinations of political, demographic, economic and social factors linked to specific social assistance regimes. This analysis will allow us to examine what conditions can help explain the expansion of social assistance in developing countries; what factors influence the specific configuration of social assistance institutions in different countries and regions; and what conditions are needed for their effectiveness and sustainability. This research will throw light on the contribution of social assistance to the reduction of poverty and vulnerability and to economic and social development. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Development Frontiers in Low Income Countries: The Role of Youth, Sport and Cultural Interventions. This project investigates the role of sport, cultural and educational programmes in promoting sustainable development among young people in low-income countries (LICs), specifically to tackle poverty, conflict in fragile states, environmental sustainability, and gender inequality. These programmes are usually implemented by non-governmental organizations with support from other agencies.
We have little unified knowledge from across different LICs, of how these programmes are implemented, and how they are experienced and interpreted by young user groups.
This project seeks to fill these knowledge gaps, and thus has three broad aims: i) to enhance knowledge of these programmes with young people in LICs; ii) to improve programme efficacy in policy and practice; iii) to work with key stakeholders, to support these interventions, to secure social change.
These aims translate into four research objectives:
1. To analyse the specific role of sport, cultural and educational interventions in tackling poverty, conflict in fragile states, environmental sustainability, and gender divisions in LICs.
2. To capture the experiences and perspectives of young people on these programmes.
3. To evaluate comparatively how these programmes are developed, implemented, experienced and interpreted.
4. To identify how programmes may be changed to have stronger benefits for young people.
Comparative research will be conducted in three small nations: Cape Verde, Nepal and Timor Leste. Data will be collected mainly through qualitative methods, including the innovative use of 'participatory action research' (PAR) to capture the voices of young people. We shall work closely with our research liaison group of non-academic and academic partners to deliver strong research impacts. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Social cash transfers, generational relations and youth poverty trajectories in rural Lesotho and Malawi The proposal addresses the call question: 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? It focuses on two countries that have instituted contrasting SCTs in the past decade: Lesotho (social pensions and child grants) and Malawi (SCTs to ultra-poor labour constrained households). Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Can schools' accountability for learning be strengthened from the grassroots? Investigating the potential for community-school partnerships in India Our project explores the potential of community based accountability relationships to raise children's foundational learning outcomes, with a focus on the most disadvantaged primary-school learners: namely those who are from poorer households and, within these, girls. We ask both whether and how changes occur when school actors are supported to view their accountability as being primarily to their local community and their goal as being to raise all children's learning. To do this, we evaluate a grassroots intervention that supports school actors to work directly with their communities to develop a shared understanding of children's learning levels, collaborate in planning how to raise them, and facilitate action both inside and outside the classroom. In addition to analysing changes in children's learning, we will examine the intervention's capacity to create changes in school-community relations, and teachers' attitudes perceptions, and actions in the classroom.

The intervention builds on two of Pratham's grassroots literacy campaigns to incorporate school-community accountability relationships. Lakhon mein Ek (LME) was primarily an information campaign, supporting communities to undertake and discuss their own independent assessments of children's learning outcomes. Reading Week (RW) provided community volunteers with packages of simple materials with which to work with children to improve their foundational literacy and numeracy skills. The proposed intervention, which we call LME+, seeks to enhance the impact of these previous interventions by working directly with school actors to help them engage and work with their local communities. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation - Phase 3 - Evidence Policy Directorate (EPD) This six year initiative seeks to maximise the impact of research funded by the ESRC DFID Strategic Partnership. The Impact Initiative focuses on providing support to both the ESRC-FCDO (formerly DFID) Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation Research and the Raising Learning Outcomes in Education Systems Research programme. The Impact Initiative takes full advantage of the extensive research and policy networks that IDS and Cambridge are connected into throughout the world to support the coordination of targeted engagement initiatives, such as policy roundtables and practitioner workshops in low income countries, and the facilitation of global networking and knowledge sharing events. It also develops programme-level research communication outputs in order to ensure the ESRC-FCDO funded programmes’ research is effectively communicated and shared, and to raise the profile of the programmes themselves. The initiative commissions outputs such as synthesis reports, policy briefs and data visualisations, and disseminates these to targeted audiences of policy actors, practitioners and intermediaries. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Information, market creation and agricultural growth Recent years have witnessed renewed appreciation that agriculture could play a significant role in the pursuit of Millennium Development Goals. In this context, the role of information dissemination through information and communication technology (ICT) in improving rural welfare is highlighted. However, some fear that with ICT technological disparity will arise, and existing socio-economic inequality and poverty will be further exacerbated.
This study will use randomized experiment and surveys before and after the experiment to investigate the impact of ICT on rural welfare in the Indian state of Karnataka. The randomized experiment (or the action research) proposed here involves facilitating information access on key agriculture related services to households in some villages and not in others.
Combining data from both surveys and the experiment, we investigate the impact of information dissemination on agricultural practices, household incomes, social network, risk coping mechanism and caste disparity. COVID-19 Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Assessing the growth potential of farmer-led irrigation development in sub-Saharan Africa This research will contribute to answering the question "what institutions and policies lead to investment in irrigation by individual farmers, groups of farmers and large-scale enterprises?" under the first DEGRP theme "Agriculture and Growth". The project will assess whether current investment by farmers in small-scale irrigation might offer a model for broad-based economic growth in rural areas of Africa. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Accountability, capacity and trust to improve learning outcomes in South Africa; a systems approach Several authors point to problematic accountability relationships and a lack of trust and capacity in the South African education system as key issues in the lack of improvement of learning outcomes. Spaull (2001) for example explains how the national, provincial and local levels of government are not held accountable for their use of public resources, and how there are few (if any) tangible consequences for non-performance or to address the high rates of teacher absenteeism and low rates of curriculum coverage. Eddy Spicer, Ehren et al's (2016) systematic review also points to lack of teacher accountability in South Africa as school-based registers of teachers' attendance are not checked and national government fails to sanction teachers who are often absent.

Lack of trust inhibits the implementation of effective assessment and inspection systems as teacher unions, for example, reject inspections of teachers and block the publication of assessment data, while lack of capacity subsequently prevents district managers, area managers, principals, heads of department and teachers to effectively use the data that is available (see Eddy Spicer, Ehren et al, 2016; Howie, 2012). This 'vicious' cycle of distrust, lack of accountability and lack of capacity renders the system powerless to improve and creates a series of 'binding constraints' (e.g. weak institutional functionality, undue union influence) that need to be addressed in order to improve learning outcomes, according to Van der Berg et al (2016).

These examples highlight the need to understand the intricate relations between accountability, capacity and trust and how these relations produce (or fail to produce) a pattern of change in learning outcomes over time and create a divided unequal system. We aim to study these relations in South Africa's public primary education system in three phases: 1) Social network analysis of the (accountability and trust) relations and flow of resources in a low and high performing school in quintile 1 and 5 (20% of schools in most deprived and wealthy areas), 2) A focus group in which we will map the causal loops which describe how trust, capacity and accountability interconnect through a series of balancing and/or reinforcing feedback loops and how these loops have (in the past) produced (or failed to produce) a pattern of change in learning outcomes and have created large inequity in the system, and 3) Collecting quantitative (assessment and questionnaire data) to test the causal loops via longitudinal path models and multiple-indicator multiple-cause (MIMIC) models. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Does information provision foster or hinder the effectiveness of microcredit for human capital investments? The proposed research is designed to contribute to filling this gap by gaining a deeper understanding of the role of information provision in hindering, or fostering the effectiveness of microcredit for human capital investments.

Microcredit - small, usually collateral-free loans given to households in low-income countries - has been much studied and their ability in relaxing poor households' credit constraints to allow them to invest in entrepreneurial activities and cope with adverse events acknowledged. More recently, microcredit has also been shown to be effective in fostering human capital investments particularly preventive health investments such as bednets, water connections and toilets, supporting the emerging trends of private enterprises increasingly taking a role in solving social and environmental problems; and in growing numbers of investors seeking to make financial investments that produce significant social or environmental benefits. Microcredit programs often ensure high loan repayment through joint liability - groups of borrowers are liable for each other's loans, and thus monitor each other. However, this feature could influence the take-up and use of microloans for human capital investments, since financial returns to such investments take time to be realised.

Acknowledging that poor awareness of the existence of social programs could hinder take-up of these programs, awareness creation campaigns have become an essential component of the roll-out of new policy initiatives. However, such campaigns typically deliver multiple messages, which could inadvertently lead to recipients taking away a message that is contrary to that intended by the program designers, implying that information campaigns could backfire and hinder the adoption of human capital investments.

We are in the unique position to research such unintended consequence and their mechanisms by building on an interesting puzzle that emerged from a previously conducted study. In particular, we found that providing information alongside microcredit for human capital investment (sanitation), led to a similar increase in loan uptake on average as the provision of sanitation microloans only, but it resulted in fewer clients using the loan for household toilets, contrary to our original hypothesis. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Impact of Urban-rural Return Migration on Rural Economic Development in China----With Implications for Vietnam This research will investigate impact of urban-rural return migration on rural economic development in China and how results are transferable to China's neighbouring country Vietnam. It will investigate ways that returnees contribute to local rural economy, their decision-making process, and key institutions and policies affecting their entrepreneurial activities. Variations between groups, across time and places will also be examined using a retrospective longitudinal multi-level approach. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.
Urgent Invite - Transitory Lives: An Anthropological Research of the Migration Crisis in the Mediterranean. The ongoing migration crisis in the Mediterranean affects all European Countries and is one of the major challenges in European policy making. According to the UN Refugee Agency, 103,000 boat migrants crossed the Mediterranean in the first six months of 2015. 54,000 of them arrived in Italy and 48,000 in Greece. More than 1800 perished, or are missing at sea.
In 2014, Kirtsoglou, Lyon and Knight carried out a Durham University funded pilot study of migrant communities in Greece and established links to an international network of academics, governmental and non-governmental organizations eager to develop new grassroots initiatives and collaborations. We propose to extend and deepen our initial involvement, by investigating in situ the management of migration emergencies in the critically affected regions of south Italy and the eastern Aegean islands. Our aim is to document and understand migrant subjectivities and motives behind high-risk irregular migration, to identify potemtial gaps in reception structures and to assess the effects of migration on receiving communities. We will engage in a programme of rigorous anthropological research that will involve extended interviews with migrants, local communities, NGO staff and policy makers. We will also carry out extensive observational research in a range of settings such as reception centres, migrant support groups and other community-based locations. Working in collaboration with humanitarian organisations and local government authorities, we will use this data to inform migration policies in the region. Research and development activity contributing to the UK’s strategy to address key development challenges.