The Department for International Development (DFID) and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) have announced a third call for applications under Phase 2 of their strategic partnership to provide a joint funding scheme for development research. Both sponsors have a strong commitment to commissioning world class research and ensuring that the resulting evidence is useful to practitioners and policy makers worldwide.
The purpose of the scheme is to provide a more robust conceptual and empirical basis for development, and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
This second phase of the joint scheme has a total budget of £23 million and consists of three annual calls for proposals. £7 million is set aside for this third call.
Themes and Areas
The second phase of funding retains the overall ‘poverty alleviation’ theme from the first phase, and applications under this broad heading will still be eligible. However, ESRC and DFID have identified three thematic areas for this call where work will be of particular interest. These areas are:
- Resource Scarcity, Growth and Poverty Reduction;
- Information and Communication Technology and Development;
- Measuring Development.
As well as research excellence, researchers must identify the potential impacts of their research on policy and practice and actively consider how these will be maximised and developed. Previous research includes: work on gender based violence that informed the design of a micro credits scheme in East Africa; research that suggested a change in focus from primary to secondary school attendance for conditional cash transfers in Mexico which was then used to inform a pilot; demand led research on TB stigma which contributed to new training materials and guidelines in Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh.
The first phase of the scheme, launched in August 2005, funded 46 world class research projects and a further 37 projects have been funded in the first two calls of Phase 2.
Last date for submission of application is September 27, 2011
For more information and details, please visit this link.
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