The Impact Initiative

Our mission is to increase the uptake and impact of research from two major research programmes jointly funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Department for International Development (DFID): the Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation Research and the Raising Learning Outcomes in Education Systems Research Programme. [read more]

Picture (cropped): Jessica Lea/DFID/Flickr  licensed under CC-BY-2.0

News and Views

News: Making the case for the UK’s investment in interdisciplinary research

At a time of increasing scrutiny of UK Aid-funded university research, leaders of UK research councils and the Department for International Development (DFID) are coming together at the Wellcome Collection on 8 July, to discuss how to maximise the impact of the UK’s investment in interdisciplinary research for international development.

News: A year on from the Global Disability Summit, what progress has been made?

Blog: Urbanisation, motorcycle taxi transport and food-security in Africa’s ‘secondary cities’

Blog: New frontiers in the fight against child poverty in Africa

Blog: Bounded mutuality of research-policy partnerships

Blog: The power of storytelling to understand 'impact'

Vlog: How research evidence can influence change

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The Impact Lab

The Impact Lab seeks to strengthen links and create dialogue by providing an outline of the issues and clear lessons for knowledge practitioners, donors and researchers. Outputs include impact stories, an edited collection of articles, and a series of learning guides. Find out more or see our glossary of terms. Additional resources are available from the Impact Initiative collections in the OpenDocs e-repository.

Calling ESRC DFID Grant Holders

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Edited collection of articles

The social realities of knowledge for development

Analysis of the critical challenges faced by organisations and individuals involved in evidence-informed development through a diverse set of case studies and think pieces

Impact stories

Understanding Displacement and Urbanisation in Somali Cities

How research captured the experiences of displaced people in four Somali cities and provided spaces for them to raise their concerns with policymakers.

Research on Children with Disabilities Influences Education Policy in Pakistan

Provides valuable new evidence on the types of strategies governments must adopt to support children with disabilities in the classroom.

Communities Improve Water Management in Burkina Faso

Setting up 'Innovation Platforms' around water reservoirs has led diverse members of rural communities to manage their most precious resource in harmony.

See more at the Impact Lab

Featured Projects

Urban/Rural

Safe and sustainable cities

This project seeks to incorporate migrant perspectives and sources of innovation into urban planning to build safer and more sustainable cities, addressing environmental sustainability, poverty, and conflict and security.

Children & Young People

Young people in fragile and conflict affected situations

The overall aim of the research is to generate new knowledge about how marginalised youth perceive, navigate, negotiate and respond to uncertainty in impoverished fragile and conflict affected communities in Ethiopia and Nepal.

Security

Development frontiers in crime, livelihoods and urban poverty

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.

Governance

Impact of social pensions on multiple dimensions of poverty

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 Older Persons Cash Transfer Programme in Kenya.

Resources

Collection

Rethinking impact: applying the gender lens

This booklet profiles the research and impact funded by the ESRC-DFID Strategic Partnership which explicitly focuses on gender inequality, but also projects where the gender dynamics emerged during the course of the work.

IDS Bulletin

Exploring Research-Policy Partnerships in International Development

This special issue of the IDS Bulletin aims to identify how partnerships focused on the production of policy-engaged research seek to achieve societal impact and explores the challenges in these processes. Draws on research funded by ESRC-DFID's Strategic Partnership.

Working paper

The Delta of Impact

Explores how barriers to impact can be overcome using a unique methodology, devised to be collaborative, for understanding the many overlapping outcomes that add up to research impact from across a diverse programme of evidence.

Collection

Recipes for impact

This booklet profiles a selection of research funded by the ESRC-DFID Strategic Partnership and the impact they have achieved. These stories highlight the multiple, unique and sometimes surprising paths to achieving impact.


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