Last month, almost two hundred social scientists, donors and NGOs met in South Africa to explore how evidence and research has shaped the last ten years of addressing poverty at the The ‘Lessons from a Decade’s Research on Poverty: Innovation, Engagement and Impact’ conference. The conference highlighted the full breadth of research carried out during the lifetime of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Department for International Development (DFID) Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation Research.
With academics, practitioners, policymakers and activists taking part, the conference provided the platform for reflection and looking to the future. It comes at a seminal point in time to identify key learning and knowledge which can help position researchers to more effectively respond to development policy agendas.
About the conference
Hosted by The Impact Initiative, the event included researchers that are supported from the Joint Fund’s 139 projects and their partners, donors, policy actors and practitioners. Attendees shared learning and forged new connections. Sessions addressed the co-construction of research with communities; research as political scrutiny and on the informal economy and crisis recovery, and much more. It delved into the challenges and successes of research uptake; exploring the themes of gender, disability, and health and nutrition, and included sessions on methods. Participants also had a lot of fun! The Cross-Sectoral Collaboration Game session led by Professor Ulrike Zeshan was the perfect antidote to death by PowerPoint.
Blog posts
In the run up to, during and following the event, advisory panel members and participants shared their reflections through a number of blog posts:
- Underpinning efforts to end conflict with sound evidence – Patricia Justino, Institute of Development Studies
- Standing in a different place – Gina Porter, Durham University
- Understanding the effect of conflict on people and households – Ana Maria Ibáñez, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
- Can research speak to policy? – Andrew Long, Department for International Development
- What impact can education research in international development settings achieve? – Pauline Rose, Cambridge University and Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre
- The politics of doing research on politics in Africa – Emma Crewe, School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS)
- Increasing municipal governance to tackle the drivers of child malnutrition – Pat Pridmore, University College London
- Gender norms, time use and labour in India and Bangladesh – Wendy Olsen, University of Manchester and Anup Kumar Mishra, DAV College BHU
- Linking government and business to serve Zimbabwe’s working poor – Rutendo Change, Adam Smith International
- Turning the scholarly pursuit into a development pursuit – Joanes Atela, African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS)
- The reality of making change happen – Morten Koch Andersen, Dignity, the Danish Institute Against Torture
- Why we struggle to repeat the trick of turning academic research into action – James Georgalakis, Institute of Development Studies
- Cross-sectoral collaboration – are you game? – Ulrike Zeshan, University of Central Lancashire’s International Institute for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies (iSLanDS)
Other resources
The conversations and key ‘soundbites’ that took place at the conference, were captured by a scribe, Jorge Martin.
Interviews and personal reflections will be shared shortly.
What is The Impact Initiative?
The Impact Initiative for International Development Research exists to increase the uptake and impact of two programmes of research funded through the ESRC-DFID Strategic Partnership. These are: (i) The Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation, and (ii) The Raising Learning Outcomes in Education Systems programme.
The Initiative helps identify synergies between these programmes and their grant holders, and supports them to exploit influencing and engagement opportunities and facilitates mutual learning. The Impact Initiative is a collaboration between the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and the University of Cambridge’s Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre.
For more details please contact:
All illustrations should be credited to Jorge Martin.
Key contacts
