Global Development Institute academics awarded over £1 million in funding

30 Mar 2016

The grants will help carry out three new research projects

Academics from the Global Development Institute have recently been awarded over £1 million of funding to carry out three new research projects.

Professor Armando Barrientos was awarded £482,000 by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Department for International Development (DFID) to improve the 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. A database will be made available online to researchers and policy makers globally.

Armando will also be part of the project Building a case for increased investments in Social Protection in Uganda.

The project is a joint venture between The University of Maastricht, Makarere University and The University of Manchester, which was awarded 368,000 euros. The project will study the potential effects and costs of Social Assistance Grants for Empowerment (SAGE) and its effect on the local economy. It will also seek to assess if alternative social protection programs be more cost-effective in achieving human capital development and productive asset accumulation.

Professor Sam Hickey has been awarded £435,000 by the ESRC to investigate 'pockets of effectiveness' within developing country governments and administrations. Working alongside Professor Giles Mohan of The Open University, Professor Hickey will strive to understand of how poverty-reducing forms of state capacity and elite commitment emerge in the form of 'pockets of effectiveness' in sub-Saharan Africa. They will examine a range of high-performing government agencies and tracing the institutional and political conditions through which they have emerged and been sustained in four specific African countries.