Call for Applications: Major Research Grants Program

The objective of PEDL is to fund cutting-edge, policy-oriented research that could be published in leading academic journals and be relevant to the policy dialogue in LICs. They welcome proposals in any area related to private sector development in low-income countries. They expect that many of the funded proposals will relate to one of PEDL’s three main research themes:

• Innovation, Organisations and Markets
• Climate and Environment
• Finance and Entrepreneurship

They are particularly interested in proposals related to the work of British International Investment (BII), the UK’s development finance institution. These will address the impact of development finance on private sector development, including understanding the indirect effect of credit and other investments on upstream and downstream firms, and on final consumers. Projects examining the effect of ports and telecommunications infrastructure are also welcome.

Cross-Cutting Themes

They also particularly encourage proposals that address one or more of PEDL’s three cross-cutting themes.

• Fragile and conflict affected states
• Gender
• Scaling up Research into Policy

Funding Information

• Major Research Grants have an average grant size of £300,000. Note however that whilst there is a lower limit of £100,000 for each Major Grant, there is no upper limit.
• These grants will fund research assistance, data collection and new surveys in low-income countries, and (where necessary) teaching buyouts for the principal investigator.
• MRGs typically run for between 24 and 36 months.
• MRGs are designed to be contracted with institutions. While they try to remain as flexible as possible, the contracts were approved with FCDO and therefore are non-negotiable.

Country Criteria

• PEDL priority countries includes all LICs and FCDO-focus LMICs. They are particularly interested in generating research in countries on which less research is currently being conducted. This means that countries with very active research (e.g., India and Indonesia) are lower priority. Proposals for research in these countries will need to justify why the research needs to be carried out there, and how the results are relevant to PEDL priority countries.
• PEDL will consider proposals for research in non-listed LMICs but they should make a clear case for the relevance of the research to policy in LICs, and also justify why the research is only feasible in a non-target country (e.g. because of exceptional data availability). Note that they are currently unable to fund projects located in Myanmar and Palestine.

For more information, visit PEDL.