Call for Proposals: Peace and Recovery Initiative

Focus Areas

• International and civil wars
• State-supported violence and repression, from mass killings to police brutality
• Electoral violence
• Riots, protests, strikes, and other collective action
• Intergroup violence, including ethnic and sectarian violence
• Terrorism and violent extremism
• “Recovery” responses after conflict or crises, including natural disasters

Priority Areas

• Understanding and preventing individual-level participation in violence
• Understanding, combating, and reintegrating armed groups
• Addressing prejudice and building horizontal social cohesion
• Strengthening household and community resilience
• Building institutions, resolving disputes, and delivering justice
• Addressing root causes and preventing future crises

Types of Grants

• Exploratory grants: These grants are to develop preliminary research ideas, contributing to the development of proposals for pilots or full impact evaluations in future rounds. Activities may include travel, relationship development, descriptive or observational analysis, and data development or collection.
• Pilot studies: These grants are intended to lay the groundwork for future impact evaluations. They are for studies with clear research questions, identified interventions, and established partnerships, but which require substantial upfront investments in design, measurement, and/or implementation before a full impact evaluation can be designed and a full study proposal can be submitted.
• Full studies: These grants are for impact evaluations that assess the causal effects of an intervention, program, or policy. Projects must have a clear research question, committed implementing partner(s), well-defined research designs, and statistical power estimates.
• Infrastructure and public goods creation: These grants are for the creation of data or tools that can support several research projects or types of analyses, often ultimately supporting the design or implementation of future impact evaluations.
• Evidence use and policy outreach support: These grants are for supporting the development of relationships with policymakers, take-up and dissemination of evidence, sharing and analysis of administrative data, and exploration of potential impact evaluations.

Funding Information

• Exploratory grants: $10,000
• Pilot studies: $75,000
• Full studies: $500,000
• Infrastructure and public goods creation: $250,000
• Evidence use and policy outreach support: $25,000

Ineligible Costs

• Program or intervention implementation costs, except in extremely rare circumstances when necessitated by the research design
  • These include any costs the implementing partner would have otherwise incurred to implement the program or intervention being tested. This also includes costs associated with refining or developing new approaches that will be adopted by the implementing partner if proven effective.
• Salary costs for researchers from institutions in high-income countries (funding for the salaries and/or time of researchers from institutions in low- and middle-income countries will be considered on a case-by-case basis by the review committee)
• Purely qualitative research that does not contribute to the development of impact evaluations or to understanding the results of impact evaluations
• Lab-in-the-field or survey experiments, except in rare circumstances, or within the context of piloting or implementing a broader impact evaluation
• Research using historical datasets, except in the context of a broader impact evaluation
• Costs labeled as incidental, miscellaneous, or contingency

Eligibility Criteria

• Researcher Qualifications
  • At least one researcher per project must be primarily affiliated with a university (e.g. PhD Candidate, Assistant Professor, Professor, etc.), and either hold a PhD or be currently pursuing a PhD in a relevant discipline. The research team must demonstrate experience conducting field research and applying impact evaluation methods in sectors that are relevant to the Peace & Recovery Initiative.
  • Exploratory grants are earmarked for LMIC-based researchers, junior faculty, PhD students and candidates, and other researchers who do not have significant sources of funding for travel and exploratory work. Researchers with different profiles may also apply, but they encourage contacting them to assess eligibility.
• Implementing Partners
  • To apply, implementers delivering programs or designing policies—such as civil society, governments, and multilateral organizations—should partner with researchers experienced in conducting similar research to the study proposed. IPA is available to support matchmaking with researchers.

For more information, visit Innovations for Poverty Action.