International Development Research Centre

For nearly five decades, IDRC has invested in high-quality research and innovation in developing countries to foster a more sustainable and inclusive world. This funding has also amplified the voices of scholars from the Global South in global policy debates and forums. To further enhance IDRC’s role as a catalyst for transformative development solutions, it is essential to synthesize and share knowledge from IDRC-supported projects for greater uptake and impact. In pursuit of this objective, IDRC’s Asia Regional Office (ARO) is launching two complementary strategic positioning initiatives. The first is a regional conference in Nepal entitled “Research for sustainable development: Building a greener, inclusive and resilient South Asia”. This event will examine regional research priorities, highlight evidence from IDRC-supported projects and showcase their contributions to policy and program development. The conference will build on IDRC’s decade-long investments in South Asia, laying the foundation for future research initiatives that unlock the region’s untapped potential. The second initiative, entitled “Sustaining the Global South’s contributions to the G20 under South Africa’s presidency”, marks the culmination of a series of Global South-led presidencies. As the G20 leadership shifts back to Northern countries in 2026, it is critical to understand the influence of Southern-led institutions in shaping the global agenda. ARO and IDRC’s regional offices in Eastern and Southern Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean will each commission a background paper within their respective regions to build on the progress made during the past three presidencies and contribute to shaping policy discussions and recommendations for the current presidency. These efforts will culminate in a high-profile G20 side event in South Africa (September–October 2025), co-funded by the three regional offices. This event will serve as a platform to ensure that the Global South’s critical development challenges remain central to the G20 discourse, reinforcing the long-term impact of Southern-led contributions to global governance.

Building resilience to climate change and natural hazards requires socially inclusive action. There is increasing recognition in the climate adaptation space, both in research and policy deliberations, that an intersectional approach is needed to reach the most vulnerable people. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change observes, risks vary across people within societies depending on intersecting inequalities and context-specific factors such as culture, gender, religion, ability, disability and ethnicity. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change also demonstrates an emphasis on intersectional approaches as countries move towards the global goal on adaptation. Applying intersectional approaches in practice, however, remains less clear. The project will develop country case studies that explore how to apply an intersectional approach to climate adaptation and resilience. Each partner will also collaborate with two or three equity organizations focusing on the rights of women, people with disabilities, younger or older people, or other underrepresented groups who will be engaged in design, data collection and analysis and dissemination. The aim of this work is to generate evidence-based recommendations for adaptation practitioners and policymakers that can inform relevant processes and policies and ensure that climate action works for everyone. This project is part of the Climate Adaptation and Resilience initiative (CLARE) jointly designed, funded and run by IDRC and the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. CLARE is an ambitious five-year initiative to enable socially inclusive and sustainable action to build resilience to climate change and natural hazards across Africa and the Asia-Pacific region.

This project focuses on enhancing the peer learning of the Asian projects under the Climate Adaptation and Resilience (CLARE) program. CLARE is a partnership between the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and IDRC. It aims to enable socially inclusive and sustainable action to build resilience to climate change by supporting governments, communities and the private sector to drive long-term solutions while strengthening capacity of both those carrying out the research and those using the resulting evidence. This will be the first time ten partners working in 15 countries in Asia will come together, and a structured program will deepen learning across the different projects, help articulate a cross-project program perspective, and foster engagement with a diverse set of climate action stakeholders. This will be achieved through a three-day workshop, co-designed with all partners, with local partners leading on creating engagement with external stakeholders.

The nutrition transition in South Asia, both in the rapidly urbanizing population and in peri-urban and rural areas, has led to diets that include a high amount of ultra-processed food, including sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs). Aggressive marketing of SSB industries, along with inadequate policy, low compliance and weak enforcement of existing policies, is leading to high consumption of SSBs, particularly among children and youth in the countries of focus. Evidence from global research suggests that SSB labels, both text or image-based, reduce young people’s predicted preferences for, and reported probability of purchasing, SSBs. This also influences parents’ willingness to purchase SSBs for their children. Calorie information may also reduce selection and consumption, specifically of SSBs. This project seeks to build momentum for a more effective regulatory and fiscal policy in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka and, ultimately, across the region. The project will undertake analysis of current policies and laws as well as SSB marketing practices and then co-create culturally relevant and understandable package labels. This will serve as the basis for policy recommendations for contextually appropriate labelling to inform consumer choice and improve diet-related health outcomes. This project is part of a cohort supporting diverse and multi-actor coalitions that combine collaborative learning networks and communities of practice, operating at multiple scales, to collectively support the production, consumption of and access to healthy diets for all, particularly the most vulnerable, emphasizing sustainable systems that contribute to the health of people and ecosystems.

Trade measures, taxes and subsidies are an important means of enabling access to healthy dietary choices. Ensuring policy coherence, such as aligning domestic agricultural subsidies, taxes and trade policies with interventions for better nutrition, is a complex undertaking. This project will address the research gap on how fiscal and trade policies interact with dietary patterns and consumption choices to impact nutrition and health outcomes. This project aims to develop a South Asian research, policy and practice network for deploying fiscal and trade policies to improve access and affordability of healthy diets. The project team will use scoping reviews and exploratory research techniques to develop country-specific analysis to identify and use fiscal and trade measures to overcome the triple burden of wasting, stunting and obesity, and to promote healthy diets. This analysis will include an assessment on how national food safety requirements are connected to trade policies. The research team will focus on understanding how policy reform can address gender disparities, which are one of the most pervasive forms of inequality and a major cause of poor health and nutrition outcomes in South Asia. This project is part of a cohort supporting diverse and multi-actor coalitions that take on a leadership role to influence policies and transform food systems at the country and regional level in Central and South America, South Asia and Southeast Asia. These coalitions combine collaborative learning networks and communities of practice, operating at multiple scales, to collectively support the production and consumption of, and access to, healthy diets for all, particularly the most vulnerable, emphasizing sustainable systems that contribute to the health of people and ecosystems.

Climate change affects people and economies across the world, but the impact is nowhere more pronounced than in marginalized communities in low-income countries like Nepal. Even within the impacted population, women are significantly more vulnerable than men because of an absence of economic independence and pre-existing social settings that leave them deprived of essential rights. On the other hand, climate-positive micro-enterprises in rural areas not only help address the climate change problem, but also provide opportunities for economic empowerment for women, thereby enhancing the resilience of such societies to the impacts of climate change. However, a major hurdle faced by such entities is access to finance. With inadequate scale, insufficient access to resources, unevolved business models, uncertain markets and absence of credit history, these micro-enterprises are considered ineligible for finance by traditional institutions. This project is aimed at developing a research-informed template for identifying constraints and impediments faced by women-led or women-benefiting enterprises in sustainable forestry in Nepal, and identifying meaningful appropriate pathways for access to finance for such enterprises. The research will also highlight the need for specific project preparation, including appropriate capacity building, for such enterprises, which will be utilized to design a funded project preparation facility that could potentially culminate in fundraising for select enterprises.

IDRC is embarking on a five-year partnership (Artificial Intelligence for Development: Responsible AI, Empowering People) with the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, also known as AI4D-FCDO, to support policy, innovations and expanded leadership to spur safe and responsible artificial intelligence (AI) development in Africa and beyond. The vision of the program is to support an inclusive and responsible AI ecosystem that improves the quality of life for all in low- and middle-income countries. This project, which is part of AI4D-FCDO, will ensure that sexual, reproductive and maternal health (SRMH) hubs around the world graduate from proof-of-concept to testing and scaling. In South Asia, the AI Sarosh hub has awarded nine grants in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The grants cover areas such as adolescent health, developing affordable colposcopy imaging and digital microscopes, early detection of postnatal depression, risk management for pregnant mothers, AI-enhanced fetal ultrasound services, AI-enabled detection of perinatal depression and early diagnosis of gestational diabetes. The monitoring of these projects has allowed AI Sarosh to identify gaps in policy and regulatory frameworks, implementation challenges, and a lack of an evidence base on the responsible use of AI in health in the region. Through this project, AI Sarosh aims to: generate evidence by supporting field evaluations of the solutions currently in development in real-life settings that can inform scaling; improve understanding of SMRH issues and the potential of AI applications in SRMH through gap analysis; develop strategies to inform policy and regulatory decision-makers and relevant stakeholders; and provide a platform for the sub-grantees to interface with other health and AI experts.

In sub-Saharan Africa, indicators for maternal, sexual and reproductive health continue to lag other health indicators. For example, the continent is not on track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal’s target of ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health-care services. Artificial intelligence (AI) holds the potential to be a transformative tool in tackling the continent’s ongoing maternal, sexual and reproductive health challenges. However, significant concerns remain about the potential harms and risks of using AI in this sector. IDRC supported the establishment of a Hub for Artificial Intelligence in Maternal, Sexual and Reproductive Health in sub-Saharan Africa, which, among other things, has funded development of a tool for predicting miscarriages among women in Uganda. In this new project, the hub seeks to scale a subset of promising AI innovations for maternal, sexual and reproductive health from the previous project. The new project will also strengthen the capacity of AI innovators to create solutions for local maternal, sexual and reproductive health priorities based on large datasets. By the end of the project, the project teams aim to have AI solutions scaled in five African countries and four new AI innovations developed through an open innovation competition. IDRC is supporting a five-year partnership, called Artificial Intelligence for Development: Responsible AI, Empowering People, with the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to support policy, innovations and expanded leadership to spur safe and responsible AI development in Africa and beyond. The vision of the partnership is to support an inclusive, responsible AI ecosystem that improves quality of life for all.

Despite global efforts to improve children's readiness, many children are not well prepared to start school. This project builds on the success of the “Every Newborn-Reach Up Early Education Intervention for All Children” (ENREACH) initiative, which successfully increased children’s readiness to enter pre-primary school in Bangladesh, Nepal and Tanzania with supports for both children and their caregivers. This project will build evidence to adapt ENREACH to include teachers by enhancing the capacity of both parents and teachers. The project will explore how to improve teacher engagement and teaching competencies. Knowledge mobilization will help integrate the model into practice, reaching key stakeholders within the ministries of education in all three countries. The goal is to facilitate its transition into a government-supported program. The research consists of a trial with preschool teachers and caregivers and targets children aged 60 to 72 months enrolled in pre-school, ensuring that those with disabilities and both boys and girls are included. The project will produce a comprehensive training package focusing on foundational skills through play-based teaching, tools for school readiness, resources for mobilization of stakeholders and a cost evaluation framework. This project is funded under the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) Knowledge and Innovation Exchange, a joint endeavour between the GPE and IDRC to connect expertise, innovation and knowledge to help low- and middle-income countries build stronger education systems and accelerate progress toward the Sustainable Development Goal on education.

This project responds to the need to address a global learning crisis in which many children do not reach expected standards, even when attending school. It aims to generate knowledge and improved practices on how best to unlock and use increasingly available education data to expand access and elevate school-level performance. The project will adapt and scale a proven UNICEF-led innovation, called Data Must Speak, that helps countries unlock existing data related to the education sector. The research incorporates the concept of “positive deviance”, which addresses how some schools achieve better results than others in similar contexts, and how this knowledge can be leveraged to advance learning outcomes across the board by using data that is available within the education system. The project will use a mixed-methods approach and will focus on testing and implementing national adaptations of the methodology, harmonizing and linking datasets, identifying best practices, and enhancing the capacity of public officials and other stakeholders to exploit data. The project will be simultaneously implemented in eight countries across Africa and Asia that have identified the need for better data management, both at the central and local levels, as a critical element of their education sector plans. It is expected that the project will strengthen education systems and enhance education sector governance and social accountability to improve access and quality of education. The project was selected through a global call, initiated by the Global Partnership for Education Knowledge and Innovation Exchange, to learn about scaling proven innovative approaches in education in developing country contexts.