The Institute of Development Studies

Our aim is to co-develop, with stakeholders, innovative and context-appropriate ways to increase options for children to avoid engagement in hazardous exploitative labour. The primary beneficiaries will be children in modern slavery and the worst forms of child labour and those who are vulnerable to being drawn into it. The families of these children will benefit from greater resilience to shocks, better options for their children’s safe and healthy future and less intra-family stress and conflict. Businesses will benefit from practical solutions to child-labour free supply chains. Policy makers, NGOs, and researchers will benefit from a knowledge of what works. Action-Research for innovation: We will generate activities and interventions through a large scale action research process. Interventions will range from small scale solutions to local problems, behaviour change initiatives, and large scale pilots. Action research is a programming modality which combines evidence gathering and learning from action. It is designed to enable diverse groups to meet over a period of time to consider evidence and generate theories of change about interventions; plan and programme innovative solutions; test the solutions in real time, and then evaluate them. In this way action research groups act as engines of new innovation.

Disability inclusion is a neglected, under-prioritised issue in international development; a lack of evidence around what works in practice to deliver inclusion contributes to difficulty in building effective programmes. The DFID Disability Inclusive Development (DID) Programme is a £30m programme designed to contribute to the long-term improved well-being and inclusion of people with disabilities in low-and-middle-income countries. DID will carry out a series of small scale interventions around increased access to health care and education, improved livelihoods and reduced stigma and discrimination, using new development approaches such as adaptive management and community-based consultation to deliver better quality of life for persons with disabilities. The programme will create a solid evidence base around what delivers positive results for persons with disabilities to scale up, as well as ensure this data and evidence is disseminated and informs the global community and governments. DID will run for six years and complement DFID’s current disability inclusion programming including UK Aid Connect.