Deadline: 17-Jun-22
The Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF) is pleased to announce its sixth call for proposals on recovering human capital after the COVID pandemic.
The focus of this sixth call for proposals is Covid-19 recovery. In particular, SIEF aims to fund experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations that examine innovative interventions that enable individuals in low- and middle-income countries to recover human capital losses incurred as a result of the pandemic. Given the enormity of the losses and the urgent need for remedies, this call for proposals will prioritize interventions that have the potential for high impact within a short amount of time.
Objective
SIEF will use this call for proposals to meet two primary objectives that advance SIEF’s core mandate of supporting evidence-based policy design in low- and middle-income countries.
- Building evidence on high-impact interventions for Covid-19 recovery: Covid-19 has reversed important the human capital accumulation gains made in recent years. There is an urgent need for scalable interventions that can help reverse these losses, within the constraints of government capacity and budget. There is little evidence, however, on how to make large gains in a short duration and at scale. This call seeks to address this gap.
- Facilitating successful matches between researchers and operational teams: As in previous calls for proposals, SIEF will use the screening process to match operational teams with interested external researchers if the teams have not already identified a research collaborator. During a first phase of screening, researchers will fill out a short application, where they outline their designs for evaluations either for their own projects or for specific questions generated by a set of World Bank financed projects that appear in the appendix to this call for proposals.
Funding Information
- SIEF will offer up to $400,000 per evaluation and expects to fund approximately 10-12 evaluations in this funding round.
- With the increasing use of cheaper forms of data collection, such as administrative data, phone surveys or online a sessments, they expect to fund many evaluations the maximum grant size.
Eligible Projects
Given the multi-faceted impact of Covid-19, a broad range of projects may be funded for evaluation under this call.
- Early childhood development: Investments in early childhood have high returns because they are the foundation for all later investments. Higher food insecurity, closure of preschools, and disruption in vaccinations and other services occurred across different countries, threatening the development of young children.
- Education: Long school shutdowns have resulted in severe learning losses. Effective interventions that provide evidence on how to remedy learning losses quickly (that is, that do not require an entire school year to materialize) are much needed so that children do not fall even further behindeven after they have returned to school.
- Health: During the pandemic, both children and adults accessed routine health services less frequently, and non-COVID health issues have been largely neglected, reversing years of progress made on controlling both communicable and non-communicable diseases. Projects may evaluate interventions aimed at helping individuals resume using health services or may directly target other health outcomes.
- Mental health: With long periods of isolation due to lockdowns and overall heightened stress, Covid-19 has affected the mental health of different age groups, including school aged children,and adults, especially women. Interventions that promote recovery from depression and anxiety and improve social-emotional skills and other dimensions of mental health are of interest.
- Employment: Covid-19 has hindered youth employment and adult employment for low-skilled workers. They are interested in interventions that help improve the employment prospects of those most affected.
Eligibility Criteria
- SIEF welcomes proposals from researchers within and outside the World Bank. That said, because SIEF is a Bank-executed trust fund, each full proposal must be submitted by a World Bank regular employee who serves as the task team leader (TTL) and the award is made to the TTL’s unit. These task team leaders provide fiduciary oversight for SIEF funds and, at the same time, increase the likelihood that governments engage with evaluation results. They also ensure that both intervention and evaluation designs will deliver evidence that countries will find useful.
- While only World Bank task team leaders can submit full proposals to SIEF, each proposal must have at least one experienced researcher dedicated to the evaluation.
- This researcher can be a current staff member of the World Bank or can be an external researcher who will eventually be hired as an individual (as a World Bank short-term consultant) if the proposal turns out to be successful.
- No universities or research organizations or firms can participate in SIEF’s call for proposals, as it is not a procurement process.
- Moreover, if a researcher collaborates with a task team leader on a proposal, any organization, firm, or institution that also compensates that researcher will not be eligible to be contracted as a vendor or receive any payments from the World Bank for any evaluation activities. Instead, a vendor will be selected competitively according to World Bank procurement rules.
- For researchers accustomed to applying for grants that go to their respective institutions, this is an important difference to be aware of.
For more information, visit https://www.worldbank.org/en/programs/sief-trust-fund/brief/call-for-proposals-6-covid-19-recovery?deliveryName=DM143448
