Deadline: 27-Jan-21
In response to the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women and girls, the Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) launched the Women’s Work, Entrepreneurship, and Skilling (WWES) Initiative as part of RECOVR (Research for Effective COVID-19 Responses). The Initiative aim is to improve and deepen the existing data and evidence on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women and girls.
The goal is to provide evidence-based insights and policy recommendations to address gender inequalities in the context of COVID-19 policy responses during the immediate crisis and extended recovery period. The focus countries of this initiative are Kenya and Bangladesh.
Key Themes
The WWES Initiative combines data collection efforts, research projects, and policy work, around two key themes:
- women’s work, entrepreneurship and time use
- youth skilling and school-to-work transitions
Types of Projects
Through the initiative, funding is available to support piloting, data collection, analysis, dissemination, and policy engagement activities. For each theme, the Initiative will consider two types of projects:
- Diagnostic studies to understand the effects of COVID-19 and related containment efforts on women’s work, entrepreneurship, and skilling, and how the crisis exacerbates gendered risks and existing gender inequalities. The initiative will support a small number of descriptive studies to collect and share urgently needed information to key decision-makers responding to the evolving crisis. Clear policy relevance and demand needs to be demonstrated for this type of projects, as well as lack of existing descriptive data available.
- Policy and program evaluations generating actionable insights to identify and scale effective approaches to address and mitigate the gendered impacts of COVID-19 and related containment measures on work, entrepreneurship, and skilling issues, both during the immediate crisis and the longer-term recovery period. Strong preference will be given to randomized controlled trials, but technically strong quasi-experimental designs will also be considered.
Funding Information
- There is a total of $260,000 to be allocated among a few exciting projects through this selection round.
- While there is flexibility in terms of award size, they encourage projects of between $10,000 and $120,000.
Selection Process
- The selection process will be led by a committee integrated by IPA’s SME Program Director, Director of Sector Programs, Associate Director of Policy, and Chief Research and Policy Officer. Proposals will be peer reviewed by the Initiative’s Scientific Advisors.
- The following criteria will guide the selection of projects to receive funding from this Initiative:
- Relevance to address the initiative’s key research questions
- Technical strength of the research proposal
- Partner’s commitment to use results for gender intentional programming and/or clear potential for policy impact (ideally, indicated through letter of support from policy partner)
- Project timeframe
For more information, visit http://www.poverty-action.org/publication/wwes-rfp-instructions