Current Research Topics - Capacity Building

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Capacity Building

The development of a science and technology base goes alongside economic growth: they contribute to each other. Likewise, developing country policy research can contribute to a climate of public debate that can make the state more effective and perhaps more receptive to the interests of the poor. To have sustainable impact in the long-term, we need to ensure that our support to research helps build scientific and policy capacity within developing countries.

By focusing on the involvement of developing country researchers in the research we commission, we increase the chances of relevance and impact. The impact of a research project on anti-poverty policy and technology delivery is usually rather diffuse and long-term. Links and networks between researchers and policy-shapers are all important. So, for DFID research to have an impact on developing country governments and other users, it must closely involve developing country researchers: they, rather than researchers from abroad, are most likely to interact with policymakers - even extending to researchers themselves becoming policymakers years later.

Yet where research capacity is weak, the causes are not in fact specific to research. Rather they affect the whole public sector: unreliable finance, poorly paid and managed staff, weak and unreliable infrastructure, sometimes a lack of security. Tackling these issues is central to the wider work of DFID in such countries. DFID has moved away from funding stand-alone projects to working directly with governments and civil society to change these underlying problems. This will have the greatest impact on improving research in the long run, by maximising the prospect of creating capable and effective public institutions, which can make a sustained contribution over the long term.

Building capacity requires substantive and long-term investment. This can only be addressed on a significant scale by developing country governments and donors operating at a country level. In this context, DFID Central Research Department will:

• support DFID country and regional departments wishing to pilot capacity building programmes. These can include the capacity of developing country policymakers to use research
• support international efforts to build capacity and strengthen research networks including initiatives that improve the access to knowledge of developing country researchers, and the capacity of users to source, evaluate and utilise existing knowledge
• promote the full involvement of developing country institutions and other local stakeholders in our research programmes
• investigate possibilities for collaboration with other Goverment Departments and with other donors with greater expertise in capacity-building.

See the working paper on Capacity Building which informed the Research Strategy 2008-2013.

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