Sustainable Cooling and Cold Chain Solutions

Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs

This activity supports a number of different areas of work which aim to accelerate the climate benefits of the Kigali Amendment (KA) to the Montreal Protocol (MP) and encourage uptake of energy efficient and climate friendly solutions. This includes (1) The creation of an African Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Cooling and Cold Chains (ACES) in Rwanda. ACES will accelerate deployment of sustainable (environmental, economic and social) cold-chain solutions throughout Africa. (2) The development and deployment of an HFC outlook model to address information gaps on energy use and energy related CO2 emissions from the refrigeration, air-conditioning and heat pumps (RACHP) market. It will assist in reducing cost of the transition for Article 5 countries to the Montreal Protocol and increase the climate benefit of action under the MP. (3) Increasing countries technical capacity and providing insights on global best practice of EE improvements of cooling products in parallel with HFC phase down, through model regulations and sustainable public procurement in ASEAN and Africa.

Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund Round 7

Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs

Illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is a widespread and lucrative criminal activity causing major global environmental and social harm. The IWT has been estimated to be worth up to £17 billion a year. Nearly 6,000 different species of fauna and flora are impacted, with almost every country in the world playing a role in the illicit trade.

• Developing sustainable livelihoods to benefit people directly affected by IWT,

• Strengthening law enforcement,

• Ensuring effective legal frameworks,

• Reducing demand for IWT products.

By 2023 over £51 million has been committed to 157 projects since the Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund was established in 2013. This round of funding includes the following projects: IWT086 to IWT107. Further information can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/illegal-wildlife-trade-challenge-fund-iwtcf (Language: English)

Darwin Initiative Round 29

Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs

The Darwin Initiative is the UK’s flagship international challenge fund for biodiversity conversation and poverty reduction, established at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The Darwin Initiative is a grant scheme working on projects that aim to slow, halt, or reverse the rates of biodiversity loss and degradation, with associated reductions in multidimensional poverty. To date, the Darwin Initiative has awarded more than £195m to over 1,280 projects in 159 countries to enhance the capability and capacity of national and local stakeholders to deliver biodiversity conservation and multidimensional poverty reduction outcomes in low and middle-income countries.

British Academy Coherence & Impact - Education and Learning in Crises

DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

This programme funds research exploring the challenges of education and learning in contexts of conflict and protracted crises.

SFC - GCRF QR funding

DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

Formula GCRF funding to the Scottish Funding Council to support Scottish higher education institutes (HEIs) to carry out ODA-eligible activities in line with their three-year institutional strategies. ODA research grants do not represent the full economic cost of research and therefore additional funding is provided to Scottish HEIs in proportion to their Research Excellence Grant (REG). In FY19/20 funding was allocated to 18 Scottish higher education institutes to support existing ODA grant funding and small projects. GCRF has now supported more than 800 projects at Scottish institutions, involving over 80 developing country partners.

Global Challenges Research Fund Evaluation

DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

The overall purpose of the GCRF evaluation is to assess the extent to which GCRF has achieved its objectives and contributed to its intended impacts.

Transformation Project - ODA Reporting Tool (ODART)

DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

The Reporting ODA Digital Service (RODA) is the data submission, processing, reporting repository system for data on BEIS R&I ODA Eligible Programmes delivered by Delivery Partners

UUKi Delivery Support

DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

These are delivery cost for shared learning workshops/training and best practice (for current and future applicants) on ODA assurance, eligibility, reporting and partnership working through either the NF and GCRF

ODA website - cross-cutting for both ODA funds

DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

This is the website for NF and GCRF consortia that promotes funding calls and impact case studies as well as publishing report such as the annual report and monitoring and evaluation documentation.

Ad-hoc GCRF activity on BEIS Finance system

DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

Increased contributions towards a range of research projects jointly funded with DFID, and funding for the Devolved Administrations for disbursement to universities within the devolved regions to fund the full economic cost of GCRF ODA research.

DfE NI - GCRF QR funding

DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

Grant to Department for the Economy, Northern Ireland to enable Northern Irish higher education institutes to carry out pre-agreed ODA-eligible activities in line with their institutional strategies. For Queen’s University Belfast in FY2019/20 this included: workshops in Cambodia, Vietnam, South Africa, and Uganda about health and education; 11 pilot projects spanning 16 eligible countries (Angola, Burundi, China, Colombia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Kosovo, Malaysia, Nigeria, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam and Zimbabwe); and additional support to GCRF and NF-funded activities. For Ulster University in FY2019/20 funding supported six pump-priming projects on: LMIC maternal, neonatal and child health; PTSD in Rwanda; Decision-Making in Policy Making in Africa and Central Asia; and hearing impairment and dementia in China.

HEFCW - GCRF QR funding

DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

Additional GCRF funding to the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales to support Welsh higher education institutes (HEIs) to carry out ODA-eligible activities in line with their institutional strategies. ODA research grants do not represent the full economic cost of research and therefore additional funding is provided to Welsh HEIs in line with their research council grant income. In FY19/20 funding was allocated to Aberystwyth University, Bangor University, Cardiff University and Swansea University. In FY19/20, the funding was used to fund: the full economic cost of existing ODA eligible activities (e.g. already funded by GCRF); small ODA-eligible projects; fellowships to ODA-eligible researchers; and to increase collaboration and impact. 53 ODA-eligible countries have been reported as benefiting from the funded work, with Brazil and India the most frequently mentioned. By region, the largest number of projects were based in the LDC’s (Least Developed Countries) in Asia, South America, and East Africa, with only a few projects in the middle-income countries such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Georgia.

ODA BEIS analysts - cross-cutting for both ODA funds

DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

ODA BEIS analysts. For the monitoring and evaluation and learning for NF and GCRF

AMS Coherence and Impact - Global Health Policy Workshops

DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

Researchers play an important role in driving sustainable impacts on health and welfare by participating in policy development. In many LMICs, poverty correlates with poor health; we are working with partners in LMICs to convene researchers and stakeholders to generate independent, expert health policy advice, based on evidence from research.

Royal Academy of Engineering Core - Africa Catalyst

DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

GCRF Africa Catalyst aims to strengthen professional engineering bodies in sub-Saharan Africa so that they can effectively promote the profession, share best practice and increase local engineering capacity, to help drive development. This is supported by high-quality research focusing on expanding the evidence base for the importance of robust engineering institutions and the role they play in delivering sustainable growth, and mapping engineering capacity and diversity in sub-Saharan Africa.

Royal Academy of Engineering Core - Higher Education Partnerships in Sub-Saharan Africa

DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

The Higher Education Partnerships in sub-Saharan Africa Programme (HEP SSA) – supported by the Anglo American Group Foundation and the UK Government through the Global Challenges Research Fund – was established by the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2016, following the successful pilot scheme, Enriching Engineering Education Programme. COVID-19

Royal Academy of Engineering Core - Frontiers of Engineering for Development

DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

Frontiers of Engineering for Development is a series of interdisciplinary symposia that facilitates national and international collaboration to tackle global development challenges. The event brings together a select group of around 60 emerging UK and global engineering and international development leaders from industry and academia to discuss pioneering technical work and cutting-edge research for international development from a diversity of engineering fields. Seed funding is available to progress some of the best ideas coming out of the event. COVID-19

Novel low cost diagnostic tools and their impact in Africa

DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

Point of care testing is fundamental in delivering health and economic sustainability in the Global South. Our project will enable low cost, effective and accurate diagnosis of, in the first instance, two infectious diseases, namely malaria and schistosomiasis. This will be achieved using a novel very low cost paper diagnostic method that is able to quantify the infectious agent's DNA in a patient sample in a multiplexed assay. The platform will allow the measurement of several diseases at the same time, thereby increasing the efficiency of healthcare provision in often hard to reach settings, as well as establishing the species of the infectious agent (e.g. malaria), which will provide actionable information to healthcare professionals, where drugs have different levels of activity for different species, thus helping in reducing the potential emergence/increase of drug resistance. We have already demonstrated the potential for these low cost assays as being both sensitive and specific and we now wish to develop new engineering approaches to improve their performance (in terms of their speed and ease of use) and evidence their impact so that they can find widespread application in both rural and urban environments in Uganda and Sierra Leone, and other endemic countries. As the assays are sensitive and quantitative, they have the potential to be used not only in the treatment of individuals, but also in eradication programmes, such as those advocated by the London 2020 accord, enabling the surveillance of disease re/emergence. To help communicate the value of repeated treatments, we plan to develop new engagement tools based upon a novel mobile phone imaging platform that enables patients to visualise the infectious agent in a sample, and to see the outcome of interventions (whether these be through drug administration or physical/cultural changes such as access to improved sanitation or bed nets). We also propose to measure the impact of our novel diagnostic and imaging platforms by collection of suitable, realistic, logistically feasible metrics, and the potential impacts (including resources, health outcomes, employment, income) of the interventions. We will also feed these into newly developed and parameterised economic models to predict the long-term benefits specific interventions may have. Finally, integral to the proposed research is an ambitious programme of impact, which includes public engagement over infectious disease diagnosis and STEM and capacity strengthening. We will also explore routes to delivery of the technologies both in the UK, where the provision of low-cost point-of-care diagnostics is of significant interest (through our industrial partners), and in LMICs. Our ambition is to explore whether, through not-for-profit business planning, we can develop the correct interactions with Governments, Hospitals and Charities/NGOs, to test whether we are able to scale the manufacturing of these devices, such that they can be made in Africa, for Africa, by Africans.

Regionalism in East Africa c. 1900 to the present

DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

This project will undertake the first comprehensive historical study of regionalism in East Africa in the twentieth century. Ideas about formal political and economic integration among the various territories of East Africa have a deep history in the region, dating back to the colonial period, and currently manifested in the institutions of the (second) East African Community, an intergovernmental organisation comprised of six eastern African states: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan. Partly owing to this deep and continuing history, East African regionalism has often been seen as a beacon of effective regional integration in Africa, and assertions of a powerful sense of common regional identity - even destiny - have been an important part of the official rhetoric of the EAC over several decades. But the extent to which regional integration has delivered positive public outcomes or alternatively simply served the interests of a small regional elite in East Africa remains hotly contested (reflecting broader global debates on this issue). This project will engage this central question within both a regional and global setting, examining the origins, character and outcomes of regional integration initiatives as the product both of East African internal dynamics as well as of interlinked global structures and processes (colonialism, decolonisation, global regionalisms, and neo-liberalism). In so doing it will fill a major lacunae in the current scholarly literature on the history and politics of East Africa, moving beyond methodological nationalism to write a history of attempts at building region alongside nation. More broadly, the persistence of regionalism as a political and economic phenomenon in East Africa over time also makes the region an excellent case for examining and historicising wider debates around regionalism in Africa and the world. This project, which builds on a successfully completed pilot study (British Academy funded - regional integration in 1960s-70s East Africa) brings together a team of historians and political scientists to examine a) the colonial origins of integration projects - ideas of 'closer union' and federation that were debated amongst settlers and colonial officials in British East Africa during the first half of the twentieth century, alongside the establishment of regional institutions by the British b) ideas of federation and 'community' that emerged among nationalists and East African publics in the years of decolonisation and independence, c) the establishment and collapse of the first East African Community between 1965 and 1977 d) the revival and expansion of the East African Community from the 1990s to the present. Throughout we will focus on key themes including a) the shifting intellectual content of regionalist visions (pan-Africanism; federalism; state-led developmentalism; neo-liberalism) b) the politics of integration in the context of intra-regional relations more broadly c) the (uneven) economic impact of regional integration d) the role of external actors in shaping regional integration projects, and the role of local elite agency in mediating or transforming external interventions e) continuities and changes in the above themes over time. The research will utilise archival documentation, press material, official reports and interviews with figures involved in regional integration to produce academic and non-academic outputs that will make a major contribution to academic debate on global regionalisms and to policy discussions on the future of regional integration in East Africa.

Harnessing the power of global data to support young children's learning and development: Analyses, dissemination and implementation

DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

The 2017 Lancet Series, Advancing Early Childhood Development: From Science to Scale, estimated that 43% of children under 5 years in LMICs (250m children), were at risk of not reaching their potential because they had stunted linear growth or lived in extreme poverty. The proportion of children at risk increases appreciably when additional risk factors are considered, especially low maternal schooling and child maltreatment. Living in poor and unstimulating conditions affects young children's learning and development. Children exposed to poverty and adversity explore and learn less than children not exposed to these stresses; they learn less at school and achieve fewer school grades; earn less as adults; have more social problems, and poorer physical and mental health. We will study barriers and accelerators to learning in LMIC ECE programmes, at home and in communities, as well as associations between early learning and indicators of child development and school performance. We will estimate their longer-term effects on education and earnings in adulthood. We will use descriptive and statistical analyses of secondary data collected through representative country surveys and research studies. As an established group of multi-disciplinary and multi-country experts and collaborators, we build on prior success in sourcing and analysing data from 91 LMICs by including early education and expanding to 137 countries. Global data, presented along the continuum of the early years, breaks down the false dichotomy between ECD and ECE, between care and education, and between learning at home and in formal programmes, and supports multi-sectoral actions along different stages of the life-course. We will expand our global analyses of threats to ECD by examining gender, location and wealth, services and family supports for young children, and policies that create facilitating environments for families and children. We will, for the first time, link indicators of the structural quality of ECE (eg teacher-child ratios) to contexts and child outcomes in LMICs. Process quality (eg teacher- and caregiver-child interactions), on which there is as yet no global data, will be studied through case studies in 5 countries, one in each of five regions of the world. We will source data on government, development assistance and household expenditures on pre-primary education; extract further country micro-data on contexts in which young children develop and learn; update nationally representative data on young children, services and policies to the most recent survey dates available, and develop new composite indicators of barriers and accelerators of young children's learning and development. Through partnerships with regional networks of ECD-ECE government and stakeholder teams, the project will help to build research capacity in ECD-ECE, and increase the use of data for decision-making, action and monitoring in 20 countries. We will use the results to provide evidence-based support to engage international human rights law, especially the right to education and the rights of the child, in advancing progress towards achieving the SDG goals of universal access by 2030. This research will address the gap in the evidence base for a unified approach to ECD and ECE. The findings will support the development of the right to education by providing a holistic approach to guide early development and educational interventions. It will demonstrate the strength of interdisciplinary work in cross-fertilizing data analysis and legal research in building strong foundations for translation into policy and regulatory change. Given the evidence on the critical roles of ECD-ECE on learning and wellbeing in the short, medium and longer term, the project has important implications for development and welfare in countries on the DAC list. This large-scale global approach is critical to support and guide policy and investments.