Research Grants for Women’s Economic Empowerment and Digital Financial Inclusion.
Request for Proposals – Women’s Economic Empowerment and Digital Financial Inclusion (WEE-DiFine) Research Initiative.
WEE-DiFine, a Brac Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) led initiative made possible through funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is requesting proposals for research projects that enhance the understanding of the role of digital financial services in the economic empowerment of women by generating evidence on the causal mechanisms between the two.
This call for proposals is dedicated to funding for the following categories:
Large-scale Greenfield Evaluations:
Intended for greenfield projects explicitly designed on strong theoretical grounding to target key questions in the initiative’s research agenda.
- Extensions to Existing Studies: Intended to add extensions to existing experimental research designs that would yield results of central relevance to the initiative’s research agenda.
- Researchers often lack the funding for accommodating the necessary sample size that would allow decomposing the mechanisms mediating the impacts of interventions, particularly in randomized control trials (RCTs) for impact evaluations.
Alternatively, researchers may not have the budget to effectively include a sufficiently large strata of women in an experimental sample, particularly in cases where women are less represented than men.
This tier of funding will enable researchers to add additional intervention arms, female strata to samples and/or other extensions to existing study designs, enabling researchers to investigate mechanisms influencing women’s economic empowerment.
This tier of award is expected to yield results more quickly than funding for new projects, enabling funding to be distributed more evenly across the duration of the Initiative.
As such, funding will be awarded to proposals that clearly focus on adding
survey rounds or samples to current studies or adding a WEE-DiFine targeted treatment arm to an existing study.
Funding Information
- Large-scale Greenfield Evaluations: The maximum award amount for this grant type is USD 500,000.
Extensions to Existing Studies: The maximum award amount for this grant type is USD 200,000.Regional Focus: WEE-DiFine will support empirical research studies in South Asia, particularly in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, as well as countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Eligibility Criteria
- Researchers working in higher education institutes or other non-profit research institutes are eligible to apply for funding though their institute.Graduate students working with a research adviser are also eligible to apply.
- They will only accept proposals submitted by an individual researcher who is not institutionally affiliated in exceptional circumstances in which the researcher has a demonstrated record of high quality research.
- A single institution is allowed to submit multiple proposals during the same call for proposals.A single researcher can also be included in more than one proposal.
If multiple proposals are submitted, the researcher and/or institutions involved should have the capacity to conduct the research according to the proposed timelines.
- Institutions can apply as a single institution as well as in partnership with multiple institutions.In case of a partnership, one institution must be identified as the lead institution, which will be responsible for submitting the proposal.
Only the lead institute will have a contract with BIGD and will be responsible for the successful delivery of the project.
Apply by 25th November.
For more Information and Application Details see;
Research Grants for Women’s Economic Empowerment and Digital Financial Inclusion