Eligibility

This call for proposals is open to applicants from non-governmental organizations, academia, and private and public-sector organizations with a strong research focus. 

We encourage applications from multi-disciplinary consortia of organizations within a country, or across countries, bringing together capacity in terms of community-level or grassroots support, applied research, and national-level advocacy. Given the focus on action research, strong preference will be given to consortia that include organizations engaged in community-based justice work. 

Applicants from the United Nations system may not apply to this call as leads or co-applicants. UN organizations may participate as collaborating organizations. 

Scope

IDRC seeks proposals for action research projects to generate evidence on innovative legal empowerment approaches and experimentation from the field. Lasting three years, the research projects can be either single country studies led by local organizations or multi-country studies led by local organizations across countries. 

Projects should support the generation of knowledge, evidence, and learning on what works, and under what conditions legal empowerment approaches can contribute to achieving systems change, especially for women and vulnerable groups.   

The research will contribute to building a comparative evidence base on how legal empowerment approaches draw on the grassroots and community-level experiences of addressing specific violations and the leadership of those who are directly affected. In particular, we will focus on how legal empowerment approaches can help address the root causes of inequality and exclusion and promote public accountability. 

More details

Online information sessions will be held for interested applicants. 

Register for the Southeast Asia session on March 2, 2021, 10 am, Singapore time. 

Register for the bilingual sub-Saharan Africa session on March 2, 2021, 4 pm, Eastern Africa time. 

For more information, please read the detailed call for proposal.  

Interested in applying?