International Development Research Centre Research Articles

Innovative financing for commercialisation of technology

This study investigates the innovation financing system supporting technology development and commercialisation in Thailand. The study is based on the findings of the research project funded by Canada’s International Development Research Center (IDRC-CRDI). The paper examines the government policies and financing programmes of major institutions legitimising technology and innovation financing such as the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Science and Technology and Ministry of Industry. The results provide empirical evidence of the innovation financing system and offer useful implications for policy makers in developing economies to promote technology transfer and commercialisation of innovations.

Free Access to Law is it Here to Stay? Good Practices Handbook

This current good practices guide is part of the 'Free Access to Law – Is it Here to Stay?' research project launched in 2009. The project was originally led by LexUM (University of Montreal), SAFLII (The South African Legal Information Institute) and the Centre for Internet and Society (India), with funding from the International Development Research Centre and the Open Society Institute. The outputs of the project are: A research methodology guide; An environmental scan report; A collection of case studies; This present Good Practices Handbook; The Free Access to Law online library providing access to a number of papers on the topic.

Antiretroviral therapy to prevent HIV transmission in serodiscordant couples in China (2003–11): a national observational cohort study

On the basis of the results of the randomised clinical trial HPTN 052 and observational studies, WHO has recommended that antiretroviral therapy be offered to all HIV-infected individuals with uninfected partners of the opposite sex (serodiscordant couples) to reduce the risk of transmission. Whether or not such a public health approach is feasible and the outcomes are sustainable at a large scale and in a developing country setting has not previously been assessed. In this retrospective observational cohort study, we included treated and treatment-naive HIV-positive individuals with HIV-negative partners of the opposite sex who had been added to the national HIV epidemiology and treatment databases between Jan 1, 2003 and Dec 31, 2011. We analysed the annual rate of HIV infection in HIV-negative partners during follow-up, stratified by treatment status of the index partner. Cox proportional hazards analyses were done to examine factors related to HIV transmission. Based on data from 38,862 serodiscordant couples, with 101,295·1 person-years of follow-up for the seronegative partners, rates of HIV infection were 2·6 per 100 person-years (95% CI 2·4-2·8) among the 14,805 couples in the treatment-naive cohort (median baseline CD4 count for HIV-positive partners 441 cells per μl [IQR 314-590]) and 1·3 per 100 person-years (1·2-1·3) among the 24,057 couples in the treated cohort (median baseline CD4 count for HIV-positive partners 168 cells per μl [62-269]). We calculated a 26% relative reduction in HIV transmission (adjusted hazard ratio 0·74, 95% CI 0·65-0·84) in the treated cohort. The reduction in transmission was seen across almost all demographic subgroups and was significant in the first year (0·64, 0·54-0·76), and among couples in which the HIV-positive partner had been infected by blood or plasma transfusion (0·76, 0·59-0·99) or heterosexual intercourse (0·69, 0·56-0·84), but not among couples in which the HIV-positive partner was infected by injecting drugs (0·98, 0·71-1·36). Antiretroviral therapy for HIV-positive individuals in serodiscordant couples reduced HIV transmission across China, which suggests that the treatment-as-prevention approach is a feasible public health prevention strategy on a national scale in a developing country context. The durability and generalisability of such protection, however, needs to be further studied. Chinese Government's 12th Five-Year Plan, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Canadian International Development Research Centre.

IMPACT OF PROJECTED CLIMATE CHANGE ON AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION IN SEMI-ARID AREAS OF TANZANIA: A CASE OF SAME DISTRICT

Thanks to Tanzania Meteorological Agency for provision of long-term climatic data for Same district. This project was funded by the Climate Change Adaptation in Africa (CCAA) programme, a joint initiative of Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID).

La implementación local de la atención primaria en la Argentina: estudio de caso en el municipio de Lanús, provincia de Buenos Aires

Se presentan resultados en Argentina de la segunda etapa de un estudio multicéntrico sobre Atención Primaria en Salud, realizado por la Universidad Nacional de Lanús y por la Red de Investigación en Sistemas y Servicios de Salud del Cono Sur, financiado por el International Development Research Center (Canadá). Se indagó sobre la traducción en servicios, prácticas y procesos de los abordajes y modelos de la Atención Primaria en Salud. Eso es un estudio de caso que aplicó el cuestionario de Evaluación Rápida de Atención Primaria en Salud (Barbara Starfield; adaptación y validación por Almeida/Macinko) a usuarios y profesionales de centros de salud del Municipio de Lanús. Se entrevistó a gestores y fueron realizados talleres participativos. Los resultados señalan que el índice global de desempeño de la Atención Primaria en Salud en el municipio fue satisfactorio, con puntuaciones altas en las dimensiones 'vínculo con profesionales' y 'formación profesional', y bajas en 'acceso' y 'orientación a la comunidad'.

Canada’s International Development Research Centre Launches Program to Fund Non-Communicable Disease Prevention Research in Developing Countries

Canada’s International Development Research Centre Launches Program to Fund Non-Communicable Disease Prevention Research in Developing Countries

Internationalization of information science education in Nigeria

Information and knowledge management have become very crucial to the growth and development of countries around the world, including African countries. This is also true about the importance of information science education. This truth has already been accepted in Africa, including Nigeria, where the joint effort of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) led to the establishment of the Africa Regional Center for Information Science (ARCIS) in 1990. The primary objective set for ARCIS was for it, as a regional Center, to internationalize its processes, functions and curriculum. This paper, relying on both primary and secondary data, examines the issue of internationalization of information science education in Nigeria with practical examples reported from experiences at ARCIS. It highlights current achievements ARCIS has recorded in its internationalization efforts, challenges it faces due to the political experiences in Nigeria and competing needs of units and departments at the University of Ibadan, as well as the prospects of ARCIS internationalization efforts. In the end, it is concluded that the internationalization future for ARCIS is bright.

Equity in financing and use of health care in Ghana, South Africa, and Tanzania: implications for paths to universal coverage

Universal coverage of health care is now receiving substantial worldwide and national attention, but debate continues on the best mix of financing mechanisms, especially to protect people outside the formal employment sector. Crucial issues are the equity implications of different financing mechanisms, and patterns of service use. We report a whole-system analysis--integrating both public and private sectors--of the equity of health-system financing and service use in Ghana, South Africa, and Tanzania. We used primary and secondary data to calculate the progressivity of each health-care financing mechanism, catastrophic spending on health care, and the distribution of health-care benefits. We collected qualitative data to inform interpretation. Overall health-care financing was progressive in all three countries, as were direct taxes. Indirect taxes were regressive in South Africa but progressive in Ghana and Tanzania. Out-of-pocket payments were regressive in all three countries. Health-insurance contributions by those outside the formal sector were regressive in both Ghana and Tanzania. The overall distribution of service benefits in all three countries favoured richer people, although the burden of illness was greater for lower-income groups. Access to needed, appropriate services was the biggest challenge to universal coverage in all three countries. Analyses of the equity of financing and service use provide guidance on which financing mechanisms to expand, and especially raise questions over the appropriate financing mechanism for the health care of people outside the formal sector. Physical and financial barriers to service access must be addressed if universal coverage is to become a reality. European Union and International Development Research Centre.

Trends in selective abortions of girls in India: analysis of nationally representative birth histories from 1990 to 2005 and census data from 1991 to 2011

India's 2011 census revealed a growing imbalance between the numbers of girls and boys aged 0-6 years, which we postulate is due to increased prenatal sex determination with subsequent selective abortion of female fetuses. We aimed to establish the trends in sex ratio by birth order from 1990 to 2005 with three nationally representative surveys and to quantify the totals of selective abortions of girls with census cohort data.We assessed sex ratios by birth order in 0·25 million births in three rounds of the nationally representative National Family Health Survey covering the period from 1990 to 2005. We estimated totals of selective abortion of girls by assessing the birth cohorts of children aged 0-6 years in the 1991, 2001, and 2011 censuses. Our main statistic was the conditional sex ratio of second-order births after a firstborn girl and we used 3-year rolling weighted averages to test for trends, with differences between trends compared by linear regression.The conditional sex ratio for second-order births when the firstborn was a girl fell from 906 per 1000 boys (99% CI 798-1013) in 1990 to 836 (733-939) in 2005; an annual decline of 0·52% (p for trend=0·002). Declines were much greater in mothers with 10 or more years of education than in mothers with no education, and in wealthier households compared with poorer households. By contrast, we did not detect any significant declines in the sex ratio for second-order births if the firstborn was a boy, or for firstborns. Between the 2001 and 2011 censuses, more than twice the number of Indian districts (local administrative areas) showed declines in the child sex ratio as districts with no change or increases. After adjusting for excess mortality rates in girls, our estimates of number of selective abortions of girls rose from 0-2·0 million in the 1980s, to 1·2-4·1 million in the 1990s, and to 3·1-6·0 million in the 2000s. Each 1% decline in child sex ratio at ages 0-6 years implied 1·2-3·6 million more selective abortions of girls. Selective abortions of girls totalled about 4·2-12·1 million from 1980-2010, with a greater rate of increase in the 1990s than in the 2000s.Selective abortion of girls, especially for pregnancies after a firstborn girl, has increased substantially in India. Most of India's population now live in states where selective abortion of girls is common.US National Institutes of Health, Canadian Institute of Health Research, International Development Research Centre, and Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute.

El-AbedOroub, Unprotected: Palestinians in Egypt since 1948, Washington, DC, Institute for Palestine Studies / Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2009, 253 p.

L’ouvrage propose par Oroub El-Abed sur les Palestiniens d’Egypte comble un manque : cette communaute n’avait, en effet, encore jamais fait l’objet d’une etude scientifique de grande ampleur telle que celle entreprise par l’auteur sous les auspices du programme Forced Migration and Refugee Studies de l’Universite americaine au Caire. L’ambition initiale de Oroub El-Abed et de son equipe etait de realiser une enquete de terrain portant sur un echantillon de 300 menages repartis dans 15 gouvern...

Free Access to Law is it Here to Stay? Local Researcher's Methodology Guide

This Methodology Guide was developed collaboratively by the project members of 'Free Access to Law – Is it Here to Stay?' This study was made possible thanks to a grant from the International Development Research Centre as well as support from the Open Society Institute. The 'Free Access to Law – Is it Here to Stay?' project is composed of members from Canada’s LexUM, South Africa’s SAFLII and India’s Centre for Internet and Society.

Designing for youth across the Gulf: Fishbowl on how today's methods, theory and findings can support tomorrow's designs

Designing for youth across the Gulf: Fishbowl on how today's methods, theory and findings can support tomorrow's designs

Strategy evaluation: Experience at the International Development Research Centre

AbstractThis chapter examines how the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) has framed and used strategic evaluations. Drawing from IDRC's experience, the authors look at Henry Mintzberg's ideas on strategy formation, and explore potential implications for evaluation in an organization that resembles what Mintzberg calls an “adhocracy.” The International Development Research Centre is a Canadian Crown Corporation that supports research in developing countries and undertakes evaluative work at different levels: strategic evaluations, program and project evaluation, and ongoing learning. “Strategic” evaluations examine issues that cut across the Centre's 18 programs. They have focused on programming modalities and broad corporate result areas like capacity building and policy influence. In a decentralized, utilization‐focused approach to evaluation, IDRC has taken the view that strategic‐level evaluation requires separate studies, as opposed to rolling up data from program or project evaluations. © Wiley Periodicals, Inc., and the American Evaluation Association.

“Show me your impact”: Evaluating transitional justice in contested spaces

This paper discusses some of the most significant challenges and opportunities for evaluating the effects of programs in support of transitional justice – the field that addresses how post-conflict or post authoritarian societies deal with legacies of wide spread human rights violations. The discussion is empirically grounded in a case study that assesses the efforts of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and one of its Guatemalan partners to evaluate the effects of a museum exposition that is attempting to recast historic memory and challenge racist attitudes in post-conflict Guatemala. The paper argues that despite the increasing trend to fund transitional justice programs, many international aid donors are stuck in traditional and arguably orthodox paradigms of program evaluation. This is having a negative effect not only upon the administration of aid but also upon how transitional justice research is perceived and valued by local populations. The case study experience indicates that there is no perfect evaluation model or approach for evaluating transitional justice programming – only choices to be made by commissioners of evaluation, evaluators, and those being evaluated. These are profoundly influenced by the extreme politics and moral values that define transitional justice settings as contested spaces in which calls to remember the tragic past must be balanced with aspirations to re-build a hopeful future.

Tools for Thoughtful Action: The Role of Ecosystem Approaches to Health in Enhancing Public Health

The intimate interdependence of human health and the ecosystems in which we are embedded is now a commonplace observation. For much of the history of public health, this was not so obvious. After over a century of focus on diseases, their biologic causes and the correction of exposures (clean water and air) and facilitation of responses (immunizations and nutrition), public health discourse shifted to embrace the concept of determinants of health as extending to social, economic and environmental realms. This moved the discourse and science of public health into an unprecedented level of complexity just as public concern about the environment heightened. To address multifactorial, dynamic impacts on health, a new paradigm was needed which would overcome the separation of humans and ecosystems. Ecosystem approaches to health arose in the 1990s from a rich background of intellectual ferment as Canada wrestled with diverse problems ranging from Great Lakes contamination to zoonotic diseases. Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) played a lead role in supporting an international community of scientists and scholars who advanced ecosystem approaches to health. These collective efforts have enabled a shift to a research paradigm that embraces transdisciplinarity, social justice, gender equity, multi-stakeholder participation and sustainability.

Causes of neonatal and child mortality in India: a nationally representative mortality survey

More than 2·3 million children died in India in 2005; however, the major causes of death have not been measured in the country. We investigated the causes of neonatal and child mortality in India and their differences by sex and region. The Registrar General of India surveyed all deaths occurring in 2001-03 in 1·1 million nationally representative homes. Field staff interviewed household members and completed standard questions about events that preceded the death. Two of 130 physicians then independently assigned a cause to each death. Cause-specific mortality rates for 2005 were calculated nationally and for the six regions by combining the recorded proportions for each cause in the neonatal deaths and deaths at ages 1-59 months in the study with population and death totals from the United Nations. There were 10,892 deaths in neonates and 12,260 in children aged 1-59 months in the study. When these details were projected nationally, three causes accounted for 78% (0·79 million of 1·01 million) of all neonatal deaths: prematurity and low birthweight (0·33 million, 99% CI 0·31 million to 0·35 million), neonatal infections (0·27 million, 0·25 million to 0·29 million), and birth asphyxia and birth trauma (0·19 million, 0·18 million to 0·21 million). Two causes accounted for 50% (0·67 million of 1·34 million) of all deaths at 1-59 months: pneumonia (0·37 million, 0·35 million to 0·39 million) and diarrhoeal diseases (0·30 million, 0·28 million to 0·32 million). In children aged 1-59 months, girls in central India had a five-times higher mortality rate (per 1000 livebirths) from pneumonia (20·9, 19·4-22·6) than did boys in south India (4·1, 3·0-5·6) and four-times higher mortality rate from diarrhoeal disease (17·7, 16·2-19·3) than did boys in west India (4·1, 3·0-5·5). Five avoidable causes accounted for nearly 1·5 million child deaths in India in 2005, with substantial differences between regions and sexes. Expanded neonatal and intrapartum care, case management of diarrhoea and pneumonia, and addition of new vaccines to immunisation programmes could substantially reduce child deaths in India. US National Institutes of Health, International Development Research Centre, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, and US Fund for UNICEF.

Canada's perceived lack of leadership on global tobacco control

The International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada’s leading institution of innovation and research in global health, recently revealed that the Chair of its Board, Barbara McDougall, was also a tobacco industry executive from 2004 until April 2010, stepping down only after African

Turkey's New Kurdish Opening: Religious Versus Secular Values

Middle East PolicyVolume 17, Issue 2 p. 152-165 Turkey's New Kurdish Opening: Religious Versus Secular Values Murat Somer, Murat Somer Associate professor of international relations at Koç University, IstanbulSearch for more papers by this authorEvangelos G. Liaras, Evangelos G. Liaras Post-doctoral fellow at Koç University, Istanbul.Search for more papers by this author Murat Somer, Murat Somer Associate professor of international relations at Koç University, IstanbulSearch for more papers by this authorEvangelos G. Liaras, Evangelos G. Liaras Post-doctoral fellow at Koç University, Istanbul.Search for more papers by this author First published: 09 June 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4967.2010.00445.xCitations: 22 The substance of this paper was presented at the Middle East Studies Association annual meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, November 2009. The authors would like to thank the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa, Canada, and Tübitak in Ankara, Turkey, for funding, and Michael Gunter for comments. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Citing Literature Volume17, Issue2Summer 2010Pages 152-165 RelatedInformation

The Politics of Trade: The Role of Research in Trade Policy and Negotiation edited by Diana Tussie Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers for the International Development Research Center, 2009

The Politics of Trade: The Role of Research in Trade Policy and Negotiation edited by Diana Tussie Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers for the International Development Research Center, 2009 - Volume 9 Issue 2

International Development and Research Capacities: Increasing Access to African Scholarly Publishing

This paper examines the evolving relationship between Canada and the African academic research community through the promotion of a concept known as Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) and with an eye to its implications for increasing the circulation of research through such means as open access (OA) publishing models. We analyze the programmatic discourse of Canada’s International Development Research Centre’s (IDRC) African research initiatives, and report on an IDRC research and development project assessing the means of increasing access to African scholarly journals through the use of open source software platforms and open access publishing and archiving models. Consistent with IDRC’s multi-year effort to contribute directly to university-based research capacities by investing in ICT infrastructure in Africa, our survey of African editors, librarians, and faculty from five African nations reveals a similar interest in developing those capacities, despite numerous challenges, through the use of online publishing systems and OA publishing models, which hold some promise of increasing access to research published in Africa.