The Feed the Future Advancing Local Leadership, Innovation and Networks (ALL-IN) program, a collaborative research grant program between the MRR Innovation Lab and the International Center for Evaluation and Development (ICED) and funded by USAID announces a call for research proposals from researchers at African institutions to advance host country leadership in defining and implementing research projects.

Selected research projects will further the mission of the MRR Innovation Lab to generate and transfer into action innovations that will bolster resilience, keeping rural individuals, households, communities and markets in positions of economic viability from which they can sustain and accelerate a path of inclusive agricultural growth.

Effectively meeting the mission described above requires shifting the locus of research control to economists in African countries. ALL-IN is designed to provide the historically under-resourced African economic research community the resources it needs to fully engage and further develop and to fully utilize local institutions’ clear pathways to local policy impacts. African researchers will take the lead in defining priorities and will then draw on US university-based mentors for support as needed to enhance their capacity in implementation and management of large-scale research projects.

ALL-IN calls for researchers at African institutions to take the lead in defining priorities within the following thematic areas:

• Resilient Escapes from Poverty: Bundled programs that can have a bigger and more lasting impact on persistent poverty than the sum of their parts.
• Financial and Agronomic Innovations for Inclusive Growth and Resilience: Expanding the potential of insurance, stress-tolerant seeds and other tools to manage the risk of drought, flood or other disasters.
• Resilient Systems for Broadly-based Agricultural Growth: Ensuring that markets and other social systems are competitive and do not bypass women and young people.

The grant selection committee will prioritize proposals that will allow contribute to local policy-relevant research questions in the thematic areas above. Across all our research priorities, we also encourage projects that include deliberate learning objectives related to gender, youth and nutrition either as a primary focus of the research or as a relevant cross-cutting issue(s).

We anticipate that 9-12 awards will be made under this request for proposals with a maximum award amount of $450,000.

In order to encourage researchers with ideas that are promising, but not yet fully developed, we will offer a seed grant funding window. Seed grants will provide modest funding (~$5,000) and other support to allow development of a full proposal in time for submission in November 2020.

• Question and Answer Session #1   16 July, 4 p.m. EAT on Twitter
• Expressions of Interest Deadline:    1 August 2020
• Question and Answer Session #2    20 August, 4 p.m. EAT on Twitter
• Proposal Deadline: 30 August 2020

For the full call for proposals and to apply, visit: https://www.iced-eval.org/call-for-proposal-advancing-local-leadership-innovation-and-network-all-in-research-grant/