Outputs from the Addressing and Mitigating Violence programme, May 2013 – October 2015

Knowledge and evidence are important elements of all policy processes. While the availability of more or higher quality evidence does not guarantee better policy processes, it is difficult to imagine how development policy and outcomes can be improved without it. In addition to a myriad of development problems, the increasing recognition of diversity, complexity and context means that policy-relevant knowledge and evidence must address different scales of analysis, speak to different audiences and be accessible in a variety of formats. This brochure presents outputs from the Addressing and Mitigating Violence strand of work within an IDS programme entitled Strengthening Evidence-based Policy funded through an Accountable Grant from the UK Department for International Development. Work under the grant privileges the review and synthesis of existing knowledge and evidence over new primary research. The modus operandi is one of ‘co-construction': a broad range of partners have played critical roles in the conception, generation and dissemination of these outputs. Beyond publication, IDS and its partners are actively working to integrate these outputs, and the lessons and recommendations that emerge from them, into policy processes at local, national and global scales. All outputs from this programme, including those that will be produced in the next year, are available through the IDS website (www.ids.ac.uk) and through OpenDocs, the IDS institutional repository (http://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/). If you would like to stay abreast of developments in relation to this work, you can sign up to the IDS newsletter at www.ids.ac.uk/e-alert-signup

Strengthening Accountability for Health Equity at the Institute of Development Studies

This is a pamphlet introducing the IDS Accountability for Health Equity programme.‘Accountability for Health Equity’ is an approach that places relationships of power at the centre of our understanding of how health systems function – or don’t – for all levels of society. Together with our partners, IDS co-produces knowledge on accountability change processes that have the potential to shift health inequities. The ethos of mutual learning is fundamental to our work. This pamphlet introduces the IDS Accountability for Health Equity programme

IDS Annual Review 2020-21

This has been an extraordinary year for the Institute. The Covid-19 pandemic and its health, social, economic and political impacts have created massive disruptions, transforming how people live and organisations function throughout the world. The challenges it has brought to how we at IDS contribute to creating a more equitable and sustainable world, where people everywhere are free from poverty and injustice, have been compounded by the UK Government’s recent cuts to overseas aid. These have been imposed hastily and there can be no doubt that they will have drastic effects. Our strategy drives the structure of this Annual Review, which highlights our progress towards each of our five strategic priorities. We share impact stories from across the Institute that demonstrate our work towards these priorities. Not surprisingly, many of our key impacts this year relate to the pandemic. These include the wide-reaching influence of the Sanitation Learning Hub’s Handwashing Compendium, the Social Science in Humanitarian Action Platform on Covid-19 response, and our work to provide rapid analysis and facilitated learning to the UK Government to support pandemic recovery. Other stories highlight exciting impacts such as large-scale successes in pedagogical advancement in Africa through equitable partnerships, and addressing digital exclusion that is affecting the most marginalised communities in our home city, Brighton, in the UK. We also marked 50 years of collaborative research with pastoralists, whose insights are prompting some major, and timely, rethinking of approaches to land management and climate change

Rapid Report on Timely, Relevant and Actionable Knowledge for the SBM-G

The momentum and scale of the Swachh Bharat Mission – Gramin (SBM-G) is unprecedented. The speed of implementation means that the identification of gaps and finding answers to these in ways that provide practical ideas for policy and practice can have exceptionally widespread impact provided they can be timely, relevant and actionable. The trade-offs between timeliness and the time required for conventional academic rigour are vast. Fortunately, a range of innovations and approaches have recently been developed and applied in India for timely and practical learning on sanitation. WaterAid India and Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Sussex, in co-ordination with The Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation (MDWS), Government of India, held a one-day workshop in Delhi on the 10th October 2017. It brought together SMB-G senior officials as well as representatives from development and knowledge partners including the World Bank, UNICEF, World Health Organisation, WSSCC, 3ie, rice institute, Praxis, Aga Khan Foundation, DevInsights, TARU, NAG-DNT, Public Affairs Centre and the India Sanitation Coalition. The main objectives were to present findings from new timely, relevant and action-orientated research, and to identify gaps and priorities for future rapid investigations with high potential applicability and impact

Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin) Immersive Research

Praxis, the community-led total sanitation (CLTS) Knowledge Hub at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), together with WaterAid, undertook an immersive research project to learn from the experiences of three districts in India that had been declared open defecation free (ODF). The researchers spent three nights and up to four days in each of a total of eight villages in Madhya Pradesh (3), Uttar Pradesh (2) and Rajasthan (3). The mixed gender teams stayed with families, without a specific agenda, learning open-endedly from lived experience, observation and conversations. The main report sums up the key findings and suggests ways to strengthen the Swachh Bharat Mission – Gramin; the policy and practice note presents actionable recommendations; and the methodology note describes the activities, challenges, lessons learnt and guidance for use of the methodology by others