The Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF) is pleased to announce its seventh call for proposals on using technology to advance learning and skill development among vulnerable children, adolescents, and youth.
In many contexts around the world, children, adolescents, and youth face enormous obstacles when it comes to learning and skill development. War, protracted conflict, and displacement cut off regular access to classrooms; they also generate toxic levels of stress that can directly impede learning. Climate hazards and natural disasters disrupt access to school and learning within classrooms. Children with special needs and disabilities often cannot benefit from the infrastructure, pedagogical approaches, and learning materials offered through education systems in low- and middle-income countries.
Through this current call for proposals, SIEF will continue to build research that is both rigorous and relevant for policy. The focus of this seventh call for proposals will be on:
- the use of technology to accelerate learning and skill development among children, adolescents, or youth who have been displaced from their homes or who are living in contexts characterized by fragility, violence, or conflict;
- the use of technology to accelerate learning and skill development among children with special needs or disabilities;
- the use of technology to understand how to protect the learning of children, adolescents, or youth from climate hazards or decrease the sensitivity of learning to these hazards.
SIEF welcomes proposals from researchers within and outside the World Bank, and in the first stage of application screening, external researchers can submit applications. Because SIEF is a Bank-executed trust fund, however, each full (second stage) proposal must be submitted by a World Bank regular employee who is accredited to serve as the task team leader (TTL), and the award is made to the TTL’s unit. These task team leaders provide fiduciary oversight for SIEF funds and, at the same time, increase the likelihood that governments engage with evaluation results. They also ensure that both intervention and evaluation designs will deliver evidence that countries will find useful. The section on How to apply below details how external researchers can be paired with World Bank task team leaders.
While only World Bank task team leaders can submit full proposals to SIEF, each proposal must have at least one experienced researcher dedicated to the evaluation. 2 This researcher can be a current staff member of the World Bank or can be an external researcher who will eventually be hired as an individual (as a World Bank short-term consultant) if the proposal turns out to be successful. No universities or research organizations or firms can participate in SIEF’s call for proposals, as it is not a procurement process. Moreover, if a researcher collaborates with a task team leader on a proposal, any organization, firm, or institution that also compensates that researcher will not be eligible to be contracted as a vendor or receive any payments from the World Bank for any evaluation activities. Instead, a vendor will be selected competitively according to World Bank procurement rules. For researchers accustomed to applying for grants that go to their respective institutions, this is an important difference to be aware of.