Exploratory Grants

PEDL will support approaches that promise to produce credible research results that will be useful for policy-making. It will promote research related to private enterprises of all sizes and will initially focus on four research themes:

  • Modelling market frictions in LICs using newly available data
  • Understanding how constraints interact using micro-founded macro models
  • The dynamics of SMEs: Informality and entrepreneurship
  • The role of export-oriented industries in driving growth

Proposals that address the following cross-cutting issues will be encouraged.

  • Fragile and conflict affected states
  • Gender
  • Climate, environment and social compliance

Exploratory Grants are research grants of between £10,000 and £35,000 that are designed to allow researchers to:

  • explore new approaches to the study of firms in low-income-countries (LICs); and
  • to develop new (or build on) existing sources of data on firms in LICs.

Proposals for Exploratory Grants can be submitted at any time and will generally run for 12 months.

Criteria:

Please note that an important criteria for funding of proposals is the relevance to policy in Low-Income Countries and other elegible countries as defined by the PEDL Programme. See the list of LICs here and additional information available our FAQ page .

Please note that South Sudan also counts as an eligible LIC.

Deadlines:

Next deadline for Exploratory Grants: 31st May, 2013 17:00 BST (Applications received by this date will be reviewed in June 2013)

Resources:

How to apply for an Exploratory Grant

Application Templates:

For successful researchers: