Private Enterprise Development in Low-Income Countries (PEDL) is a joint research initiative of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and the Department For International Development (DFID). It offers a competitive research grants scheme for projects related to the behaviour of firms in Low-Income Countries (LICs) that aim to better understand what determines the strength of market forces driving efficiency in these countries.
Since the launch of the initiative in December 2011, 80 Exploratory Grants, 29 Major Grants and 41 Special Exploratory Grants have been awarded, ranging from business transformation in low-income countries to market incentives and efficiency.
An important criterion for funding of grant proposals is their relevance to policy in Low-Income Countries (LICs) and other eligible countries as defined by the PEDL programme. For more information on our grants, please see our Funding page.
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.
One of PEDL’s objectives concerns building the community of scholars working on the above mentioned issues, so applications and proposals from Ph.D students are highly welcome. As a result, these grants can be extremely useful for talented Ph.D students planning to work in development or needing funds for their dissertation.
Grant set-up:
Exploratory Research Grant (ERG) projects will run for 12 months.
Please note that contracts will be signed 3 months after the application deadline, which is also the expected start date for the projects.
Contracts are generally signed with the researcher directly; we do not anticipate any institutional involvement.
For further information on ERGs, please consult the FAQs.
Criteria:
Please note that an important criteria for funding of proposals is the relevance to policy in Low-Income Countries and other eligible countries as defined by the PEDL Programme. See the list of LICs and here.
Please note that South Sudan is also an eligible LIC.
Deadlines:
The deadline for the 21st ERG round is 5pm GMT on October 31, 2016. Applications received after this time will be considered for the 22nd round of the ERGs.
Resources:
How to apply for an Exploratory Grant
Application Templates: