About IDRC
A Crown corporation, we support leading thinkers who advance knowledge and solve practical development problems. We provide the resources, advice, and training they need to implement and share their solutions with those who need them most. In short, IDRC increases opportunities—and makes a real difference in people’s lives.
Working with our development partners, we multiply the impact of our investment and bring innovations to more people in more countries around the world. We offer fellowships and awards to nurture a new generation of development leaders.
What we do
IDRC funds research in developing countries to create lasting change on a large scale.
To make knowledge a tool for addressing pressing challenges, we
- provide developing-country researchers financial resources, advice, and training to help them find solutions to local problems.
- encourage knowledge sharing with policymakers, researchers, and communities around the world.
- foster new talent by offering fellowships and awards.
- strive to get new knowledge into the hands of those who can use it.
In doing so, we contribute to Canada’s foreign policy, complementing the work of Global Affairs Canada, and other government departments and agencies.
Resources
Displaying 161 - 165 of 324Assessing the conditions for recognizing Katkari claims to land, Ambewadi, Maharastra, India
The paper analyzes a workshop to enhance Katkari claims to land, which the tribal people have inhabited for 45 years. Participants felt confident in the findings of the exercise and with their decision to proceed with a petition to village authorities. They also said that the assessment gave them a better sense of their relative power and legitimacy in relation to the issue. The conditions for making a petition for legal title to the hamlet improved during three months, due to shifts in the assessment of power and interests for a number of stakeholders.
Heterogeneity, commons and privatization : agrarian institutional change in Goa
History of events and actions that have harmed or protected Rupa Lake in the Pokhara Valley of Nepal
From forest clearing to landslides, then private claims to ownership, and with diversion of streams causing new landslides, a progression of environmental crises is tracked over time. The paper provides a timeline of 23 major events affecting the health of Rupa Lake and its wetlands (1952-2005). By 1986 government efforts were launched to control flooding and landslides, building check dams and planting trees. A Community Forestry Program to support local ownership and control of forests was begun.
From gray to green : replanting hope in Africa's highlands
In Uganda’s Kabale district, too many people had been trying to make a living from too little land. Because of overpopulation and exhaustion of the soil by intense cultivation, the area had gone into decline. Then, researchers and farmers — supported by the International Development Research Centre — joined forces to revitalize the region.
Fighting desertification and poverty : it's the same war
The people of the Sahel — that huge region stretching along the southern edge of the Sahara Desert — are still striving to recover from the fallout of the terrible droughts that have afflicted the area since 1973. Drought has shattered the momentum of socioeconomic development in Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal. According to researchers with Burkino Faso’s Institut de l’environnement et de recherches agricoles, “Rural men and women are now struggling to survive in a land that is exhausted, denuded, desiccated, and swept away by the wind and water.”