British Academy fosters international collaboration in the humanities and social sciences and promotes the sharing of international perspectives on global challenges.

Cities and Infrastructure

The Cities & Infrastructure Programme funded interdisciplinary research projects that addressed the challenge of creating and maintaining sustainable and resilient cities, with the aim of informing relevant policies and interventions in developing countries. The programme was run by the British Academy on behalf of all the National Academies.

Early Childhood Development

The purpose of this interdisciplinary research programme is to fund the evidence that will inform the policies and interventions capable of transforming the life chances and destinies of children in their early years in lower- and middle-income countries. The programme is joint-funded by GCRF and DFID. It focuses on:

• supporting innovative interdisciplinary research projects and partnerships, including with practitioners;
• advancing cross learning between disciplines and building our understanding of how existing interventions contribute to child development outcomes;
• addressing key questions around how to implement and scale cost-effective early childhood development, including how to work with government systems where appropriate;
• expanding the research base in countries and populations with high unmet need and low research capacity.

Early Childhood Education

The projects funded under this programme aim to provide critical knowledge to inform policy-making in the education and broader learning domain, while recognising the necessary interplay of education with health, nutrition, gender equality and other disciplines and sectors.

Education & Learning in Crises

This programme funds research exploring the challenges of education and learning in contexts of conflict and protracted crises. It supports research in the following areas:

• Enhancing understanding of the role of education and learning in responding to and fashioning novel ways for coping and/or transforming children’s opportunities and outcomes in crisis settings, particularly those in the longer-term and including natural as well as man-made crises.
• Building the evidence base of how education and learning take place and are affected during and through crisis situations, including particular attention to the importance of local context and practice in this regard, and what implications this entails for learning, parenting, schooling and communities.
• Investigating how crises particularly affect the education and learning of children and their families of hidden populations, marginalised people including girls and women, and populations on the move.

GCRF Challenge-led Grants

This scheme, led by the Royal Society on behalf of the National Academies, provides funding to support research consortia involving groups in the UK and developing countries to address Global Challenges with a focus on resilience.

Heritage, Dignity and Violence

This programme funds research on sustainable peace and the prevention of violence broadly understood.

The projects funded under this programme demonstrate an innovative and interdisciplinary approach yielding new conceptual understandings, developing ground-breaking research and energising innovative collaborations in the humanities and social sciences.

Sustainable Development Programme

This programme funds excellent, policy-oriented research, aimed at addressing the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and advancing the UK’s Aid Strategy. Supported by the Government’s £1.5 billion Global Challenges Research Fund, it provides funding to researchers in the humanities and the social sciences working to generate evidence on the challenges and opportunities faced in developing countries.

Urban Infrastructures of Well-being

This programme aims to support interdisciplinary research that explores how formal and informal infrastructures interact to affect the well-being of people in cities across the Global South. The projects aim to:

• Deliver research excellence with development impact;
• Strengthen the evidence base on what works at the critical junctions of formal and informal infrastructures, including what works in different contexts;
• Provide insights to enable new approaches to infrastructure development and innovative directions in implementation by policy makers and practitioners.

Youth Futures

This ongoing programme aims to examine the contributions of young people to the UN’s 2030 Agenda, bringing a youth lens to the global sustainable development challenges.

Projects funded under this programme involve genuine interdisciplinarity, collaborative work that extends beyond the standard research model, and policy thinking based on close understanding of, and working with, young people at various stages of ‘getting by’.

GCRF Resilient Futures Initiative 

The British Academy works with the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Academy of Medical Sciences to deliver several other GCRF programmes as part of the Academies’ GCRF Resilient Futures Initiative. These programmes include the GCRF Networking Grants, led by the Academy of Medical Sciences but open to applicants across all academy disciplines, and the series of interdisciplinary and international Frontiers of Development symposia led by the Royal Academy of Engineering.