INSTITUTE

Our Institute for Development Research is an independent and non-partisan unit of the Dataville Group which brings together more than 75 independent experts in academia and government from all over the globe who provide the highest quality research, policy recommendations, and analysis on a full range of development and public policy issues.

Our collaboration with researchers, policy makers and international development practitioners help to foster thinkers with well-informed views. Their diverse insights and opinions represent our commitment to advancing knowledge and using rigorous research to find sustainable solutions to international development challenges.

Dataville Group IDR located in Durban is home to 45 research fellows and 25 graduate interns, but our community extends far beyond. Our research tackles the complex and persistent challenges of poverty and development. We take a multidisciplinary approach and work with an international network of partners to develop solutions which we actively seek to see applied in development policy and practice. Our research revolves around Africa; Poverty and Development; Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); Gender and Development;and Aid Challenges.

The world’s largest and most populous continent after Asia, Africa faces some of the world’s most intense development challenges. A continent with great challenges, Africa’s recent history has been marked by political instability, violence and authoritarianism, with post-colonial struggle, ethnic tensions, famine, civil war and environmental challenges all impeding social and economic development. High levels of illiteracy, malnutrition, poor water and sanitation and dismal health indicators make for the worst human development indicators in the world.

But although Africa is often spoken of in terms of crisis and a place of failure and insurmountable problems, it is also a continent of cultural richness and immense diversity. Some countries are making great strides economically. Many more states are democratically governed than was the case twenty years ago. The rate of HIV infection appears to be stabilising and child mortality appears to be declining while primary school completion is improving. Today, Africa is a continent whose economic and social orders and governance structures are undergoing extremely complex transformations.

Capturing these transformations lies at the heart of our IDR’s Africa-related research. Drawing on approaches from anthropology, sociology, political science, ecology and biology, our researchers are currently involved in projects in across the continent. Our research covers topics ranging from the challenges of implementing renewable energies and the socio-cultural aspects of energy, biodiversity, livelihoods and food security, to studies of governance and aid policy and global health issues including immunization, reproductive health and health system development.

Despite the high expectations generated at the start of the 1990s, the past two decades have offered little hope to many poor countries whose populations increasingly find themselves in a complex web of poverty and deprivation. Poverty and inequality appear as resilient as ever and hundreds of millions across the world suffer the daily anguish of deprivation in some form or another, be it the pain of persistent hunger and disease, the absence of adequate health care or the blatant disregard of basic human rights. 1.4 billion people live in poverty, 1.6 billion live without
access to modern energy, 25 per cent of the world’s children suffer from malnutrition and one in six have no supply of clean water.

IDR’s poverty research explores how lives of the African poor are characterised by the lack of capabilities and entitlements to food, health, education, land, natural resources, security and political influence. We are also interested in comparative studies of disparities across countries and regions in terms of income poverty, vulnerability and well-being and issues related to natural resource use and management, climate change, ethics, foreign aid, governance and human rights. Our aim is to study both success stories and failures, including studies of policy formulation and implementation which shed light on why certain poverty reduction strategies succeed in certain contexts and not in others.

In September 2015, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development were adopted by world leaders at a historical UN summit. While the SDGs build on the success of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), they aim to go further to end all forms of poverty. The new SDGs are unique in that they call for action by all countries, poor, rich and middle-income to promote prosperity while protecting the planet. They recognize that ending poverty must go hand-in-hand with strategies that build economic growth and addresses a range of social needs including education, health, social protection, and job opportunities, while tackling climate change and environmental protection.

The SDGs also differ from the MDGs in taking a more consultative approach in the formulation of the goals, and including stakeholders such as civil society and the private sector to a greater extent. Many argue that this has created a greater ownership to the SDGs among various groups, and that Agenda 2030 has created a shared platform for different actors and sectors to work towards the same goals. The role of the private sector has especially been highlighted in 2030 Agenda, as it is widely recognized that none of the goals can be met without a dedicated commitment from the business community.

The 2030 Agenda is not legally binding, but national governments are expected to establish national frameworks for the implementation and monitoring of progress on the 17 goals, which are accompanied by 169 targets. At the heart of the ambitious agenda lies the promise to leave no one behind, but critics have raised concerns of the dangers that the SDGs might only help those who live in states with administrative capacity, the political will to act and a certain sense of social legitimacy.

Research on gender requires an understanding of what women and men do and how they relate to each other, but also an understanding of the ideas, conceptions and socio-material contexts that motivate and organize gender roles. Gender roles, relations and perceptions are challenged by changing global, national and local conditions. Because societies are gendered, the ways women and men, relate to change will be gendered too, even when innovations are conceived of as “gender neutral” and not directed particularly towards men or women. For example, land reforms that are seen as neutral may reproduce or even aggravate gender inequalities when implemented. The same may happen with the introduction of new “gender neutral” technology. Technology cannot be understood independently of social and cultural contexts because, from their production to their uses in everyday life, technologies are intimately tied to human life and the organisation and dynamics of social life, for example in the form of gender division of labour.

This view on social change is associated with an approach that assumes that the variations in organizational forms and cultural patterns are to a large extent the outcome of the different ways in which men and women in a given context organizationally and cognitively deal with new situations and accommodate themselves to changing circumstances. Moreover, it draws the attention to the ways in which individuals and groups can contribute to and indeed modify patterns of local, regional and national development.

The gender research conducted at IDR spans from international gender and development issues to ethnographic studies of male and female identities in changing social and natural environments. It focuses on agriculture, political mobilization, migration, and reproductive health at global and national levels.