Preface: In this interview we speak with Shahid Vaziralli, Head of the Research Programme at the International Growth Centre (IGC). Here he discusses the IGC’s Resident Fellowship, how its funding supports transformative change in partner countries, and what it actually takes to turn research into policy.
Tell us about the founding and primary goals of the International Growth Centre (IGC).
The International Growth Centre came into being in 2008 as a joint venture of the London School of Economics and Oxford University, funded by UK International Development from the UK Government. It was set up to help governments tackle some of the hardest questions around economic growth by bringing rigorous research to inform them.
In practice, the world of policy is not as neat as the one in which a paper is written. Governments make decisions with incomplete data and under time pressure, while contending with institutional inertia, political realities and competing interests. The evidence may be hard to come by or non-existent. Sometimes the problem is not generating more evidence, but putting in place the relationships and institutions that allow governments to use it.
We try to work in that space. Our aim is to push the frontiers of knowledge on growth and see that knowledge tested in real decisions. There is a sweet spot in research that is both independent and academically rigorous, yet still addresses something a government needs to know. We are not simply dispensing advice or funding research for its own sake; we are trying to connect the two.
What is your role with the IGC?
I am the Head of the Research Programme. Much of what I do is work out how to take fairly broad questions on economic growth and shape them into a portfolio of work that is coherent, rigorous and useful.
That means working with our Research Directors and the wider academic community, as well as with country teams and policy counterparts. We look for gaps in knowledge and commission work to fill them, while building partnerships with researchers internationally and in the countries where we operate. I also think about how individual projects relate to one another rather than letting each study stand alone.
I probably give as much thought to the mechanics around research as to the research itself. Who is posing the question? Can the researcher get the data they need? Does someone in government actually want the answer? And when the study is done, what happens next? These may sound like administrative concerns, but they are fundamental if you want research to have any impact.
What makes IGC’s approach to turning research into policy different from that of other development research organisations?
If I had to single out one thing, it would be the way we give research and policy equal standing in our model.
There is a tendency to assume the hard part is the research and that getting a policymaker to act on it follows naturally. But they are separate challenges. An excellent paper can have no bearing on policy if it tackles the wrong question, comes too late or lacks the necessary institutional connections.
Our country teams are invaluable in this respect. They tell us what governments are actually dealing with, rather than what we might suppose from London. When that insight is combined with the international research network we have at our disposal, the model does what it is supposed to do.
Take the Ghana Commodity Exchange. IGC’s role was not a case of one study leading to a policy shift. It began with research on whether commodity exchanges could address market and information failures, then moved into implementation and evaluation with policymakers, followed by further experimentation. Over roughly a decade, we supported seven projects around the Exchange.
That is often how change happens. The research matters, but so do timing, relationships, persistence and a willingness to iterate.
Give us more detail about the IGC’s Resident Fellowship. What is the goal of the program, and what makes a strong application for the Fellowship?
The Fellowship is as much about changing who does the research as it is about the research itself.
Working with our university partners in-country, we place outstanding early-career economists close to important policy problems, often inside government institutions. An IGC network researcher is then paired with them to provide academic mentorship, from shaping the question through to analysis and, we hope, a strong research paper.
Proximity is important. A fellow based in a statistics office or ministry of finance has access to data and questions that are difficult to see from a university half a world away. We have had pilot fellows in the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and the finance ministries of Ethiopia and Ghana, among others.
So we are not looking only for technical proficiency. A strong applicant also needs intellectual curiosity and an eye for an interesting question inside a messy policy problem.
More broadly, this is a deliberate shift in our model. We do not think development economics should be dominated by researchers in richer countries deciding what poorer countries need answered. Much more of the intellectual agenda should come from the places where we work.
How does IGC make decisions about funding allocation between long-term research, rapid-response policy advice, and country-level engagement?
There is no formula for it; context and timing determine the value of any piece of work.
Our commissioning process is built around two tests. The first is academic: is the methodology sound, is the question important and can the research add something new? Our Research Directors and other academic reviewers are central to that. The second is demand. Our country teams and policy partners ask whether anyone actually needs the work, whether the political window is open, whether the data is available and whether the findings could plausibly influence a decision.
I am most drawn to projects that pass both tests.
We keep our funding instruments varied for that reason. Some questions require a major multi- year project, while a modest grant may be enough to unlock a dataset, test an idea or respond quickly to government demand. I prefer having a number of different bets in the portfolio rather than a few very large ones.
My advice to applicants is to put the problem before the method. We are less interested in a technically neat answer to a question of little consequence than in a difficult, important question where research can make a difference.
How does IGC measure the connection between funding of research and transformational change in partner countries? Relatedly, how do you assess ROI when the impact of research may not become visible for several years?
We have become much more careful about the language of attribution. Saying that ‘this paper caused this reform’ makes for a neat story, but it rarely does justice to policymaking. A research project seldom brings about change on its own; ministers and civil servants matter, as do political incentives, institutions and often simple persistence.
Our focus is therefore on the pathway. Did the research introduce a new idea? Was it taken up by an institution or process? Did it affect implementation? Was it scaled? Did it leave behind data, systems or relationships that lasted beyond the original project?
In Sierra Leone, IGC-supported work helped Freetown move from an outdated property-tax valuation system to a digitised, city-wide one with new administrative infrastructure. Revenue tripled in the first year, assessed liabilities rose substantially, and the work went on to inform reforms elsewhere in the country.
Putting a neat financial figure on the ROI of something like that would miss much of the point. Research produces public goods in the form of data, human capital and knowledge whose value can take years to emerge. We take impact measurement seriously, but we do not pretend every meaningful outcome can be reduced to a ratio.
Tell us more about how IGC collaborates with country teams and local policy-makers. What best practices have you identified for implementing these multi-stakeholder research programs?
The most important lesson is to treat relationships as infrastructure.
You cannot walk into a ministry at the start of a crisis and expect to become a trusted source of evidence three weeks later. The value of our country model lies in what is not always visible in normal times: repeated contact, trust between researchers and policymakers, knowing where decisions are made and understanding which datasets are available.
COVID-19 demonstrated the value of that infrastructure. In March 2020 we were able to reorient a large share of our work towards the pandemic. Country teams were fielding urgent questions from governments while we commissioned rapid research and produced work on issues ranging from lockdowns and livelihoods to social protection and the use of data. We did not wait for the normal academic cycle to play out before producing policy guidance.
Our work on social protection spoke directly to a central problem governments faced: how do you reach vulnerable households in an informal economy where conventional welfare systems have limited reach? COVID was an extreme case, but the lesson is broader. Research systems have to be able to move at something closer to the speed of policy.
How does IGC manage the risks involved in funding innovative research focusing on complex issues such as poverty alleviation and sustainable development?
We accept that failure is part of research. A portfolio with no failures is probably not taking enough intellectual risk.
We manage our work more like a portfolio than by selecting a few supposed winners. Small grants can test whether an idea is viable, whether a dataset exists or whether a government partnership is likely to hold before larger sums are committed. Methodologies can fail, data access can disappear and political windows can close.
A negative result is not necessarily a failure. Showing that a popular intervention does not work can be valuable if it prevents scarce public money being wasted.
The harder risk is often institutional. Is there genuine ownership of the question? Do the researchers understand the political economy around the reform? That is why we put so much weight on local knowledge and policy demand when commissioning work. We are willing to take research risk, but have little appetite for research detached from the institutional reality in which it is meant to matter.
What are some of IGC’s most significant achievements?
There is a scale story first. Over its history, IGC has funded around 2,500 research projects. Our systems contain roughly 4,400 proposals and reviews, 399 peer-reviewed publications, and close to 1,700 recorded instances of policy impact. Those figures show that this is not simply a collection of unconnected research projects. Over time, we have built a substantial body of knowledge and experience about what it takes for research to inform policy.
But the individual cases are more revealing.
Take the Ghana Commodity Exchange that I had mentioned earlier. IGC invested nearly £500,000 across seven connected projects over roughly a decade, taking an idea from understanding market failures through design, implementation and evaluation. The Exchange was formally launched in 2018 and has since become a national institution with warehouses across the country. The point is not that an IGC paper ‘created’ the Exchange. Rather, sustained research, relationships with policymakers and repeated iteration helped the idea take root.
Or consider the Economic Growth Forum in Uganda. A joint initiative with the Ministry of Finance launched in 2017, it is now an established venue for government and researchers to debate major growth questions. IGC has supported seven forums, two projects and a book around it. What stands out is that the lasting product is not simply another research paper, but an institution for bringing evidence into policymaking.
In Sierra Leone, our work on property taxation in Freetown shows what can happen when research gets close to the machinery of government. It contributed to a far more systematic approach to valuation and administration. In one experiment, making taxpayers more aware of the public services their taxes support increased property-tax payments by around 20%.
Still, I would say one of IGC’s greatest achievements lies in the people and relationships we have built. Development research is sometimes described as a pipeline: researchers produce evidence and policymakers make better policy. Anyone who has done the work knows it is rarely that simple. Our researchers want to be rigorous and independent while also understanding the institutions they study. Our country teams respect the evidence while being realistic about the constraints governments face.
A small project builds trust. Trust can unlock better data, which can lead to a more important research question and another policy relationship. That cumulative infrastructure is what matters most to me.
What are IGC’s main goals and ambitions for the next few years?
In many respects, the next phase is about changing how development research is done.
Localisation is a priority. We want the countries in which we work to have a much stronger hand in shaping the research agenda, through deeper university partnerships, Resident Fellowships, more locally based researchers and greater influence for country teams over what gets commissioned.
We also want to be more systematic about demand. Rather than starting with a supply of research ideas and then looking for where they fit, we want to begin with the problems governments are trying to solve and bring the best research to bear on them.
Speed is another challenge. The traditional research cycle is often too slow for policy. We need to find ways to combine rigorous research with rapid analysis, better use of administrative data, and new tools including AI, without sacrificing quality.
Development economics itself also needs to broaden. Political economy, behaviour, climate and technology all shape questions of growth; the boundaries between disciplines are far less tidy than academic departments suggest.
Most of all, we should be less comfortable with a model in which the Global North formulates the questions and the Global South is simply where those questions are studied. The ambition is not just to produce more research, but to build better research systems in which the people closest to the problems have much more influence over the questions being asked.
Acknowledgements
We are thankful to Shahid Vaziralli for taking the time to share his perspectives with us on the IGC’s work and research programmes to foster positive and transformational social and economic change in partner countries. We appreciate their commitment to cross-border collaboration and their attention to building programmes in which partner countries’ own stakeholders are able to shape the research being done to support positive local change.