IGC annual report to DFID 2014-2015

The IGC aims to promote sustainable growth in developing countries by providing demand-led policy advice based on frontier research. We seek to improve growth policy and strengthen policy making in our partner countries, to expand the global knowledge frontier on policies to generate growth in developing countries and to communicate our findings with the aim of influencing growth policy at both a national and global level. Our four themes – state effectiveness, firm capabilities, cities and energy – have become central to the IGC brand and the three key components of the IGC – country engagement, research and communication – together create a powerful model for driving improvements in growth policy.

During 2014/15, we have taken a series of steps to strengthen this model, with the goal of ramping up our impact on growth policy in our partner countries and globally. The result has been a significant increase in outputs and impact, as detailed in this report. The main focus this year has been on driving up our policy impact through more proactive management to increase delivery, better integration of our research and in-country policy engagement activities and strengthening of our global communications.

Our Country and Research Programmes are working in a much more integrated way. The unified commissioning process has deepened the pool of high quality, high impact projects and provided both research and country input into decisions. We have strengthened ex ante project influence planning and in-country policy engagement for all projects. Strong appointments to key research positions and steps to increase the coherence of the research portfolio have further enhanced our ability to influence policy in our partner countries and more broadly. IGC has made a step change in its approach to global communications. We have developed an overall strategy, agreed cities, tax and energy as priority themes for global influence and have formulated and started to implement project influence plans. We launched an improved website, a new IGC blog and a range of publications to help articulate IGC ideas.