Impact & public engagement

In Peru, longitudinal evidence and policy influencing by Young Lives have directly informed legislative change to prohibit and eliminate marriage with minors under the age of 18.

Departmental Lecturer Francesca Lessa has provided expertise and resources that are proving crucial in efforts to bring to justice those responsible for Operation Condor, a campaign of persecution of opponents in exile by authoritarian regimes in Latin America in the 1970s.

Research has highlighted how businesses in low-income countries innovate to survive and grow, despite constraints.

Research by the Refugee Studies Centre in Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia has led to a radical reframing of assumptions held by aid agencies about the economic lives of refugees. 

Engagement work by Associate Professor Tom Scott-Smith has helped enrich understanding of the complexities of emergency refugee accommodation and humanitarian nutrition.

Research led by Dr Indrajit Roy has explored the lives of internal migrants in India, shedding light on their motives for migrating and examining their social and political rights as they move around the country.

Young Lives advised on the roll-out of a new ‘zero grade’ before the start of primary school in Ethiopia, providing evidence on both supply- and demand-side constraints on good-quality early childhood development.

ODID researchers have advised diplomats and foreign ministry officials on how to optimise their use of digital diplomacy.

Research by Professor Chris Woodruff and colleagues is helping to improve the functioning of the Mexico City Labour Court.

Young Lives supported state-level approaches to early marriage and the development of sexual and reproductive health care policies in India.

Research exploring the effects of two interventions to help young urban-dwellers find jobs is impacting policy in Ethiopia.

Young Lives have worked with Oxfam to produce an engaging new resource for UK schoolchildren.

A series of immersive performances aim to open a dialogue with audiences on what it is to be a migrant.

There are few more challenging questions in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies than where and how we draw the line between ‘refugee’ and ‘voluntary migrant’.

Research by OPHI has contributed to a growing number of international and regional agencies adding a multidimensional perspective to their view of and their work on poverty.

Today, the notion of agency among refugee youth is almost taken for granted but this attitudinal shift and its consequent impact on policy and practice have only recently come about.

Research carried out by the Nigeria Research Network at ODID is helping to shape a new policy approach to the Islamist insurgency in northern Nigeria.

Research by Oliver Owen is providing evidence for change in the Nigerian Police Force.

The Multidimensional Poverty Peer Network allows policy makers to share experiences and build their collective knowledge on non-monetary measures of deprivation.

In May 2016, the department took its research to the public in a visually engaging way with an exhibition of fieldwork photos titled ‘Global Engagement’ as part of Oxfordshire Artweeks.