MAP received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the UK.
The ESRC and AHRC called for research projects focusing on the experiences of internationally and internally displaced people who have been forced to move from their homes because of war, conflict, environmental crisis, poverty, or human rights violation.
These projects were allocated £1.5 billion in total from the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). The funding is supporting research addressing the challenges faced by developing countries, and is part of the UK’s Official Development Assistance commitment.
In the modern age, unprecedented numbers of people have been displaced. The United Nations Refugee Agency has recorded almost 20 million refugees and around 40 million internally displaced people around the world. Over half of the 60 million are children. Around 86% are displaced in countries considered to be less economically developed, which suffer from poverty, poor health, and inadequate infrastructure. See the UN Refugee Agency’s website for more information on the global crisis of forced displacement: http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/fragilityconflictviolence/brief/forced-displacement-a-growing-global-crisis-faqs.
Research projects allocated funding from the GCRF are bringing researchers from different academic disciplines together to take longer-term, cross-cultural and global perspectives on experiences of forced displacement. They are connecting with government and non-governmental actors, so that their findings will feed into current policy and practice. MAP is one of many such projects that will inform the design of programmes aimed at addressing the immediate and longer-term needs of displaced people and the communities in which they live.
For more information, see ESRC’s explanation of the GCRF: https://esrc.ukri.org/research/international-research/global-challenges-research-fund-gcrf/.
Read a definition of the GCRF by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD): http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/officialdevelopmentassistancedefinitionandcoverage.htm.
The University of Edinburgh supplied funding to publish and print 500 copies of the book collecting poems written by children at the Ejit Elementary School and the Cooperative School in Majuro, RMI. The book was published in 2017 by the Island Research and Education Initiative.
Parts of this text were adapted from the ESRC-AHRC’s ‘Forced displacement call: call specification’.