The main goal of IDRC’s Urban Poverty and Environment Program (UPE) is to ease the environmental burdens that exacerbate poverty in developing countries by strengthening the capacity of the urban poor to access environmental services, reduce environmental degradation and vulnerability to natural disasters, and enhance the use of natural resources for food, water and income security. UPE helps its partners understand the nature of environmental burdens, identify potential solutions, test interventions, assess policies, and contribute to planning, development, and implementation of policies. Visit www.idrc.ca/upe for more details.
As part of its strategy to create knowledge and unleash potential innovations, UPE is launching the IDRC ECOPOLIS Graduate Research and Design Awards with the goal to promote research and design projects that help lighten the environmental problems borne by the urban poor and enhance their financial, human, resource, and social and political assets. Awards will be granted to cover expenses related to Master- or Doctoral-level research and design projects in developing countries where the candidate has formed a partnership with local academic institutions, such as universities, and non-academic organizations.
Two types of awards are being offered: Research Awards and Design Awards. Research Awards will support field expenses for studying a theme included in UPE’s priorities. Research Awards will not include a design aspect.
In contrast, Design Awards must include a research aspect, but the research will be oriented to informing a design project. A design project is one that partly or completely conceives, lays-out, or prepares something physical that would be developed, constructed, implemented, or demonstrated. A design can encompass one or many, if not all, the stages leading to the realization and the use of an object. For instance, a design project could include one or more of the following:
* Plans or diagrams of renovated or new sustainable housing for slums;
* A physical or virtual model of a design, for example, a scaled or full-scale model of a part or the whole layout of a new urban social housing community;
* A device (such as a hurricane roof-to-wall connector),
* A building material, a component, a sub-system (roof, wall or foundations) or a full building system, which can turn existing buildings or make new ones earthquake, landslide or flooding-proof in urban poor areas;
* A working model of equipment, software, technology or infrastructure that helps manage the environment or resources, such as a pump or latrine, a water treatment system, or a composter;
* A demonstration, installation or construction of an urban garden, small bore sewer, or a geotextile for slope stabilization, within a community.
UPE wishes to encourage innovation and creativity and a design project can mean different things to different audiences. Thus the above is meant for guidance only, and applicants are free to propose design projects that go beyond the above examples. The definition of a design project will likely evolve and deepen as ECOPOLIS progresses.
Deadlines
Applications must be received by October 18th, 2007.
Awards will be announced on or before December, 18th 2007.
Awards tenure should have started by August, 31st 2008.
For more information, please click on the link below
