For 2017 IDRC Research Award Recipient Sujaya Neupane, carrying out fieldwork in Nepal was literally coming home. Neupane spent time in the remote western villages of Thapagaun and Jhimpa — his childhood home — to find ways of improving science education by using digital learning tools.

The quality of education is vastly different in Nepal’s rural and urban areas, he explains, leading to poor educational outcomes in rural schools. But with the advent of inexpensive technology and free multimedia resources, science teaching materials can be accessed at low cost, he says. His goal was to determine how sustainable digital libraries could be set up in rural schools.

“One can’t hope to educate young people today without computers,” says Neupane. “I used a Raspberry-pi computer board as a server with embedded open-source learning tools, including those provided by Khan Academy and Wikipedia. Tablets were used to access these materials wirelessly from the server,” he explains. The Raspberry Pi is a low-cost credit card-sized single board computer designed specifically to promote education.

A team of teachers-cum-researchers in two secondary schools worked with Neupane to establish a protocol for using the digital learning materials.

Establishing an e-library in Jhimpa has opened up sources of knowledge to students who never had access to a library before, says Neupane. He and the on-site research team are now exploring how to evaluate the impact on students’ learning when the project ends in mid-2018.

Of his IDRC experience, Neupane says “being able to go back and live in my village and conduct research in schools there jointly with the teachers was the most memorable,” says Neupane. “Through this experience I am determined to work to develop an education system in rural Nepal as a volunteer and independent researcher.”

What motivates researchers and funders to collaborate with different partners? “Although collaborations in research have been around for a while, there’s still a lack of understanding about what drives researchers to collaborate,” says Natalia Yang, 2017 IDRC Research Award Recipient.

She set out to discover those motivations among think tanks in South Asia. This region “provides a unique context because most countries within the region share similar challenges,” she says.

Yang found that the drive to collaborate depended on the role partners played in the organization. For example, researchers focused on what they were able to offer and gain from the collaboration — enhanced skills and access to new knowledge, for example, and stronger networks.

Principal investigators, coordinators, and funders were more concerned with how the collaboration contributed to obtaining and sharing knowledge, such as building a regional or international dialogue. Funders also saw collaboration as a way to attract other funders to a cause they believed in.

Overall, she says, she learned that “behind any research there is a human element that needs to be recognized and supported. Understanding collaboration in research is also about revealing the relationships at work behind anything we do.”

Yang values the experience she gained in research, including learning that “it’s better not to overthink the steps I have to do as a researcher. Often, the best thing to do is to just act and have the flexibility to adjust and adapt to new circumstances and research issues that did not come to light before.”

For Andréanne Martel, research and the work she carried out at IDRC as a 2016 Research Award recipient are inseparable. Martel sought to understand if and how a project to provide access to justice for victims of sexual violence in Mumbai had endured and been replicated. But, she says, “my focus was not on the research project itself. It was more on what research I could do to influence IDRC’s work.”

“It was the first time I was doing this kind of oriented research to help an organization better understand how they are bringing impact to scale,” says Martel. Success in the project, she discovered, was due in large part to the team’s ability “to coordinate with plenty of organizations in the society, and with the state stakeholders,” she says.

Embedded in IDRC’s evaluation team, she collaborated in a study to help the Centre and its donor partners better design projects so that impacts could reach the greatest number of people. This enabled her to work “on really corporate issues for IDRC” she says. “This is what I really wanted to do, to understand the bigger picture.”

For two-time Research Award recipient (2012 and 2014) Ahmed Rashid, his IDRC experience “gave me the confidence to conduct high quality research in social sciences.”

In 2012 Rashid explored the influence of think tanks on policy in Bangladesh, as well as their relationships with international donors and media. In 2014, he explored two-way student exchanges between Canadian and developing-country universities.

“My most memorable experience both times was going to the field,” he says. “As the awardee for the Think Tank Initiative, I traveled to Bangladesh and interviewed representatives from non-governmental organizations, think tanks, donors, and media. For the research on study-abroad programs, I talked to administrators, professors, and students in universities across Canada.”

Rashid found that flexible study-exchange programs with a longer history and clear expectations were the most successful. The opportunity for students to gain “experiences outside the classroom and to undertake collaborative activities with Southern counterparts” was critical and “helped deepen their understanding of issues,” he says. “These programs should be increased.”

Now a development analyst, Rashid considers that “working within the IDRC teams strengthened my program support and management competencies and prepared me for new and more challenging tasks and responsibilities.”