What makes a good leader? Are the desired qualities the same the world over and in every field? Those questions were at the heart of Emma Fieldhouse’s research as a 2017 IDRC Research Award Recipient. “There is a lack of clarity on how conceptions of leaders might differ across regions,” says Fieldhouse. “The perspective of Southern leaders is noticeably absent.”

Fieldhouse focused on four leadership development programs for young researchers in the Global South to learn about how they conceptualize leadership, how they integrate gender and equity considerations, and how they define and evaluate the successes of their programs. Program participants described what good leadership in their contexts meant to them, and the challenges they faced in getting there.

For programs and participants, becoming a leader wasn’t seen as an end in itself, but as a means of achieving downstream positive effects on institutions and communities. For example, Emma found that women taking part in one program faced great challenges in being accepted as leaders in their communities, “yet they were so determined to persevere and succeed so they could make life better for others.”

Fieldhouse learned that emerging leaders in the South overwhelmingly believe that interpersonal skills are the most essential leadership elements, even in the realm of research. That includes collaboration, building trust, empathy, and nurturing other leaders. “Knowing this is important in order to assess success, because if we get this wrong, we could be evaluating things that don’t really matter, or we could be further marginalizing perspectives and experiences that should matter,” she says.

Ruth Nara’s work as a 2017 IDRC Research Award Recipient “reinforced my passion for improving the health of the most vulnerable populations, including displaced women and children,” she says. “I am more than encouraged to continue contributing to reducing the systemic inequalities that affect access to health.”

During field studies in Kampala and the Nakivale Refugee Settlement, Nara sought to understand the reproductive health needs of Congolese refugees in Uganda, including maternal health and delivery care, contraception, and abortion and post-abortion care.

She found that maternal healthcare was inadequate: human resources were insufficient, facilities were poor, and medications were not always available. Women faced long waits to get care, sometimes resorting to offering bribes for services. Many faced discrimination when accessing services, and language barriers compounded these problems.

Nara believes that her research findings will ultimately contribute to policies and programs to improve reproductive health rights and services for conflict-affected populations in Uganda. The fieldwork, she says, “reminded me that I was in the right place and I should continue to be in this space.”

Equally important, it brought home “that the women I spoke with in this study are people, just like you and me. They’re not just numbers, they’re not just subjects, but they’re living, breathing people who have their human potential and deserve support and respect of their human rights.”

Youth fare better financially than adults in the processing of cassava in Ghana. They could also surpass them in production and marketing if they had more access to credit and extension services, says Nana Anima Akrofi, a 2016 IDRC Research Award recipient.

Ghana is the world’s sixth largest producer of cassava and the crop remains the country’s most important staple food. Cassava is also of growing economic importance and could provide jobs for women and youth while increasing food security.

Akrofi set out to determine what role youth play in the cassava value chain and how their performance compares to that of adults. “The main challenge youth face is poor access to credit and extension services,” she says. “This inhibits their production activities. They are, however, relatively more profitable in processing — by turning the roots into dry flakes or flour — than adults.”

Akrofi credits the IDRC Research Award for enabling her “to identify issues in agri-food businesses that could generate options for improving food and income security,” she says. It also “opened the opportunity for me to pursue further studies and undertake academic research.”

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.”