Building research and analytical capacity in relevant institutions through genuine, long-term partnerships can greatly help bridge the science and policy divide. The KCP combines retailing and wholesaling models of research to promote meaningful capacity building and local partnerships, which significantly lowers the barrier for access to development knowledge. The KCP works to strengthen institutional and human capacity on research, data, and analytics in developing countries, to democratize knowledge, empower citizens, and inspire policy changes.
Past experience has shown that the most effective and durable capacity building in research is done through embedding close collaboration with local researchers and institutions in the research project. The KCP’s phase III has substantively engaged more than 450 developing country institutions and more than 700 developing country researchers. Following the tradition, the KCP’s new phase will continue supporting capacity-building efforts to improve human and institutional capacity in primary and secondary research, data collection and analysis methods, and analytical work in client countries. The KCP will allow budget lines dedicated explicitly to capacity building and local partnerships as part of the overall research endeavor, including those that support the time of researchers, data scientists, and others from developing countries.
The KCP also emphasizes devising tools to empower researchers, policy makers, as well as citizens in developing countries to allow them to generate their own analysis and promote evidence-based policy. PovcalNet, Maquette for MDG Simulations, and World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS) are some of the powerful tools that have been developed for economic analyses of poverty trends, Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) monitoring, and trade and integration. For example, PovcalNet allows users to replicate calculations made by World Bank researchers in estimating the extent of absolute poverty in the world, regions, and countries. It also performs a range of simulations and computes the growth rate needed to reach a poverty reduction goal. During FY2017, PovcalNet delivered 33.8 million computations for users around the world. The tool has facilitated countries’ adjustments of their national poverty lines. All six World Bank Regions and the Poverty Global Practice use PovcalNet to simulate poverty and inequality measures under different scenarios. These outputs have also been used by the International Monetary Fund, United Nations Development Programme, Asian Development Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, International Labour Organization, and many other organizations in their work and publications.