Research Facilitation
Sisters complete schoolwork together in Kenya.
Research is conducted by virtually all UNICEF offices around the world to inform programmes and policy advocacy for children. Research supported by UNICEF takes place across a wide range of contexts, and it is often undertaken in conjunction with a variety of partners including governments, academics, think tanks, the private sector and civil society.
Innocenti’s mandate includes leading the development of global research policy and research governance across all of UNICEF’s offices and strengthening capacities to generate, communicate and make use of research and evidence on children in decision-making. To do this, Innocenti provides technical support to assure the highest quality of research is produced by the organization, that institutional incentives are set in place to reward good research and that lessons from previous research investments can be easily found and shared.
This includes provision of essential guidance, tools, and mechanisms to enhance knowledge sharing and broker good research practice. For example, by establishing minimum ethical standards of research on/with children, improving quality assurance measures in all stages of the research cycle, producing methodological briefs and evidence syntheses, granting recognition to quality research efforts, and strengthening research management skills and capacities of UNICEF staff and partners from research design and methods through to research uptake and impact.
Read our blog on 5 Questions with Kerry Albright, Chief of Research Facilitation and Knowledge Management at Innocenti.
Research Governance
The UNICEF Innocenti provides formal oversight of research at UNICEF which includes research governance made available on UNICEF internal platforms. Informal technical advisory support is provided on an ongoing basis to UNICEF staff in research management, research design and delivery.
- UNICEF Policy on Research
- UNICEF Taxonomy for Research, Data and Evaluation
- Guidance on External Academic Publishing
- UNICEF Procedures for Quality Assurance in Research
- UNICEF Procedure for Ethical Standards in Research, Evaluation and Data Collection & Analysis
Project team
Kerry Albright, Emanuela Bianchera, Patricia Arquero Caballero, Alessandra Ipince, Jorinde van de Scheur, Shivit Bakrania, Benjamin Hickler, Camila Perera Aladro, Gabrielle Berman, Nilam McGrath
Publication
Ethical research for children
UNICEF is committed to ensuring that all its research is ethical. To this end, procedures and guidelines have been created to embed ethical principles and practices in all our evidence generation programmes.
Publication
Capacity building
The Office of Research supports a range of capacity building activities to help UNICEF staff and partners appraise, commission, undertake, communicate, and use research on child rights.
Publication
Evidence synthesis
Accessing high quality evidence and making it readily available to policymakers and practitioners remains a challenge. Evidence synthesis is the process of bringing together information and knowledge from a range of sources.
Publication
Research uptake and impact
Ensuring that research produced at UNICEF is shared and findings are used is a significant part of our mandate. Innocenti oversees multiple initiatives to promote the uptake and impact of UNICEF research.