Looking at the bigger research picture

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.”