Policy research at the Yangon University of Economics – 2020-21

IDRC and Global Affairs Canada launched the Knowledge for Democracy Myanmar (K4DM) initiative to nurture meaningful dialogue and engagement during the country’s transition to democratic development. Working with other development partners, the initiative targets diverse and complementary entry points to strengthen analytical thinking and research capacity.

This project builds on the success of previous initiatives particularly the partnership between the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the Yangon University of Economics (YUE). The project will continue the core elements of the previous years, including the three-week summer program, extended support for a select number of executive graduate students and teaching staff, and collaboration between UBC faculty and YUE administration to support the development of a Masters of Public Policy program (which has greater importance following important reforms in Myanmar’s higher education and knowledge landscape).

Several important components will be added, including additional in-house support to provide training and mentoring on pedagogy, grant writing, research skills, and academic publishing; in-depth methods training to address the requests of the teaching staff and senior graduate students; and knowledge dissemination by Myanmar scholars through several channels, including an emerging academic journal on development research and a Burmese-English Special Issue on Myanmar for the prestigious Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia. The project will also include active mentoring of faculty and graduate students for three major international conferences in 2020 and 2021 as well as graduate research grants to enable extensive field research for four Myanmar scholars.