Application Form and Instructions: J-PAL Urban Services Initiative

J-PAL Urban Services Initiative -Second Round - Spring 2013

Application Form and Instructions: J-PAL Urban Services Initiative

Second Round – Spring 2013

J-PAL’s Urban Services Initiative (USI) funds randomized evaluations of innovation solutions to the problem of inadequate access to water, sanitation, and hygiene (WSH) servicesto the urban poor in Asia and Africa. USI is now calling for proposals from J-PAL affiliates (and select others), for both Pilot Studies and Full Research Projects. For this round of grants, proposals are due at 5 pm EST, Thursday May 16, 2013.

Background:Access to safe water and sanitation is essential for health, security, livelihood, and quality of life. However, the developing world–particularly Asia and Africa–is lagging in water and, even more so, in sanitation coverage. Close to 2.4 billion people are expected to still be lacking access to proper sanitation in 2015. While the problem of inadequate access to water and sanitation exists both in rural and urban areas, the problem is particularly pressing in cities. With internal migration and the “urbanization of poverty,” this is where an increasing proportion of the poor live.In the last three decades, growth in urban populations in developing countries exceeded that of rural area three-fold. In 2007, there were already more people living in cities than in rural areas. Consequently, in many cities, water, sanitation, and hygiene infrastructure is stressed beyond current capacity, and infrastructure investment has not kept pace with rapid and unplanned urbanization.Whilelarge infrastructure overhaul–if and when it is possible–has great potential benefits, various public finance, planning, budgetary, and institutional impediments limit how much can be achieved in the short run through large-scale investment alone.

In this context, the strategic focus of USIwill be to design or identify, and rigorously test innovative micro- and medium-scale solutions to the problem of inadequate access to water, sanitation, and hygiene in urban neighborhoods of developing countries.Furthermore, while there is vast literature addressing the impact of access to improved WSH services on health outcomes, there is surprisingly little rigorous evidence on interventions that effectively and sustainably improve access to WSH services for the urban poor. Given this, the emphasis of the research conducted under USI will be on how, rather than whether; taking the potential impacts of improved WSH access largely as a given, the question that will be asked is: How can we achieve better urban services outcomes, access, and coverage?

A Framework:To address the problem of achieving greater coverage, a first step is to identify the barriers to innovation and implementation of improved water and sanitation. USI identifies three key barriers. The first one clearly is insufficient supply. Building water and sanitation infrastructure is costly and may involve numerous technical, bureaucratic, and legal constraints–particularly in the developing world. There may be smaller-scale, off-grid, innovative supply solutions, but realizing those solutions requires clever innovations in contract design, pricing, and market development. Second, even in places where the water and sanitation network exists and it is technically feasible to connect to it, there may be demand constraints that limit people's access to these services. Willingness-to-pay may be low, different agents’ demand may be inter-linked, and the presence of transient or migrant populations may undermine demand. The third type of constraints is institutional. For example, centralized supply solutions may not be sustainable or even work at all if regional and local levels of government are not involved to facilitate implementation in the local context.In addition, moral hazard and free riding problems that plague collective action can arise when the sanitation or water infrastructure is shared, and must be jointly maintained.

Focus:USI aims toevaluate interventions that can improve access to WSH services quickly, efficiently, and cheaply, either by improving access to existing (or newly planned) large scale infrastructure or by providing smaller scale investment at the individual or the community level. A key imperative of research done under USI will be to inform policy, and the causal pathways through which new solutions address the problem.A few research priorities for USI have been identified in the Urban Services Review Paper prepared by J-PAL. While USI seeks to promote any innovative research that has the potential to address any of the three barriers identified above (supply, demand, and institutional), there are four areas of focus where additional researchwould be highly productive:

Consumers’ willingness to pay: Interventions that help understand the demand functions for WSH services, what households are willing (and unwilling) to pay for, how to make the consumers value those services, the optimal “bundling” strategies to encourage take up.
Collective action and Market Design:Collective action problems arise with shared infrastructure and shared sanitation solutions. New markets and communal solutions have to be structured carefully such that incentives are correctly aligned, institutions are well-designed, and the community can successfully monitor users. Suppliers and service providers need to develop innovative contracts, pricing schemes, and allocation rules to adequately address market failures.
Institutional and legal barriers and solutions: Studies on the effects of land titling on sanitation investments, and on the optimal way to provide property rights. Can new, innovative institutional solutions be developed to circumvent the pressure on urban WSH infrastructure (which is currently stressed beyond capacity)?
Political economy and Public Finance issues: Voter mobilization and how politicians respond to voters’ incentives, the mechanisms of vote buying and its implications for the quality of urban public good provision, particularly WSH. Can government programs, budgets, and taxation systems be adapted to enable better WSH service provision?

These are meant to be general guidelines only, and not an exhaustive list of research questions of interest to USI. Ifyou are uncertain about a research project’s eligibility for USI funds, please contact Jasmine Shah, Initiative Manager for USI, at .

Researchers can choose to apply for new research projects, projects matched at the USI matchmaking conference, or for one of the open research opportunities under USI. For the list of all open research opportunities currently available to J-PAL/USI affiliates, please click here.

Funds:In the current round, USI expects to award up to approximately $1,100,000 in research grants. Three types of proposals will be considered:

Full Research Projects: These grants are for research projects at a mature stage of development. Not only must the research question be clear, but applicants must also demonstrate a commitment from implementing partners, a method of randomization, well-defined instruments, and sample size estimates. There is no funding cap for these grants, however it is expected that total award for a single projectwill not exceed $400,000over the life of the project (across this and future USI funding rounds). One of the important criteria for proposal evaluation is the ‘value for money’ generated.

Pilot Studies: These grants will be for a maximum amount of $50,000. They are for studies with a clear research question, but for which the design and implementation of an evaluation requires further testing and pilot data, a baseline survey, a feasibility study, or fact-finding trips.

Off-Cycle Pilot Studies:Proposals for pilot studies that face time constraints and need to receive funding before the end of the process for this round will be considered. There has to be a clear statement or proof or urgency (e.g. the launch of an intervention by a partner).

The pool of eligible applicants is comprised of J-PAL affiliates, J-PAL post-docs, and a select group of researchers specializing in urban services that have been pre-approved to participate in USI. Proposals may include collaborators outside of this network but the principal investigator (PI) must be a J-PAL or USI member.

Local Researchers:USI is committed to nurturing the capacity of local researchers working on urban WSH issues. Proposals submitted in collaboration with local researchers, including USI post-doctoral fellows (profiles at based in Bangladesh and South Africa, will receive extra credit as per the USI evaluation criteria (detailed on last page). Any expenses related to the involvement of local researchers will not be a part of the funding cap, and will be reimbursed separately.

Applications: Proposal applications are due at5 pm EST, Thursday May 16, 2013.To apply, please fill in:(i) the Proposal Application Form (see below), and (ii) a separate Budget Form, and submit both documents by email to

In addition, when submitting a full proposal to USI, applicants:

Must attach a letter of support from their partner (intervention-implementingorganization), if applicable.
Are encouraged to concurrently apply for approval from their respective Institutional Review Boards (Human Subjects Committees). The award of any USI grant is contingent on approval from the host-institution’s IRB (unless that IRB defers to the judgment of MIT’s IRB, as is often the case) as well as the IRB at MIT, the Committee On the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects (COUHES).
Are encouraged to submit the application to their office of sponsored programs or contracts department as MIT will need official acceptance of the proposal and budget by your institution to process the Sub-award.You can do this after submitting your proposal to the USI Board, but doing so before the award decision will lessen delays.

Grant Conditions:Successful applicants will be asked to do the following:

Volunteer to peer-review proposals in future USI rounds at which they are not requesting funding.

Data collection instruments, and at the end of the evaluation, the actual data as well will have to made available through the USI website.

Collect and report program cost data on a USI template that is sufficient to conduct a cost-effectiveness analysis. Such data will have to be provided to USI.

Grantees should provide a brief annual progress report, and a final narrative and financial report within 60 days of completion of the award period.

Grantees should produce a working paper based on research results within a pre-agreed time period.

Grantees should prepare a simple “How To” toolkit that can guide practitioners and policymakers to replicate and scale up interventions that are found to have a proven impact. For each project, the format and content of the toolkit shall be finalized in collaboration with the USI team.

Participate in at leastone of USI’s activities on a mutually agreed date and place. This activity could be an evidence workshop, a matchmaking conference, or a presentation to one of USI’s donors, or at a conference that is attended by sector experts and/or practitioners.

Applicants are encouraged to budget for these activities at the outset.

Review Process: Selection of awards will follow a two-stage process:

First, proposals will be distributed for peer review to referees selected from a roster of researchers and policy experts with experience in the urban services sector or in the region from which

many proposals of that round are drawn. The roster will be assembled by the three co-chairs of USI. Each application will be reviewed by 3 referees: two academics and one policy expert, at least one of who is also a USI Review Board member.

Following peer review, proposals will be reviewed and scored by the five members of the USI Review Board consisting of: (i) two of the three co-chairs of USI, (ii) Radu Ban, Program Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, (iii) one external policy expert, and (v) J-PAL’s Director of Policy or a senior member of thepolicy team.Proposals will be scored using the evaluation criteria described below. Based on the scores and the comments of the referees, the Board will vote on the status of the application. The status of an application can fall into four categories: (1) approved (unconditionally), (2) conditional approval (with minor revisions or clarifications), (3) revise and resubmit on this or a subsequent round, and (4) not approved.

If you would like to appeal a decision of the USI Board, you may contact USI’s Initiative Manager Jasmine Shah within one week of the results’ announcement detailing the reasons for the request for reconsideration (maximum two pages in length). This will then be communicated to the USI Board.

Detailed criteria on which the projects will be evaluated and scored are listed on the last page of this document.

Proposals for off-cycle pilot studies will be reviewed by the co-chairs of USI who might decide to accept or reject the project for funding, or include the proposal in the regular review process for this round.

Timeline

Friday March 15, 2013 / RFP is Issued
Thursday May 16, 2013 / Proposal Submission Deadline
Monday June 10, 2013 / Peer Review Deadline
Week of June 17, 2013 / USI Review Board Meeting+ Results Announced

Administrative Notes: Budgets, Requirements, and Process

Budget:

Awards are normally paid on a cost-reimbursable basis.
Overhead charges under the Urban Services Initiative are capped at 9% of total direct costs.
Costs related to project implementation may be included in the budget.
USI does not allow incidental, miscellaneous, or contingency costs to be included in the budget.
USI will not count salary/benefit costs for local research partners as part of the budget ceiling.
Specific country office expenses such as office rentals, legal expenses, office assistant, telephone and internet, IRB application, etc. are normally considered part of the country management fee and should not be budgeted separately. If there is a reason for including any such specific fees, please provide an explanation in your budget.
It is your responsibility that the budget you submit is correct and follows your host institution’s policies for costs. If you wait until an award has been made by the USI Review Board before getting approval from your planned host institution, you risk having an award that your institution can not accept. We recommend that as soon as you submit your proposal to USI (if not before), you send it through your host institution for their review and acceptance.
Please note that this applies to all projects, including those going through regional J-PAL offices and IPA. You should make them aware of your plans as early as possible.

Requirements:

If your proposal is accepted for award, the actual funds will be provided under an award from MIT to your host institution. To ease the processing of this, it is strongly recommended that–at some point before the USI award is announced–you:

Secure formal submission documents of the proposal from your institution to the USI. While you can submit a proposal directly to the USI as part of the RFP process, any eventual award will require proof of acceptability from your institution.
Secure IRB approval from your host institution for any human subjects involvement in your project. MIT will require proof of this prior to executing the award with your institution.

Process:

The process MIT follows for these awards is:

You receive the award notice from the USI Review Board;
If not already submitted, we will request the two items noted above: your institutions approval of the proposal and your institutional IRB approval.
We will provide you with forms to complete for the MIT IRB; we do need their approval as well, but if you already have approval this shouldn’t be a problem.
We will establish an account with award funds at MIT.
MIT will establish a Subaward under that account with your institution.

Our goal is to get this done within 60 days of receiving all your forms. Unfortunately this isn’t always possible, but we will set the period of the award to start from the USI award date (assuming IRB approval is in place).

Proposal Application Form

Second Round – Spring 2013

Instructions: The proposal is comprised of:(i) The Application Form which includes a cover sheet andthe narrative,(ii) a Budget Form, and (iii) Letters of Support from implementation partner and, if available, also from potential scale-up partners.

Narrative:Your narrative (not to exceed 5 pages in length)should clearly describe the underlying project and the evaluation including a summary of the policy problem that motivates this research, description of the treatment, evaluation design, target population, and implementing partners.The narrative should also address each of the topics listed in the Evaluation Criteria listed at the end of this RFP. Please also mention if the project has scale-up potential, and if the program costs and impacts can be used to generate cost-effectiveness analysis.

The narrative mustalso include a 100-150 words abstract of the study which will be updated directly in USI’s web page in case the project receives funding.