Beyond the Challenge Fund Grant: Shaping Researchers 

While research grants for early-career scholars are a well-established practice, ensuring they make a lasting policy impact is another story. DEEP’s Challenge Fund in Bangladesh evolved to bridge this gap. What sets the Challenge Fund apart from many other funders, is the comprehensive support accompanying the funding: mentorship from senior researchers, sustained engagement with a National Steering Committee (NSC), and a direct line to policy audiences. It is this combination, rather than the grant alone, that shapes what awardees carry forward once the funding period ends.  

 The Bangladesh Challenge Fund was DEEP’s third iteration of the Challenge Fund, following rounds in Tanzania and Ethiopia. This meant the team had a distinct advantage: the opportunity to learn from prior cycles. By analysing what worked, refining what could be improved, and adapting to local priorities, the fund evolved into an even more impactful model for evidence-informed policy. 

Looking beyond the capital city   

Bangladesh is a small, densely populated country where research and professional networks are heavily concentrated in the capital. Dhaka hosts most universities, think tanks, and policy institutions, so when a call for proposals is shared only through a webpage or a launch event in the city, it tends to reach and attract the same Dhaka-based audience. 

 Rather than relying on the capital to advertise the fund, the DEEP team actively sought researchers across the country. This was something that hadn’t been tried in the previous two Challenge Funds. It meant reaching out to individuals and institutions outside Dhaka and, as a deliberate departure from a Dhaka-only approach, holding a second launch event in Chittagong, the country’s second-largest city. The event, hosted at Chittagong University, a major public institution, brought in researchers from surrounding universities who might otherwise never have learnt about the opportunity. 

The initiative was a success: one third of applicants for the Bangladesh Challenge Fund came from outside Dhaka. This indicates that widening the search beyond Dhaka can surface researchers who would otherwise remain invisible in a capital-centered process. 

Closing the Gender Gap 

Another learning point from Tanzania and Ethiopia was how hard it was to reach, female lead researchers (30% in Tanzania and only 11% in Ethiopia). Rather than relying on a gender-neutral call to achieve a gender-balanced outcome, the team made a few deliberate changes to the call for proposals in Bangladesh. The DEEP team worked with a technical reviewer from Ethiopia to re-design the scoring matrix so that applicants received points for having a woman team lead. In addition, messages encouraging women to apply as lead researchers were woven into all promotional outreach. 

The impact was immediate. Applications started coming in with women in lead roles, and by the time the cohort was finalized, four of the eight successful teams were led by women. This result makes an important point: representation gaps in research funding are rarely about talent. More often, they reflect who gets actively invited, encouraged, and made to feel that they belong at the table. 

A Steering Committee That Supports and Guides 

One of the most successful aspects of the Challenge Funds in Tanzania and Ethiopia was the support of National Steering Committees (NSC), which were involved at every point of the process.  The National Steering Committee for DEEP Bangladesh brought together a strong mix of top researchers and academics, policy experts, government officials, and international development professionals, ensuring the fund was intellectually credible and grounded in Bangladesh’s research landscape. Unique to Bangladesh was the fact that the NSC helped shortlist which poverty research topics were most relevant to Bangladesh’s policy priorities, ensuring the Fund is not just financing interesting academic research but answering questions someone in government or civil society needs answered. The application pool of 89 Challenge Fund proposals was shortlisted to eighteen finalists. NSC members then scored each finalist against a shared evaluation matrix, discussed the results internally, and then conducted a final round of evaluation in person, giving proposal teams the chance to be questioned directly and to defend or refine their thinking before funding was confirmed. 

The NSC’s role did not end once the grants were awarded. During the research period, Challenge Fund teams presented their progress to the committee at two separate checkpoints, giving NSC members the chance to flag problems early, suggest course corrections, or connect researchers to data and expertise they might not know existed. It is a level of ongoing oversight that makes the NSC something closer to a standing panel of advisors, one with real influence over Bangladesh’s poverty research agenda. 

Built-in Mentorship  

A unique aspect of the Bangladesh Challenge Fund was its formal mentorship programme – this was something that hadn’t been tried in Tanzania or Ethiopia. As the evaluation rounds progressed, it became clear which CF teams would benefit from extra support. In practice, that meant two CF researchers were formally paired with NSC mentors, while a third team was able to get advice from a focal point at the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics during the Challenge Fund validation workshop, gaining access to institutional expertise that is often out of reach for early-career researchers. It is a small but telling example of what DEEP’s Bangladesh network offers beyond funding: guidance and access. 

A Wider Capacity Boost 

That same philosophy shapes how DEEP thinks about capacity building more broadly. Beyond the mentorship pairings themselves, the team has actively connected awardees to opportunities outside the Challenge Fund. One example was a DEEP training on small-area estimation (SAE), led by facilitators from the University of Southampton and organized primarily for Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics officials under the DEEP MoU with BBS. Four CF researchers from four different organizations were also invited to join, because their work involved small-area estimation applications. 

This serves as a reminder that real capacity building happens incrementally: taking hold of opportunities as they emerge and making a tangible difference for early-stage scholars. 

What This Adds Up To 

Expanded outreach beyond Dhaka, a deliberate focus on female leadership, active committee oversight, and structured mentorship: none of these elements is transformative in isolation. What makes the Bangladesh Challenge Fund distinctive is how they work in unison. 

The result is a model that sees research funding not as a destination, but as a hopeful beginning. Eight early-career teams- half led by women, bringing in vibrant perspectives from Chittagong and Khulna alongside Dhaka—are walking alongside experienced mentors and a steering committee that stays invested every step of the way, well beyond the grant timeline. 

Building long-term research capacity takes time, care, and community. We hope this combination of funding, mentorship, and shared networks will offer emerging scholars a lasting foundation, one that creates meaningful ripples long after the initial research outputs are completed.