Eldis has provided free access to relevant, up-to-date and diverse research on global development issues for over 20 years.
Our database includes summaries and links to over 60,000 full-text research and policy documents from a growing global network of several thousand research organisations and knowledge brokers.
These partners help to ensure that Eldis can present a truly global picture of development research. We make a special effort to cover high-quality research from smaller research producers, especially those from developing countries, alongside that of the larger, northern-based, research organisations.
We also highlight news, blogs and job vacancies relating to the development sector.
Eldis Key Issues Guides and Collections
In recent years, we have increased our offer to include cost effective products designed to help research projects and programmes introduce their knowledge and evidence to a broad global audience of development practitioners, decision-makers and researchers.
Key Issues Guides are a mixed media online resource that creates an engaging narrative, guiding users through a particular issue. The Guides highlight recommended reading and related content to encourage users to delve further into the issues and build a more detailed and informed picture.
The Guides are aimed at users with some general understanding of development issues who are seeking a timely introduction to a new topic. In particular, they target nonacademic development professionals working in the formulation of good policy and project design.
Examples of Key Issues Guides can be found below:
In turn, Collections can be used to provide more comprehensive access to research content relating to a particular network, project or programme:
The benefits of using Eldis
Our services are used by a large and truly global audience of development practitioners, decision makers and researchers. Over the course of 2018, nearly 500,000 users from 228 different countries visited Eldis, accessing over a million pages of Eldis content. More than half of our regular visitors are based outside of Europe and North America with our largest audiences being in South Asia, Southern and Eastern Africa.
For research programmes and projects creating an effective online presence from scratch can be expensive, difficult and time-consuming. The relatively short lifecycle of most research projects means creating a new website from scratch and building audiences for your content is time-consuming and rarely cost-effective. By using Eldis, projects and programmes can bring their research to an audience that is already established and engaged. Because Eldis has been able to build its audience, content and reputation over a long time it has a high Google quality score which means that resources listed on Eldis are likely to perform better in internet search rankings than they would hosted in project and programme websites.
Eldis also has its own social media channels that can be used to promote your research, with over 3000 followers on Twitter and 2000 on Facebook. We run our own fortnightly newsletter with nearly 10,000 subscribers and support our partners by developing targeted and cost effective digital promotion campaigns to make sure their research reaches its intended audiences.
With our off-the-shelf products and dedicated editorial support for projects and programmes Eldis works out as a fantastic value for money either as an alternative to building another new research project website or as an effective driver of engagement for larger research programmes.
Finally, in supporting Eldis and in creating new content with us, projects and programmes are helping us to secure the future of the site, continue our support for smaller research producers globally and keep our services free for nearly 500,000 users worldwide.
The cost
Eldis receives no core funding from IDS or any donors. To keep our services free for users, we charge projects and programmes a fee for commissioning bespoke pieces of work such as Key Issues Guides and Collections. (We do not charge a fee for adding individual pieces of research to the repository.)
Key Issues Guides and Collections usually cost in the range £3-£6,000 depending on requirements. Additional guides are offered at a discounted rate. Remember that IDS alumni can get a 10% discount on Guides & Collections just let Alan and Alice know you are an IDS alum.
To discuss your particular needs, please get in touch with Alan Stanley (
a.stanley@ids.ac.uk) and Alice Webb (
a.webb@ids.ac.uk)
