Projects Overview |

About Our Projects

We respond to requests from developing country governments that seek to strengthen their capacity to sustainably manage and govern their natural resource endowment for the long-term growth and prosperity of their countries. We deliver targeted support through advisory services, applied research, education and training, and multi-stakeholder engagement.

Our projects are designed and delivered collaboratively to meet the needs of our developing country partners in alignment with our three focus areas:

Improving Public Sector Capacity and Governance
Environment and Climate Change
Transforming Artisanal and Small-scale Mining

Our Vision, Mission and Values guide our decisions and activities, and three crosscutting themes inform our projects:

Gender equality
Environmental sustainability
Good governance

Each project is built on a performance management framework to ensure that our activities are guided by their potential measurable impact towards our ultimate goal of poverty alleviation. In addition, we integrate Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets and indicators into our projects so we can contribute to achieving these global goals.

Where We Work

How We Select Our Projects

In our early development, CIRDI supported small, short-term projects that allowed us to explore and develop approaches, teams and partners. Informed by this work, we took on a more strategic approach and focused our resources and efforts in a few, multi-year projects with a tight geographic focus that allows us to concentrate our impact.

Most of CIRDI’s current projects are coalition-led and are funded by Global Affairs Canada. Additional projects are funded through new partnerships with other agencies such as the Inter America Development Bank (IDB) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

We continue to respond to requests from developing country governments that align with our three areas of focus. We welcome collaborative partnerships that will enable us to expand and share our knowledge of sustainable natural resources development and grow our portfolio of impactful projects.

Partner Country Criteria

We consider the following criteria when assessing opportunities to partner:

Government request for assistance.

Political will to undertake collaborative/participatory approaches.

Political commitment to transparency.

Opportunity for a long-term relationship.

Opportunity for profound impact (this may lead CIRDI to program more heavily in smaller countries with less complex bureaucracy and/or countries that are standard-setters in their regions).

Government’s ability to pay and/or opportunity to attract donor funding for programming.

Safety for CIRDI personnel, partners and contractors. As part of overall strategic oversight, CIRDI’s advisory council and board will review the country/region prioritization regularly to give the Institute flexibility to re-rank countries as programming develops, networks expand and in-country political landscapes shift.