IDEA associates have engaged in research programmes and consultancy on a wide range of disability and development issues. Among many others, these have included:

• DFID-funded consultancy and research project on capacity building of Southern Disabled People’s Organisations. The basic premise of this project is that disabled people are the best judges of what they need to build their organisations. Most of the work has been carried out by disabled consultants in the South. One part of the research considered how Nordic DPOs worked to capacity build with Southern DPOs. See, Capacity Building of Disabled People’s Organisations in the South. The Scandinavian Model - Downloads)
• Consultancy from DFID to develop a ‘How to note’ - Working on Disability in Country Programmes. IDEA was successful in bidding for this project. Working closely with DFID staff, IDEA consultants were instrumental in putting together this groundbreaking practice note.
• Managing research of the DFID-funded Disability Knowledge and Research (DKaR) Programme. IDEA associates were involved in all aspects of what was perhaps the most ambitious and wide-ranging international research project on disability and development ever undertaken. For more on the project and the research see the following Link.
• DKaR research on, among other topics, disability, poverty and the new development agenda, mainstreaming, gap analysis, the work of INGOs in Mozambique, disabled people and the 2004 tsunami and Uganda’s PEAP. Research findings were disseminated widely by DPOs in the South through workshops and conferences in Southern Africa, India and Cambodia. Presentations were also given at USAID, the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank, the latter which is recorded on video. A book based on the findings of the programme, In or Out of the Mainstream? Lessons from Research on Disability and Development Cooperation (2006), has been published by the Disability Press.
• Evaluation of first DFID Disability Knowledge and Research (DKaR) Programme. The report’s recommendations formed the basis for a radical change in emphasis during the second phase of the DKaR, from a medical to a social-model approach.  An article based on the report was published in the Asia Pacific Disability Rehabilitation Journal
• Research on the formulation of development of disability policy in Bolivia. This report is wonderful and disturbing and unique. It comes from the raw voices of disabled people. Not leaders or the conventionally articulate, but the voices of ordinary disabled people talking about their lives. And it gets better, because they have, through the creation of public murals, also painted their lives and aspirations.

Other projects on which IDEA associates were involved were:

• Research on disability and poverty
• Youth programme development in Bulgaria
• Youth development work in the former Soviet Union
• Consultancy work with a range of DPOs throughout Africa
• Research on capacity building for Southern African DPOs
• Consultancy to the Department for International Development (DFID) on disability policy, human resources, training and research
• Research on service delivery to disabled people in South Africa
• Strategic planning exercise for the African Decade of Persons with Disabilities
• Evaluation of Community-based Rehabilitation (CBR) Programmes in Lesotho and Mpumalanga Province of South Africa.
• Planning and technical support to South African Federal Council on Disability (SAFCD).
• Development of a training pack on disability for DFID country offices
• Research on various aspects of education for disabled people in Fiji
• Consultancy on and evaluation of independent living schemes in various European countries
• Devising DFID-funded grassroots human rights project for disabled people in the Samara Oblast, Russia