What is BeFinD?

IOB researchers Danny Cassimon, Dennis Essers and Karel Verbeke are involved in one of the three Acropolis projects launched by VLIR and ARES in 2014. ACROPOLIS projects aims to support the decision-making of the Belgian Directorate General for Development Cooperation (DGD) by evidence-based research. The programme is funded by both ARES-CCD and VLIR-UOS. It brings together policymakers from DGD, BTC, and other relevant governmental actors on the one hand and researchers from both Dutch- and French-speaking universities in Belgium on the other for a duration of three years (May 2014-2017).

IOB is involved in the Acropolis project BeFinD, a consortium of four research centers at Belgian universities (Antwerp, Leuven and Namur) with the objective of covering the policy and research questions that are the most relevant to Financing for Development in the framework of the Academic Research Group for Policy Support (ACROPOLIS).

The overall research is structured around seven research packages: improving tax systems for LICs, illegal money flows, social protection, mobilizing private resources for development, global public goods, debt management and ODA and its relationship with other development-relevant funding flows. IOB contributions mainly focus on the latter two topics.

BeFinD is a collaboration of four Belgian research centers. The four centers involved are: