The Innovations for Poverty Action and Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab Displaced Livelihoods Initiative (DLI) supports rigorous impact evaluations, pilots, exploratory studies, and infrastructure and public goods projects, to inform policies and programs on sustainable livelihoods for displaced populations and host communities. Funding for DLI comes from the IKEA Foundation.

A portion of funding this round is earmarked for projects that include researchers with lived experience of displacement and/or work in partnership with refugee-led organizations. As part of this commitment, Round V also introduces two new funding types, evidence use grants and conference travel grants. You can learn more about these new proposal types here.

Supported projects will contribute to innovation and generalizable learning on program effectiveness, identify the mechanisms underpinning programming, and address potential barriers to impact. Priority areas of research include:

• resilience
• entrepreneurship
• wage employment
• social cohesion, inclusion, and norms
• rights and regulations

DLI’s Fifth Call for Proposals is now open. Mandatory Expressions of Interest are due May 15, 2026, and full proposals are due July 24, 2026. Awards will be announced in September 2026.

Unlike previous funding rounds, Expressions of Interest are mandatory and must be submitted by the deadline to receive substantive feedback. EOIs submitted after this deadline are still welcome, but will likely not be provided feedback beyond confirming if it falls within DLI's thematic and methodological scope.

The DLI team held information sessions providing an overview of our Call for Proposals before our first round. Recordings can be found below. Please note that for Round V, all proposals are being accepted through IPA. Please see our Application Instructions for more information.

• Researcher Information Session
• Policymaker and Practitioner Information Session

Due to the high volume of submissions anticipated, DLI will use AI to support the review of expressions of interest and proposals. All submissions will also receive human review, and no information from submissions will be used to train AI systems.

Please reach out to displacement@poverty-action.org with any questions.

Dates for Round V: 
Mid-April, 2026: Competitive round announced
May 15, 2026: Mandatory expression of interest deadline
Week of June 8, 2026: Decisions on expressions of interest released, during which successful teams will receive the link to submit their proposal
July 24, 2026: Proposal submission deadline
September 2026: Awards announced