Global Safety Evidence Centre funding call 2025

At Lloyd's Register Foundation we have recently launched our 2024-2029 strategy, reaffirming a commitment to making a significant difference in improving the safety of people and critical infrastructure. As part of this vision, we are launching a Global Safety Evidence Centre, a hub for anyone who needs to know ‘what works’ to make people safer in the face of a range of global safety challenges, including workplace accidents and injuries. Alongside the launch, we are delighted to announce a call for proposals to support research and evidence projects that address occupational safety and health (OSH) evidence gaps, as well as broader safety science work, such as how to measure and value safety and prevention, and how to learn from past failures and successes.

The Global Safety Evidence Centre collates, creates and communicates the best available safety evidence from the Foundation, our partners and other sources, on both the nature and scale of global safety challenges, and what works to address them. It works with partners to identify and fill gaps in the evidence, and to use the evidence for action for anyone who needs to know ‘what works’ to make people safer. The Evidence Centre will initially focus on two areas:

1. Safety Science: Safety is a broad field with many disciplines, professions and use contexts.  We aim to bring together the relevant knowledge, tools and methods across these fields to help improve safety outcomes.
2. Safe Work: The Lloyd's Register Foundation World Risk Poll consistently finds that, one in five workers globally (18%) experienced harm at work in the last two years, and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates this to be the cause of three million deaths annually. Around the world and across industrial sectors, many professionals, policy and decision-makers who need to consider safety do not have access to sufficient high-quality evidence; either because it does not yet exist, or because it has not been collated and communicated to them in an understandable and actionable form. Evidence is critical to improving the safety of people and property; without it, we cannot fully understand the nature and scale of safety challenges faced by people around the world, nor what works to protect them from harm.

The grants from this funding will directly contribute to the Foundation’s mission to engineer a safer world and the strategic objective of growing the foundation’s capability and reputation as a trusted source of safety evidence and insight. These grants are intended to create evidence to improve understanding and sharing of which safety interventions work; inform decision making; and highlight and fill knowledge and data gaps, ultimately influencing others to act and leading to better safety outcomes.

This call is open to academic institutions, research organisations, non-profit organisations and industry worldwide. Collaborations across sectors and disciplines are highly encouraged. Eligible institutions must be actively engaged in research activities that align with Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s mission to engineer a safer world, focusing on safety science and safe work.

Your proposal

We are seeking ambitious and innovative proposals that aim to support with understanding and sharing which safety interventions work; inform decision making; highlight and fill knowledge and data gaps and lead to safer outcomes; or lead to the creation of evidence to support efforts to influence others to act. Evidence outputs must be open access and will form part of the evidence repository of the Foundation’s Global Safety Evidence Centre.

Proposals should be for evidence projects of up to two years. We anticipate to see budgets of between £100,000 to £250,000 but should you wish to discuss projects with smaller or larger budgets please get in touch on the below details. Proposals that are seeking to secure the higher budget threshold are likely to be those resulting in multiple research types or areas or regions of focus. Applications that leverage funding from other sources is highly encouraged.

Themes and topics

Proposals should address one or more of the following themes:

• Safe Work: the creation of a safe work environment, particularly in ‘high hazard’ industries, building on insights from the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll. We are seeking proposals that contribute to the evidence base for the Sustainable Development Goal 8.8: Promote Safe Working Environments.  
• Safety Science: knowledge about risk and safety, and how individuals understand, assess, measure and manage them, at work and in other spheres such as transport, energy or other critical infrastructures. At present safety science terms are poorly defined, occupational safety and health interventions are inconsistent and those that are implemented are typically never evaluated. We are seeking evidence projects to support in defining key terms and approaches, and evidence that seeks to use models and theories to make causal relations in safety evidence.

Types of research projects

Proposals should take the form of one or more of the following research outputs:

Evidence reviews and synthesis - reviewing existing and published global studies, either through established methods for search and assessment or through developing new methodology and capability for global evidence in safety. This could include:

• Conceptual and indicator reviews to produce more precise, universally accepted definitions of safety and models to measure them in the workplace.
• Rapid evidence assessments, scoping and umbrella reviews to provide a broad overview of safety knowledge and interventions evidence.
• Intervention effectiveness reviews to understand the evidence range of what the impact of specific occupational safety interventions have been. We are especially keen to see reviews focusing on informal workers and organisations without dedicated safety professionals.
• Living evidence synthesis and partnerships to continuously update safety reviews and guidelines as new evidence becomes available. For example, examining how new evidence and partnerships are moving society closer to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 8.8: Promote Safe Working Environments.

Research, evaluations and trials – building on the current evidence, using established research methods to produce quantitative or qualitative research. We are looking to test theoretical models that clarify the causal relationships between attitudes, behaviours or organisational practices and improvements in safety outcomes.  This could include:

• Innovation and discovery evidence - pipeline studies to get a better understanding of key elements of safety culture, theories of change or determining context for new ideas and small scale pilots of safety interventions.
• Scaling and development evidence – promising safety intervention ideas with a solid theory of change that are ready for larger scale trials.  
• Implementation and deployment studies - established effective projects that require better understanding of how best to achieve implementation in practise and how to measure them. For example, exploring acceptability, feasibility or affordability.

Data generation and analysis – reviewing existing data, from organisations and practitioners to gain a deeper understanding. This could include:

• Secondary data analysis (typically we would expect these to be shorter and lower cost in nature).
• Data infrastructure capacity "building to make it easier, quicker and cheaper for audiences to do high quality data collection and analysis to measure safety initiatives and knowledge."  
• Primary data collection will only be funded in the Foundation’s three safety strategic priority areas.

Stakeholders, evidence use and policy analysis - researching overlooked areas assessing where the evidence needs are pressing  but research outputs have been slow produced to emerge. We are particularly keen to see partnerships with user led programmes and non-governmental organisations within this area. This could include:

• Research that helps identify and evidence existing safety knowledge or needs of practitioners and others working in the space of occupational safety. Projects would look at understanding practitioners knowledge, what interventions they implement based on their applied experience and what needs they have in their daily roles. This could include further analysis and research into an issue or place to better understand the local context and needs faced by different industries or types of workers. This could also include mapping evidence to understand which research gaps exist against occupational safety and health practitioner knowledge as well as what level of qualifications they have compared to what level is required.  
• Developing areas of research interest or collaborative research agendas with practitioners, working collaboratively to identify problem statements.  
• Projects looking to apply evidence with wider communities and end users – for example identifying how to embed safety evidence into national or sector safety plans. This could also include extending and comparing the occupational safety and health practitioner research to other sectors such as shipyards, commercial and shipping, ports, energy and search & rescue.  
• Safety policy analysis to highlight evidence gaps and priorities to support further research and policy-making. We would expect this to be significantly shorter and lower cost in nature to other research outputs.

Essential criteria

It is anticipated that high quality proposals will feature the following characteristics: 

• Research should build on, challenge, or extend existing knowledge in the field and address a relevant gap or need.
• Research method design should be sound, appropriate, and carefully considered, with a well-founded approach based on the best available evidence or theory.  
• Research should take a systematic and transparent approach to analysis and interpretation.  
• Evidence reviews should have a pre-registered protocol with clear inclusion and exclusion criteria and take a systematic and transparent approach to searching and selecting studies as well as a robust and consistent way of appraising the quality of included studies and assessing the confidence level of the review findings.
• Researchers should demonstrate an understanding of the context for the area of government or policy that they hope to inform and/or an understanding of how their work is grounded in real world context.  
• Objectives and outcomes should be clearly defined and feasible, given the current stage of knowledge, with a logical methodology suited to achieving the goals.  
• The project should be realistically achievable with the proposed resources, timeline, and expertise, and the plan should align with the stage of knowledge, whether it is early-stage exploration or advanced application.
• The proposal should have a clear dissemination plan and collaboration activities for explaining, sharing, and using results.
• Proposals should demonstrate how their scope aligns with our mission to engineer a safer world and the potential for leveraging wider support and generating long-term impact.  

An example of a strong evidence project previously funded by the Foundation can be seen here.

Desirable criteria

• Applications that leverage funding from other sources is highly encouraged.
• Applications for research is strongly encouraged in the Foundation’s Ocean Centre countries; Brazil, Kenya, Ghana, Bangladesh, India, Philippines and Indonesia, as well as other coastal communities that share geographic and societal characteristics and collaborations. Research from other countries should prove a higher level of leveraged funding from other sources.  
• Whilst safety evidence projects are welcomed from a broad spectrum of areas, there is a preference for projects that address the Foundation’s strategic priorities of Safer Maritime Systems; Safer Sustainable Infrastructure; and Skilled People for Safer Engineering.  
• There will also be a preference for projects that consider the Foundations strategic challenges of Adapting to Climate Change, Decarbonisation, New Technologies, and Changing Global Workforce. To discuss this further please do contact our team, (contacts listed below).  
• We are particularly keen to see projects that are global and led by local voices, including practitioner led work.  

Out of scope

Proposals will not be considered if they:

• Include organisations outside the scope of our mission, politically minded organisations and religious groups.
• Do not contribute to improving safety outcomes.
• Lead to commercial gain or prioritise commercial product development without a strong connection to research and safety outcomes.
• Projects where activities only directly benefit the applicant.
• Applications that include costs for practical application resulting from the research – this call is focused on funding research only.  
• We will not fund significant overhead costs and applicants should use UK charity costing to reflect this - please consult our information on  eligible costs for full details. 

Funding support

Funding for between £100,000 - £250,000 over two years, please see specific guidance for each area of research outlined above. Should you wish to discuss projects with smaller or larger budgets please get in touch on the below details.

Access to networks and expertise

Successful applicants will gain access to our global network of industry leaders, academic institutions, and policy experts, fostering valuable connections to enhance the project’s reach and outcomes.

Support for dissemination and publicity

We are committed to amplifying the impact of funded research through our Global Safety Evidence Centre. We will also actively work with successful grant recipients to disseminate findings through high-profile channels, including industry platforms, conferences, and publications.

We will provide support in promoting the outputs and outcomes to key stakeholders and decision-makers, ensuring that your work reaches the right audiences to drive change.

Collaboration with Lloyd's Register Foundation

Successful applicants will have opportunities to collaborate closely with us and our partners, benefiting from shared insights and strategic alignment with our broader mission to engineer a safer world.