SAGA Progress Report - Attachment 3 (Technical Assistance)

SAGA
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SAGA Progress Report
October, 2002

ATTACHMENT 3.

MEMORANDUM REGARDING TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE UNDER SAGA

MEMORANDUM

March 26, 2002

To: Directors of SISERA Institutions

From: Rita Aggarwal, USAID SAGA Project Manager
Diéry Seck, Director, Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP)
Stephen D. Younger, Cornell SAGA Project Technical Assistance Coordinator

Re: Technical Assistance Under SAGA

In addition to its support for collaborative research, the SAGA project provides funds for technical assistance to SISERA institutions. We would like for this technical assistance to be a coherent program rather than responses to a series of ad hoc requests. But of course, we also want the program to be as responsive to the needs and interests of your institutes as possible.

To achieve both of these goals, we would like to ask for your input as to the kind of technical assistance activities that will be the most beneficial for your institutes and for the policy making process in your country. We will circulate your comments among all the SISERA directors as a way of starting a virtual discussion of SAGA’s technical assistance program. This will enable us to finalize a design when we meet in person at the next SISERA Directors’ meeting.

While the eventual technical assistance will be demand-driven, there are a few parameters to keep in mind as you prepare your observations:

SAGA is a five-year project, so you should think long-term. In particular, our experience is that the best technical assistance programs involve repeated interaction between participants, so that each new activity can build on its predecessors.
We generally do not view large, international seminars as cost-effective. Travel budgets quickly balloon out of control in Africa. Instead, we prefer a series of in-country activities, which may well include seminars or short courses. However, in cases where international seminars are a more cost-effective option—for example, seminars designed for small numbers of participants from many countries—we will consider them.
In all SAGA technical assistance activities, we will prefer research themes that are consistent with the research component of the CU/CAU SAGA project, but our support is not limited to those themes.
SAGA technical assistance activities can draw on the considerable breadth of research experience at Cornell, Clark-Atlanta, and SISERA.

As David Sahn explained at the November meeting in Dakar, the collaborative research activities involving Cornell and Clark-Atlanta universities will focus on a core of five or six countries. SAGA’s technical assistance, however, is available to any partner institution, emerging center, or collaborating center. Thus, we are interested in input from each and all of you.

The types of technical assistance that you might consider include support to your on-going research and policy outreach activities, and short courses or seminars on research themes and methods relevant to SAGA. But we do not want to limit the possibilities at this point, so please feel free to propose any and all ideas that you have.

Please send your responses to Steve Younger, the CU/CAU technical support coordinator, at sdy1@cornell.edu or at fax number 1-607-255-0178.

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