SAGA Briefing Report
November, 2003

• Cornell-SAGA is helping ISSER set up the new Network on the Economy of Ghana, whose aim is to link policy makers with the very best in global research on Ghana, through an electronic network. Plans are also under way for a major conference under the auspices of the NEG, to bring together policy makers and researchers.
  
  
• At the conference on designing the SAGA-Ghana research program, the National Development Planning Commission was an active participant (along with USAID and other donor missions).

• Our SAGA team includes two members who are writing the government’s Kenya Rural Development Strategy.
  
  
• Our SAGA consultations included two members who are writing the government’s Kenya Rural Development Strategy. Hezron Nyangito, the Acting Director of KIPPRA (the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis, roughly Kenya’s equivalent of the Congressional Research Service), leads one of our teams. James Nyoro of Tegemeo, who leads another of our subprojects, chairs the governments parliamentary advisory group on reforms in the coffee sector.
  
  
• The planned March 2004 working on Mixing Qualitative and Quantitative Methods of Poverty Appraisal in Kenya has already attracted senior level interest from the Ministry of Agriculture and the Office of the Presidency, which expect to send representatives.

• The Secretary General, Mme. Josianne Rabetokotany of the Ministry of Education, along with the Prime Minister, requested and secured financial support from the World Bank at a Paris donor’s meeting for a survey to be jointly designed and conducted by SAGA and the Ministry to improve the knowledge base for the Ministry’s policy making and investments.
  
  
• At a workshop in March 2003, organized by Cornell, FOFIFA and INSTAT, the results we not only used to define the SAGA research agenda, but fed directly into the Ministry of Agriculture and the Presidency’s deliberations on the PRSP later that month.

• Ravi Kanbur has been involved in a number of outreach activities at the request of USAID-South Africa and DPRU. He has addressed Parliamentarians on the issue of globalization and poverty, made presentations to South Africa Treasury staff on a range of issues, and has become a peer reviewer for the Fiscal and Finance Commission for their next report to Parliament. The research collaboration with DPRU has complemented well the training course on poverty analysis that Cornell and DPRU held in Cape Town for staff from Historically Disadvantaged Universities
  
  
• Haroon Bhorat, Director of DPRU is a member of the South African Fiscal Finance Commisison. At the request of DPRU and FFC, Ravi Kanbur made a presentation on his recent research on Spatial Inequality and development, a special interest of the FFC, and agreed to become a peer reviewer on their report to Parliament.

• Godfrey Bahiigwa and Stephen Younger have one working paper in progress that examines the impact of policies proposed and/or implemented under the Plan for the Modernization of Agriculture (PMA) on children’s nutritional status. The Ministry of Agriculture specifically requested this paper at a presentation we made to solicit suggestions about SAGA’s research program in Uganda.
  
  
• We have three working papers that address an issue that both the Ministry of Finance and the World Bank explicitly expressed interest in, that being the apparent contradiction between rapid progress on income poverty reduction with little or no improvement in non-income measures of well-being like infant mortality and children’s nutritional status. One, by Stephen Younger, is finished. Two more, by Sarah Ssewanyana and Stephen Younger and by Ashie Mukungu and Ibrahim Kasirye, are under way.

• With our colleagues at CREA, we are organizing a workshop in April with the Director of Planning in the Ministry of Education to help formulate the new education strategy that is being prepared. As part of this effort, we are both engaged in primary data collection, analysis and training, as well as in organizing a series of policy seminars, the first being planned for April 2004.

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