SAGA Progress Report

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SAGA Progress Report
April, 2003

I. RESEARCH
3. Madagascar

An initial SAGA participatory workshop was organized in March by Cornell University and our SAGA partner, the Centre d’Etudes Economique (CEE). Attending from Cornell was Christopher Barrett, David Stifel and Bart Minten.

The deliberations commenced with the Cornell University team outlining the general structure of SAGA’s three broad activities and the research themes and core countries within the research activity. We encouraged CEE and the Mission to think about capacity building needs for CEE and to propose appropriate training efforts to SISERA and SAGA for TA funding.

CEE, Madagascar’s SISERA institution, is within the Department of Economics at the Université d’Antananarivo. CEE is therefore closely linked to the university. It has a publication series. It previously worked under EAGER with Harvard on a variety of macroeconomic and financial sector topics. The scale of CEE is effectively the 10-14 permanent faculty (9-11 really available, given other commitments) and DEA (20-30) and doctoral (4) students. They are proposing to SISERA research on: (i) privatization in the financial sector and its effects; (ii) mining sector policy and growth; (iii) urban poverty and development, and a few other topics under development. CDMS is another closely linked center within the department that is part of a Paris II-led international network. There was some discussion about the distinctions between CDMS and CEE.

USAID’s new five-year strategic plan for Madagascar starts October 1, 2003. Four strategic objectives (SOs) have been identified: (i) democracy and governance; (ii) environment, natural resources, agricultural production and rural development and farming systems approach with an emphasis on biodiversity conservation; (iii) agriculture marketing and trade policy ; and (iv) health with an emphasis on MCH, HIV/AIDS.

The Mission expressed support for SAGA work in the thematic area of poverty dynamics and rural vulnerability, and particularly how that would link with PRSP team. Among the issues they would like to see tackled are what are the high value agricultural products that could help stimulate sustainable agricultural intensification here, and how rural household portfolios can be adapted to stabilize and increase well-being. The PRSP and Ministry of Agriculture are key audiences here. The Bank is talking about starting up a large agricultural statistics collection effort, which could conceivably link well to work in this area. Work in this area could build on Cornell’s existing efforts under Ilo and BASIS.

Decentralization of public services delivery in health and education is a huge, important topic. A student working with Cornell’s Bart Minten is presently engaged in working on decentralization of schools, and the World Bank is doing expenditure tracking surveys to understand the resource movements across levels of government hierarchy. Two other examples of a possible emphasis for future work would be to participate in the design and analysis of health facilities and user survey, and a similar survey of schools and cognitive achievement of children. The Ministry of Decentralization (attached to Office of Presidency) is the key government audience, as well as the Ministries of Health and Primary and Secondary Education. We also will coordinate closely with the World Bank, and other bilaterals who have started some work on this also.

There is shared concern about ensuring integration of research design and results reporting into policy discussions. We mooted the possibility, therefore, of SAGA starting a policy research forum with INSTAT, FOFIFA, CEE, Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education, Ministry of Health, USAID, LDI, etc., akin to what we have started in other SAGA countries, in order to: (i) hold pre-study workshops to get stakeholder input and buy-in into research before it begins, (ii) hold regular quarterly meetings to coordinate link between current and upcoming policy questions and current and upcoming research. It would seem sensible to fund CEE to coordinate this activity, which should be relatively inexpensive (telephone and meeting costs only), would increase their visibility and integrate them more into research networks, especially those with strong extramural collaboration (e.g., INSTAT-FOFIFA-Cornell).

CEE has an interest in urban poverty dynamics and urban labor markets, as well as the decentralization theme. Perhaps they can be linked to the last stages of the relevant Cornell work under Ilo, although the Mission had a clear preference to concentrate the poverty dynamics and vulnerability work in rural areas, not urban ones. We will also explore the possibility that CEE could get SISERA funding for complementary work on the urban issues, as well as the possible use of 2001-2003 EPM to explore household-level poverty dynamics at a national level with INSTAT. This could specifically involve examining the link between asset holdings, livelihood strategies, and welfare dynamics to explore poverty traps and vulnerability. Then we can use and build on BASIS-FOFIFA data to explore the linkage between agricultural production and marketing and natural resource management patterns at the household level (e.g., soil and welfare dynamics), why some people do not make the jump out of poverty and what can be done to help them climb out of poverty.

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