SAGA
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SAGA PROGRESS REPORT (12/03-12/04)
&
UPCOMING WORKPLAN (1/05-12/05)
II. RESEARCH
Despite two decades of economic reforms, African growth and poverty reduction remains
disappointing. The central tenet of SAGA’s research is that there is much to be learned about this
disappointment from adopting a “bottom-up” analysis of poverty and poverty reduction. This
strategy starts with the capabilities of individuals, households, and communities — their
productivities, vulnerabilities, institutions, and environment — to consider how development can
and does play out at the ground level, and to understand what factors keep Africa’s poor from
prospering. This is in contrast to the bulk of research on policy and poverty which takes a “topdown”
approach from policy (usually macroeconomic or structural) to individuals.
To maximize the policy relevance of our efforts, we develop SAGA’s research program
collaboratively with our partner institutions, USAID missions, policy makers, and other
stakeholders in each core country. To date, SAGA researchers have completed 121 papers and
many more are in progress. We have also fielded several major surveys and sponsored around 15
research workshops and conferences. Here, we highlight selected results and our plans to build
upon this work for the upcoming year.
II.1. Schooling, Education, and Human Capital
II.1.2 Schooling Attainment and Cognitive Ability
The vast majority of research on education and human capital uses attainment — years of
schooling completed — as its outcome measure. Yet in systems where the quality of schooling is
variable and poor, this is not a good measure of human capital accumulation. In Africa, a variety
of individual, household, and institutional factors conspire to ensure that too many children do
not learn in school. Policy makers need to understand what factors contribute to children’s
learning, not just their attendance. To address those questions, SAGA has co-funded large and
ambitious surveys of children, their households, schools, and communities in Madagascar and
Senegal to understand the determinants of children’s cognitive ability as measured by
standardized tests. This effort is just entering into the analysis stage in each country, but already
some interesting descriptive results are emerging. Highlights include:
From Madagascar (The Demand for Primary Schooling in Madagascar: Price, Quality, and the Choice Between Public and Private Providers
):
- Poor households are substantially more price-responsive than wealthy ones. Fee
increases for public primary schools—even if used to pay for quality improvements—will
have negative effects on equity in education.
- Parents respond strongly to school quality. Most importantly, poor facility condition and
the practice of multigrade teaching (several classes being taught simultaneously by one
teacher) have strongly negative impacts on public school enrollments.
From Senegal (http://www.saga.cornell.edu/images/wp171.pdf):
- More than half of children repeat at least one primary grade, and only about 52% of
children who entered primary school complete it.
- Among children who do manage to complete primary school, most (just over three
quarters) go on to secondary school.
- There is a strong positive relationship between test scores in second grade and the
subsequent probability of both completing primary school and continuing on to
secondary school. This suggests that early learning and academic performance is a good
predictor of subsequent academic achievement.
- Parental education is the key to explaining school attainment, as are household and
community shocks. Conditional upon level of schooling, however, cognitive skills are
unaffected by parental background and most other factors generally thought to be
associated with achievement.
Next Steps
Given that this work is still in its early stages in both Madagascar and Senegal, we will be
focusing on preparing a series of papers along the following dimensions over the next year:
- Comprehensive descriptive and statistical report: This will cover in detail all the main
aspects of the study, including: primary enrollment; grade repetition and dropout during
primary and lower secondary school cycles; transitions from primary to secondary
school; performance on 2004 academic and life skills tests; indicators of public and
private school quality; school management practices; community-school interactions;
parents’ perceptions about education and school quality and awareness of education
policies.
- School enrollment and school choice: This study will use the detailed data on local
schools and on households to measure the importance of factors such as family
background, school availability, and quality on the decision to enroll a child in school.
- Progress through school: This paper will examine the determinants of education
trajectories. It will consider the role of family background, school availability and school
quality, child health, and initial performance on tests (measured in the 1998 PASEC
survey) in determining how long a child stays in school.
- Determinants of scholastic achievement (test performance): This will be a multivariate
regression analysis of the determinants of children’s achievement on standard math and
French tests.
- Acquisition of “life skills”: This analysis will measure the determinants of basic practical
knowledge as measured by the ‘life-skills’ tests given to 14-17 children in the sample.
The tests measure knowledge of good health practices, agricultural knowledge,
knowledge of civic and government institutions, etc. It should provide insights into
whether and how school curricula should be changed to better address these skills.
II.2. Health
SAGA’s work on health and nutrition falls into three categories: the impact of finance,
decentralization and the characteristics of health delivery systems on utilization and health
outcomes; the behavioural aspects of preventing HIV; and the use of health-related measures of
well-being in poverty analyses.
II.2.1 Institutional Analysis and Health Delivery Systems
This work is concentrated in Madagascar where we have collaborated with the World
Bank, INSTAT and the Ministry of Health to conduct a health facilities and user survey. We
completed the first preliminary report on the impacts of the economic crisis and subsequent
elimination of cost recovery on the supply side—in particular, on the quality of services provided
in public health centers.
- The survey of health facilities reveals severe inadequacies in infrastructure: for example,
only 53% had electricity and only 60% had an adequate source of water (tap or pump)
and less than 38% of facilities have supplies of drugs adequate to their needs.
- The effects of the 2002 crisis on health care utilization was severe but apparently shortlived:
consultations fell by about 10% but since then have rebounded strongly.
- Direct observation of health practitioners (by doctors carrying out this part of the survey)
suggests that standard treatment protocols are often, even typically, not followed
completely. For example, in only about a fifth of the centers did practitioners note
lethargy in their patients.
Next steps
Over the next year we will continue our analysis of the data, focusing on whether demand
for health services has begun to recover, and in particular, has it done so for the poorest groups?
Secondly, our present work now focuses on a more general but equally important aim—to
provide a clear and comprehensive picture of the functioning of the Malagasy public health
sector some seven years into the policy of health sector decentralization, making use of detailed
facility data.
In addition, we will study the demand for public and private health care services in
Uganda, another country that has made substantial progress in the decentralization of health
services and has also eliminated user fees for basic health care.
II.2.2 HIV/AIDS
Our work on HIV has focused on knowledge acquisition and prevention knowledge.
Using the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) we have recently completed a 7-country
study (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia) that examines the
determinants of, and changes in knowing how to prevent HIV/AIDS, attitudes toward testing and
access to voluntary counseling and testing programs. (See
http://www.springerlink.com/content/1432-1475/?k=Changes+in+HIV%2fAIDS). Highlights of the results include:
- Knowledge of HIV prevention has been strongly increasing over time. This is
encouraging, but even where prevention knowledge is relatively high—as in urban areas
of Uganda or Kenya—a substantial minority of individuals do not know that using
condoms or having just one partner can reduce the risk of infection.
- Further, substantial gaps between men and women, and between urban and rural areas,
remain. Overall, the gaps between rural and urban areas have been falling, but not the
gaps between men and women.
- In most cases, the large differences in HIV knowledge between non-poor and poor and
between educated and uneducated have either stayed the same over time or increased.
Related to this cross-country work is an in-depth analysis of knowledge and high-risk behaviors
in Madagascar (http://www.saga.cornell.edu/images/wp168.pdf). Key conclusions are:
- In both rural and urban areas of Madagascar, more educated and wealthier women are
more likely to know about means of preventing infection, less likely to have
misconceptions about transmission, and more likely to use condoms. Community factors
such as availability of health centers and access to roads also lead to greater HIV
knowledge.
- However, most of the large rural-urban difference in mean knowledge is due not to
location per se but to differences in schooling and wealth; rather than simply being
geographically targeted, AIDS education efforts must be designed to target and be
understood by uneducated and poor subpopulations.
- The results also suggest that spreading information via radio broadcast may be highly
effecting at increasing HIV/AIDS knowledge, especially in rural areas where there are
fewer alterative sources of information.
Next Steps
Next steps in SAGA’s cross-country HIV work will involve a similar analysis of sexual
behaviors, with a focus on at-risk behaviors. Again, our approach will be to focus on behavioral
analysis to gain insight into personal attributes and policy variables that can reduce the
transmission of HIV through high-risk behaviors. In the case of Madagascar, which has just
completed a new round of the DHS, we will explore in great detail the changes that have
occurred since the earlier 1997 survey that was the basis for our original paper.
II.2.3 Non-Income Measures of Well-Being and Poverty
Most poverty researchers accepts Sen’s argument that poverty is multidimensional,
involving not just lack of income, but inadequate capabilities and functionings, including poor
health, illiteracy, and lack of political voice. Yet in practice, virtually all empirical poverty
research measures deprivation in incomes or expenditures alone. SAGA researchers have begun
to address this limitation of the empirical work with a series of papers that address non-income
measures of well-being in Uganda. Key results include:
- Despite Uganda’s rapid growth during the 1990s, both infant mortality rates and
children’s heights have stagnated.
- Household incomes are significantly correlated with children’s heights and their survival
probabilities, but the correlation is small, so that even if Uganda’s rapid growth were to
continue for another decade the impact on IMRs and children’s heights will be small up
to 2015.
- Even under optimistic assumptions about improvements in health care and mother’s
education, both of which have significant effects on IMRs, Uganda will not achieve the
MDG for infant mortality.
- Increased reliance on cash crops relative to food crops by poor households does not
worsen their children’s nutritional status in Uganda. If anything, the opposite seems to be
the case.
Next steps
We will bring together these papers and others into an edited volume of poverty analyses in
Uganda.
II.3. Empowerment and Institutions
II.3.1 Q-Squared
Economists’ analysis of poverty is almost always quantitative, based on survey data,
while anthropologists and sociologists are more likely to rely on qualitative poverty assessments.
That these different methods often arrive at different conclusions about poverty changes is
disturbing, and has begun to attract the attention of scholars in many social sciences. SAGA
researchers have been at the forefront of efforts to bring together researchers from different
disciplines to reconcile the apparent contradictions of quantitative and qualitative approaches to
poverty analysis. Activities to date include:
- At a first conceptual stage, SAGA co-funded a workshop held at Cornell that set out the
broad parameters of collaboration between quantitative and qualitative approaches in
poverty analysis. This led to a volume entitled Q-Squared edited by Ravi Kanbur,
published in 2003 (https://www.vedamsbooks.com/no31075.htm).
- The second stage has been more empirical, focusing on researchers’ actual attempts to
use both quantitative and qualitative methods in practice. SAGA supported a conference
organized jointly by Cornell and the University of Toronto in May 2004, with cofinancing
from DFID and IDRC (http://www.utoronto.ca/mcis/q2/). A selection of these
papers will be published as a special issue of the journal World Development.
- SAGA organized a workshop on “Mixing Qualitative and Quantitative Method of
Poverty Analysis in Kenya,” hosted by KIPPRA in Nairobi on March 11, 2004 (see
http://www.saga.cornell.edu/saga/q-qconf/qqconf.html). The workshop was attended by
about 50 representatives from government ministries, Kenyan universities and research
institutes and national media. A proceedings volume from the event will be published
later in the year.
Next Steps
The third stage will focus on combining mixed methods in the context of policy making
and policy dialogue. The focus will be on mechanisms to ensure that within national statistical
offices there is cross-fertilization between qualitative and quantitative information. Discussions
on these are just beginning, and we expect a conference to take place in 2006.
II.3.2 Labor Market Institutions
An important institution that affects the well-being of the poor is the function of the labor
market. SAGA’s work program in South Africa and Madagascar has a focus in this area.
From South Africa
Work conducted under the SAGA project presents one of the most comprehensive
analyses of the evolution of the South African labor market in the last decade. Major findings include:
- Unemployment at the end of the period stands at a staggering 41.8% and is concentrated
among African, female, poorly educated, and young workers.
- Almost nine in ten unemployed individuals having been unemployed for more than three
years or having never had a job at all.
- There is a rapidly growing number of unemployed workers with relatively high levels of
education (specifically tertiary qualifications). This problem is particularly acute amongst
Africans.
- The unemployed are also increasingly marginalized in households with no wage or salary
earners and are relying more and more on state transfers (pensions and other grants).
From Madagascar
Our work on the urban labor market in Madagascar uses household and labor force
survey data to analyze changes in the structure of the urban labor market and earnings in
Madagascar since the early 1990s. Major findings are: (see
http://www.saga.cornell.edu/images/wp175.pdf):
- The most significant change was the dynamism of the urban labor market and rapid rise
of urban manufacturing employment in Madagascar’s export processing zone, especially
for women.
- The evidence suggests that the export processing zones provide better employment
opportunities—in terms of wages and job benefits—for semi-skilled women than are
generally available to them elsewhere in either the formal or informal economy.
Next Steps
We plan to use continuing household and labor force surveys to investigate the extent of
the recovery of export manufacturing and employment from the 2002 crisis, and the longer term
impacts of these changes in the labor market on urban poverty and gender equality.
II.3.3 Access to Social Services
An important aspect of our work in this research theme is on the functioning of
institutions that deliver services directly to the poor. In Madagascar, we use data from three
rounds of nation-wide household surveys to find
(http://www.saga.cornell.edu/images/wp128.pdf):
- Education and health services for the most part are distributed more equally than
household expenditures.
- However, few services other than primary schooling accrue disproportionately to the poor
in absolute terms and some services such as post-primary schooling are in effect targeted
to the non-poor. Significant disparities exist as well in the use of services between rural
and urban areas, and by province, but there are no notable gender differences in coverage.
- With regard to changes over the decade, primary enrollments rose sharply and also
become significantly more progressive. The improvement in equity in public schooling
occurred in part because the enrollment growth was in effect regionally targeted: it
occurred only in rural areas, which are poorer.
In Kenya, SAGA work undertaken by IPAR and by Cornell University in collaboration
with Egerton University has explored how rural households access extension and other services,
with an eye towards understanding the likely impacts of further decentralization of the provision
of government services and of donor and government-directed creation of farmer groups.
Preliminary analysis of the original survey and focus group discussion data indicate that:
- Limited experience with decentralization does seem associated with increased householdlevel
access to extension services, although the direction of causality remains somewhat
unclear and the effect is most pronounced among wealthier households.
- Rural households’ mean willingness to pay for extension services in medium-to-high
potential rural areas appears to be at least equal to prevailing rates charged by private
service providers.
- Community groups created in concert with extra-village entities (e.g., government, NGOs
or private firms) leverage more resources than groups that originate indigenously, from
within the village, and have a greater positive impact on household incomes and
propensity to adopt improved technologies as a result of the added access to resources.
II.3.4 Land tenure
USAID/Ghana has recently funded an ISSER proposal for a three-year program of multidisciplinary
research into Ghana’s land tenure and administration systems. This research is
timed to produce resources for deliberations about the directions, processes, components and
likely impacts of reforms under the Land Administration Project (LAP). Also, it will contribute
to discussions about the place of land tenure in poverty reduction through the GPRS. This project
is just beginning and will begin to produce results in 12 months’ time.
II.4. Risk, Vulnerability and Poverty Dynamics
The risk of falling into poverty (measured in many possible dimensions) deserves
considerable attention given the importance that poor people place on vulnerability and the
relative scarcity of research on the subject and related issues such as poverty traps and dynamics.
This is especially true for Africa’s poor who face unusually high risks, especially, but not
exclusively among those living in rural areas. The poor have fewer means for dealing with the
risks that they face, and lack access to assets and a range of institutions usually associated with
mitigating the wide range of risks and shocks that affect households in Africa.
From South Africa
Some recent work presented at the SAGA sponsored conference in Cape Town has
examined the role of asset accumulation and shocks in South Africa using the Kwazula-Natal
Income Dynamics Survey (KIDS) and the South African Participatory Poverty Assessment (SAPPA). Key findings include:
- Participants in the SA-PPA provide commentary on job losses, the death and illness of
household members, theft and destruction of property, and in each case, link these shocks
to permanent declines in income.
- Access to finance is also identified as an important constraint. The central finding—the
strong links between temporary shocks and permanent poverty—focuses attention on
preventing and mitigating these shocks.
From Ghana
In Ghana SAGA has taken an asset based approach to analyzing rural poverty based on
household survey data (see
http://www.isser.org/publications/older/Poor%20Household%20Asset%20Choice%20in%20Ghana%201.pdf).
Major results include:
- For most people, there are hardly any institutions in rural Ghana that offer a positive real
return on savings. Aside from the poor return, savings mobilization in rural Ghana has
very little institutional organization, not even with the informal sector participation.
- Savings does not necessarily generate access to a credit market in order to generate
liquidity when desired. The institutional characteristics of the financial market lead to
substantial transaction costs that reduce the real return on financial assets for rural
households.
From Madagascar
Collaborative research between Cornell and FOFIFA has shown that:
From Uganda
A SAGA-funded study at EPRC has found:
- Even though poverty fell significantly in the 1990s, most Ugandans remain vulnerable to
shocks that could drop them below the poverty line.
- The most important shocks to households are the illness or death of a family member. For
communities, the most important shocks are crop losses due to disease or poor weather.
- The least vulnerable group, and the group whose poverty declined most over the decade,
are those households with a public sector worker.
From Kenya
SAGA co-funded work based at Cornell with Kenya-based collaborators at KARI, the
University of Nairobi and Egerton University has found:
- Price risk faced by livestock producers in the arid and semi-arid lands of the north can be
attributed almost wholly to variability in the inter-market margins between up-country
and Nairobi terminal markets. The highest return investments in stabilizing livestock
market conditions would therefore come from improvements in transport and security
that affect inter-market basis risk.
(See Decomposing producer price risk: a policy analysis tool with an application to northern Kenyan livestock markets )
- Income and asset dynamics in western and northern Kenya exhibit patterns consistent
with the notion of a poverty trap. Nonlinear asset and welfare dynamics create critical
thresholds, points at which safety nets become especially important to guard against
shocks that could make people permanently poor and to induce rural people to manage
risk without severely compromising expected income growth. Health and mortality
shocks appear the most common explanations for households falling into chronic poverty.
(http://www.saga.cornell.edu/images/wp154.pdf and
http://www.saga.cornell.edu/images/wp169.pdf)
- Using high frequency panel data among Ethiopian and Kenyan pastoralists we establish
that self-targeting food-for-work or indicator-targeted free food distribution more
effectively reach the poor than does food aid distributed according to community-based
targeting. Food aid flows do not respond significantly to either covariate communitylevel
income or asset shocks. Rather, food aid flows appear to respond mainly to more
readily observable rainfall measures. Finally, food aid does not appear to affect private
transfers in any meaningful way, either by crowding out private gifts to recipient
households nor by stimulating increased gifts by food aid recipients.
(http://www.saga.cornell.edu/images/wp170.pdf)
Next Steps
- A national policy conference on reducing risk and empowering the poor in rural Kenya,
early February 2005, hosted by IPAR, showcasing SAGA research by IPAR, KIPPRA,
Tegemeo, University of Nairobi and Cornell.
- SAGA will co-sponsor with the World Bank and USAID a substantial, regional
conference on Pastoralists, Poverty and Vulnerability: Policies for Progress, tentatively
scheduled for January 2006 at a venue to be determined in Kenya. The aim of this event
would be to draw lessons from research in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Tanzania, and
Uganda on the problems confronting governments, donors and NGOs trying to reduce
poverty, risk exposure and vulnerability among pastoralist populations. We are presently
in discussions with the Office of the President’s Arid Lands Resources Management
Program about co-hosting this event so as to increase its visibility among high-level
policymakers.
- SAGA researchers, working with FOFIFA (Centre National de Recherche Appliquée au
Développement Rural) and INSTAT (Institut National de la Statistique), will continue
exploring the relationship between agricultural technologies, transport infrastructure, rice
productivity and patterns of poverty and food insecurity throughout the country so as to
help establish the likely relative poverty reduction efficacy of strategies based on
improving agricultural productivity versus improving market access. At the same time,
we will be studying the dynamics of rice productivity at plot and household level to try to
identify sources of stagnation in rural productivity and incomes in Madagascar and the
interrelationship between farm and non-farm activities in household level welfare.
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