SAGA PROGRESS REPORT (11/04-11/05) &
UPCOMING WORKPLAN (12/05-12/06)

II.1.1 Schooling Attainment and Cognitive Ability

• Rates of current enrollment, passing through the primary cycle, and transitioning to lower secondary school are high overall. Still, the data point to clear urban rural gaps as well as differences by level of household resources. Almost all children in the sample enter school, so the differences show up as earlier school leaving for children in rural households or poorer households. Children in the subsample of smaller and more remote rural communities do quite poorly along all these dimensions compared with other rural areas and urban areas—a consistent pattern in these data
  
  
• Wealthy children in both urban and rural areas are much more likely than poor children to attend private primary schools, which are approximately five times more costly than public schools. However, it is also noteworthy that despite the elimination of public primary school fees in 2002, it is surprising that about 25% of households with children in public schools report paying such fees.
  
  
• Controlling for being in school and for grade level, we find that current primary school students (in 2nd and 3rd grade) who live in urban areas score higher on tests than rural children. Those in the smaller rural public schools appear to do the worst. It was also seen that private school students consistently score higher than public school students in the same grade.
  
  
• Children who did well in the 2nd grade are more likely to have progressed through to lower secondary school. This association may indicate that getting children to do well early in the primary cycle is important for later school success.
  
  
• Of particular note are the poor conditions of the sample’s small rural public primary schools Close to half of such schools were described by the interviewers as ‘dilapidated’ or ‘very dilapidated’; among the parents themselves of children in these schools, 81% described their schools this way. In more than a third of the small schools, some of the students must sit on the ground, and some classes must be held outdoors for lack of classroom space.
  
  
• In terms of overall satisfaction with their child’s school—the level of concern on the part of teachers and school directors, and the manner in which they (parents) were treated by school personnel—parents of both public and private school students tended to rate their schools fairly favorably.
  

• Schooling matters strongly, even for knowledge of ‘life skills’ that are presumably imparted largely outside of the classroom.
  
  
• Conditional on a child’s level of schooling, having better educated parents or enjoying the advantages of being in a wealthier household have only modest or inconsistent (across tests) benefits for academic performance.
  
  
• Efforts to enroll and keep in school children from less advantaged backgrounds will contribute significantly to closing not just schooling gaps themselves but also the substantial skill gaps that exist between them and more affluent children.
  
  
• Gender gaps in cognitive skills also exist though they are modest. These differences between girls and boys are due both to disparities in their level of schooling and differences in the impacts of other determinants of test performance. Here too, however, achieving parity in the level of schooling for girls and boys will serve to close a significant portion of the skill gaps.
  
  
• While household characteristics have limited effects on test outcomes controlling for grade attainment, they have strongly significant impacts on attainment itself. Wealth in particular has large effects on schooling.
  

• Determinants of scholastic achievement in Madagascar (test performance): This will be a multivariate regression analysis of the determinants of children’s achievement on standard math and French tests.
  
  
• Effects of early cognitive abilities on school attainment in Senegal: In this paper, we are looking at the impact of early cognitive ability, measured by testing after first grade, on subsequent attainment and academic achievement.
  

II.1.2. Community Schools in Senegal

• “Costs and Financing of Basic Education and Participation of Rural Families and Communities in Third-World Countries” (http://www.saga.cornell.edu/images/nal-commsch.pdf) by N’Dri Assié-Lumumba. This article draws from earlier works of the author to provide a broad background for the project on “Contribution à la scolarisation universelle, l’éradication de la pauvreté, et la mise en place d’un programme national pour le développement durable” that was submitted to Cornell University.
  
  
• A synopsis by of the project “Les écoles communautaires de base au Sénégal: Contribution à la scolarisation universelle, l’éradication de la pauvreté, et la mise en place d’un programme national pour le développement durable” (http://www.saga.cornell.edu/images/nal-senegal.pdf). This paper was co-authored by N’Dri Assié-Lumumba, Mamadou Mara (Chef de la Division, Appui au Développement (DADS), Direction de l’Alphabétisation et de l’Education de Base (DAEB), Ministère de la Formation Professionnelle, de l’Alphabétisation et des Langues Nationales Dakar, Sénégal), and Marieme Lo, then a doctoral student at Cornell University.
  

II.2.1 Institutional Analysis and Health Delivery Systems

• 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.
  

II.2.2 HIV/AIDS

• We can see that the predominance of positive behavioral change applies to all behaviors, for both men and women. Particularly noteworthy is that case of condom use among men and women with persons other than co-habitating partners.
  
  
• Among the behaviors examined, the least progress has been made in terms of increasing the share of abstinent women.
  
  
• The one country where negative signs predominate is for women in Nigeria. Likewise, the most recent signals in terms of behavior change are decidedly mixed for women in Uganda. The country with the most dramatic changes in behavior, at least in percentage terms, is Mozambique.
  
  
• Education among women is generally associated with lowering at-risk behaviors. While we expected safer sexual practices to be increasing with education and wealth, even among men, this does not seem always to be the case. Despite our expectations that, for example, more education would be a complement with information in the determinants of safe sex, or that greater assets will increase safer sex practices (assuming that health is a normal good), it also appears that the more educated men are, the more able they are to persuade potential partners or engineer circumstances that enable them to engage in more and unprotected sex, and that the sex itself is a normal good increasing in wealth.
  
  
• We find that the extent to which modern contraception, as well as radio access, is practiced is strongly associated with lower age at first intercourse, less abstinence, more multiple partners, and greater condom use among women. We conclude from the analysis that there is possibly an element of causation operating through access to modern contraception.
  

• Although there is a widespread belief that scaling up HIV voluntary testing and counseling (VCT) programs in Africa will have large prevention benefits through reductions in risk behaviors, these claims are difficult to establish from existing evaluations of VCT.
  
  
• Considerations from behavioral models and the available data suggest that as VCT coverage expands marginal program effects are likely to decline due to changes in the degree of client selectivity, and that potential uptake among those at highest risk is uncertain. The paper also assesses two other common perceptions about VCT in Africa: that a policy of promoting couples-oriented VCT would be more successful than one emphasizing individual testing, and that VCT demand and prevention impacts will be enhanced where scaling up is accompanied by the provision of anti-retroviral drugs.
  

II.2.3 Non-Income Measures of Well-Being and Poverty

• 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.
  

• 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 (http://www.saga.cornell.edu/images/wp186.pdf).
  

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 in this area during the last year consisted of publishing a proceedings volume from a conference held in summer 2005 and has been widely distributed in Kenya and among the broader, global community of scholars working on mixing qualitative and quantitative methods. See Quantitative and Qualitative Methods for Poverty Analysis (http://www.saga.cornell.edu/saga/q-qconf/proceed.pdf).
  
  
• Editing of the World Development Special Issue is complete. It will come out in 2006. See Appendix I for a Table of Contents for this issue, showing the article titles and authors who are included.
  

II.3.2 Labor Market Institutions

• From the perspective of government policies in Madagascar, prospects for continuing expansion of the EPZ are good, but a major problem is the elimination in January 2005 of quotas imposed under the Multi-Fiber Agreement.
  

II.3.3 Access to Social Services

• In these two countries, such investments can have at best only limited impacts on time use and the gender distribution of work and leisure. In rural areas, where the time burden of water collection is largest, the most feasible large-scale investments would be in well construction. However, the estimates indicate that in both countries, this will not lead to time savings over the alternative of using natural sources such as lakes or rivers. In large part this is because the distances to these two sources of drinking water tend to be similar, as well as not very great.
  
  
• In urban areas of both countries, the availability of interior taps (and outdoor taps in Uganda) leads to reductions in average time in water collection. Yet these savings generally do not amount to more than a few hours per week relative to alternative sources, as the latter are already fairly close at hand for most urban residents. Hence the effects on time use and the overall burden of work of investments that make interior taps feasible for urban households will be limited.
  
  
• Even in rural areas of Madagascar and Uganda, the time in water collection of women and girls, while not trivial, is usually is no more than 3 to 4 hours per week, which puts limits on the time-related benefits to public water supply investments. Time savings may be larger in other countries, especially in more arid climates.
  

• 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.
  
  
• Policy changes that devolved authority over smallholder coffee cooperatives to growers appear to have resulted in lower productivity and poorer financial returns to coffee production. This appears due to the procedures used to elect local cooperative leadership, which facilitates the election of corrupt officials, with demonstrable adverse effects on the prices received by growers and farm-level productive efficiency. Furthermore, the data do not support arguments favoring consolidation of local factories into larger cooperatives as there appear diseconomies of scale in cooperative size (in terms of numbers of factories) even though there are economies of scale at factory level. The clear implications are for the relative efficiency of small, factory-based cooperatives but under different rules for electing leadership and monitoring and enforcing the performance of elected officers.
  
  
• In parallel research, cooperative performance, as reflected in prices received by members for agricultural commodities grown, appears strongly, positively associated with vertical integration into processing, with credit access, and with better educated cooperative leadership.
  

II.3.4 Land tenure

• Approximately 45 papers were presented, the majority by Africans based in Africa.
  
  
• The conference was hosted by ISSER, as part of our institution building strategy, to raise ISSER’s profile from national to regional prominence.
  
  
• The conference was co-organized by Prof Ernest Aryeetey of ISSER, Prof Ravi Kanbur of Cornell University, and Dr. John Page, the new Chief Economist for Africa at the World Bank.
  
  
• The Mission Chief of USAID-Ghana was on the opening panel of the conference.
  
  
• Work sponsored by USAID-Ghana was presented at the conference.
  
  
• The conference was co-funded by SAGA, The World Bank and DFID. SAGA’s $25,000 managed to leverage another $100,000 from these donors.
  
  
• A selection of the papers presented at the conference will be published in the African Development Review, the Africa-wide professional journal published out of the African Development Bank. The refereeing and selection process has just started.
  
  
• Work also continued on editing the Analytical Perspectives on the Economy of Ghana volume, with papers selected form those presented at the Accra conference in 2004 and from work commissioned for SAGA from Ghanaian authors. James Currey has expressed an interest in publication. The volume will probably come out in 2006.
  

• Rice markets are reasonably well competitively integrated at the sub-regional (within fivondronana) level, with factors such as high crime, remoteness, and lack of information are among the factors limiting competition. There appears insufficient competition at the regional level, as reflected in persistently positive and significant expected profits to spatial arbitrage at provincial scale. But very high transfer costs continue to impede spatial market integration at the national level, underscoring the importance of nationwide efforts to improve transport infrastructure so as to increase the remote rural poor’s access to markets and reasonably priced staple products.
  
  
• Supporting the government’s emphasis on agricultural productivity growth through improved technology adoption as a central plank of its poverty reduction strategy, we show that, controlling for geographical and physical characteristics, communes that have higher rates of adoption of improved agricultural technologies and, consequently, higher crop yields enjoy lower food prices, higher real wages for unskilled workers and better welfare indicators.
  

• 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)
  
  
• 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” by Christopher B. Barrett and Winnie K. Luseno, published in Food Policy Volume 29, Issue 4 , August 2004, Pages 393-405.
  
  
• Pastoralist households do not appear as vulnerable to trader exploitation as is sometimes argued. They appear to make sequential marketing decisions that fully exploit available market information and retain flexibility in response to price discovery once they arrive in markets. The fixed costs of market participation do impede market participation, and auctions yield more attractive prices for herders than do dyadic markets based on bilateral herder-trader bargaining. But the main impediments to livestock marketing in the arid and semi-arid lands of northern Kenya appear due not to underdeveloped livestock marketing infrastructure and institutions, but due to limited alternatives investments other than livestock in these areas.
  
  
• Increased maize price volatility post-liberalization appears associated with a reduction in maize cultivation by Kenyan smallholders and increased cultivation of crops such as sugarcane that exhibit relatively greater price stability. Weakness in input markets compound by the problem of price volatility to dampen response to market liberalization.
  
  
• Rural villagers are stratified into networks according to wealth and income. The poor engage in frequent, low-value transfers in kind and in exchange labor. The poorest engage in few cash transfers. Those of intermediate wealth engage more actively in transfers in kind, but not in cash. The relatively rich are also active in transfer networks, and it is almost exclusively they who are able to raise large cash amounts through social networks, either as loans or gifts. As people get wealthier, they engage more in cash transfers and less in transfers in kind in spite of the fact that people who have access to formal financial services participate less in transfers through networks and access to formal financial services is positively associated with wealth.
  

• SAGA researchers’ work on asset-based approaches to poverty analysis and the identification of poverty traps has sparked widespread interest among donors and researchers on the continent. The fractal poverty traps concept now underpins much of the work of the Kilimo Trust in east Africa and has become one of the central organizing concepts behind the Rockefeller Foundation’s work in Africa.
  
  
• Among Ethiopian pastoralists, previously documented patterns of poverty traps appear attributable in large measure to rainfall shocks that impact the large subpopulation of herders of intermediate ability, underscoring the importance of risk management tools. However, it turns out that informal social safety nets systematically exclude most of the poorest households, reinforcing the importance of public or external agency provision of productive safety nets such as those being piloted in Ethiopia currently.
  

• SAGA will co-sponsor with the World Bank and USAID a substantial, regional conference on Pastoralists, Poverty and Vulnerability: Policies for Progress in late June 2006 in Nairobi, Kenya. This event aims 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. The Kenya Office of the President’s Arid Lands Resources Management Program and the International Livestock Research Institute will co-host this event so as to increase its visibility among high-level policymakers. The co-organizers intend to edit a selection of the best papers into a published volume.
  
  
• SAGA researchers will continue to work together on exploring variation in individuals’ risk perceptions and management over time and differentiated by wealth, gender and other observable and targetable characteristics, with an eye towards better understanding how donors, governments and operational agencies can better respond to the range of risks differentially faced by poor peoples in rural Africa. This includes work with national early warning systems in trying to identify readily available leading indicators of changes in household-level productivity or nutritional status.
  

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