SAGA Progress Report - Technical Assistance

SAGA
B16 MVR Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
(607) 255-8931
Fax (607) 255-0178
saga@cornell.edu

SAGA Progress Report
October, 2002

III. TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE

1. Development of the Mode of Operation for SAGA Technical Assistance Activities

The broad parameters of SAGA technical assistance activities are set down in the technical proposal to USAID, and have subsequently been modified to include significant collaboration and coordination with SISERA’s activities. Under the terms of the cooperative agreement, Cornell and Clark-Atlanta Universities are to provide technical assistance to SISERA partner institutes on a demand-driven basis. Recognizing the potential for excess demand for such assistance, the technical application establishes broad guidelines for the types of activities that will receive priority. This includes those:

that complement the cooperative agreement’s research activities;
that complement other technical assistance activities at Cornell and Clark-Atlanta;
that complement the cooperative agreement’s small grants program;
with potential to establish long-lived professional relationships;
with potential to mentor young scholars; and
with potential to redress long-standing gender inequities in support to African economic researchers.

In addition, at the initial meeting between Cornell, Clark-Atlanta, SISERA, and USAID, held in Ithaca on October 29, 2001, we agreed that Cornell and Clark-Atlanta should coordinate its own technical assistance activities with those of SISERA, which also has support for such activities from USAID under the SAGA initiative (see Attachment 2, the Memorandum of Understanding dated December 10, 2001). Establishing the exact nature of this cooperation took some time, but after extensive discussions between CU/CAU, SISERA, and USAID, we circulated a memo to institute directors to inform them of the possibilities for technical assistance under SAGA (see Attachment 3, memo dated March 26, 2002).

Parallel to these activities, SISERA developed its own, SAGA-funded, research competition for its partner institutes (see Attachment 4, Information and Invitation to Participate in SAGA). Steve Younger consulted extensively with SISERA and USAID on the design of this competition. An important feature is that institutes preparing proposals will receive "coaching" from an established scholar. These resource people will provide a critical review of an institute’s draft proposal, and suggest data sources and methods appropriate to the proposals theme. In addition, recognizing that many research resources are difficult to access from Africa, resource people will acquire relevant material and send it to the institute. Insofar as possible, this coaching will come from the Cornell/Clark-Atlanta consortium, although in cases where an appropriate resource person cannot be identified within our institutions, we will approach resource people from other institutions.

While the initial Memorandum of Understanding between CU/CAU and SISERA calls for CU/CAU staff to review SISERA research proposals as well as to coach them, we subsequently decided against this, for two reasons. First, there is a potential conflict of interest from being both a coach and a reviewer for a proposal. More importantly, we expect that some SISERA research activities will be coordinated with the CU/CAU SAGA research agenda. Given that possibility, there would be a serious conflict of interest if CU/CAU were affiliated with a research activity and also its reviewer. Thus, SISERA has agreed to seek outside reviewers for all proposals.

2. Activities

To date, there have been three SAGA-related activities to provide technical assistance to SISERA partner institutes. We present each of those in turn, followed by a general review of other, related, activities over the course of the year.

Uganda Survey Data Analysis Workshop

As part of the process to select specific topics for SAGA’s collaborative research in Uganda, Steve Younger traveled to Kampala in November, 2001, and again in June, 2002. During these visits, he held extensive meetings with the Economic Policy Research Centre (the SISERA partner in Uganda), academics, policymakers, donors, and other stakeholders in Uganda to debate the most appropriate themes for policy-oriented research in Uganda. During these consultations, a surprisingly large number of people noted that Uganda is a country rich in data, but with very few people using those data. Further, there is general agreement that the main problem is not funding for research, but a scarcity of researchers who are both interested in and capable of doing quantitative data analysis that is useful for policy making. Ugandans expressed particular concern that the main users of the data are foreign.

This technical assistance was designed to address the imbalance between abundant data and scarce researchers in Uganda. Both EPRC and Cornell have considerable experience at training researchers to analyze survey data using advanced econometric techniques and software. Thus, we had an excellent opportunity to provide a valuable technical assistance activity under SAGA. Further, our previous experience with such workshops allowed us to organize the activity quickly. In the event, the workshop was held from August 26, to September 6, 2002, with Steve Younger (CU) and John Okidi (EPRC) serving as joint coordinators and resource people.

In addition to developing general skills for survey data analysis, the workshop also aimed to generate interest in research areas relevant to SAGA’s research program. By showing the workshop’s participants both research topics and the methods to address them, we hoped to interest a group of researchers who might participate in the SAGA research agenda. We chose our topics accordingly. In particular, we discussed general poverty analysis and poverty comparisons; the incidence of public expenditures and taxes; agricultural development; and the demand for public social services. For each topic, we reviewed two or three key papers that use survey data to address a policy issue. We then worked through the steps of how to conduct a similar analysis with data available in Uganda. This latter activity was very much hands on. EPRC provided one computer for each pair of participants so that everyone could work through the program required for the analysis. This was followed by exercises in which each pair had to work through a similar problem with new data.

A further goal of the workshop was to inform the consultations between researchers and policymakers that are, in turn, to inform SAGA’s research agenda in Uganda. To accomplish this, we included the participants in a day-long consultative meeting intended to define specific policy-relevant research topics. In addition to the workshop’s researchers, this meeting included representatives from the government, donors, university faculty, and the press.

Finally, the workshop helped to encourage young researchers to become involved in the SAGA research program. Workshop participants included junior staff at EPRC and graduate students from Makerere University. In this regard, we are off to a good start: at least five workshop participants are currently preparing research prospectuses for consideration in SAGA’s Uganda research program.

The workshop participants included four EPRC researchers, four Makerere University lectures, two graduate students, and one researcher from the Bank of Uganda. In addition to these Ugandan participants, six researchers from other SISERA partner institutes attended, two each from Kenya (IPAR), Tanzania (Economic and Social Research Foundation (ESRF)), and Zambia (Institute for Economic and Social Research (INESOR) of the University of Zambia).

The participants’ evaluations of the workshop were quite positive. It is particularly interesting that almost all thought that the length of time was about right, despite the grueling pace of eight hours a day over ten days. (The resource people, at least, were exhausted by the end!) We were also surprised that the responses to the infrastructure question were a little less positive than for other questions, despite the fact that EPRC’s computers and networked internet access were better than anything that we have worked with in Africa before.

Technical Assistance for Education Analysis in Senegal

During May, 2002, Peter Glick was in Senegal to assist the Centre de Recherche en Economie Appliquée (CREA), the Senegal SISERA institution, in the design of household surveys. In addition, Leopold Sarr, a doctoral student at Cornell and Senegalese national, who is working on his dissertation was sent to Dakar from Mid-June to early October. The technical assistance team from Cornell University worked primarily with the director, Abdoulaye Diagne, and with lead researchers Monseur Dafe and Salimata Faye. The specific area in which Cornell is providing technical assistance is in the design of household, community, and school-level questionnaires for examining education outcomes, as well as the planning and design of sampling procedures and related analytic approaches for data analysis.

While CREA has done much research on education in Senegal, the data collection efforts for their education research are very ambitious. They involve a complicated enumeration process (locating former PASEC students from school rosters as well as selecting a random sample of non-PASEC households in the same areas). The survey instruments are complex as well, in part because a great deal of retrospective data are planned to be collected in order to understand factors behind school entry decisions, dropout, and test scores. Cornell has had extensive experience with these types of surveys. Hence we were able to advise on issues such as enumeration, sample size, questionnaire design, and survey logistics. This additionally involved providing technical assistance to the Direction de la Prévision et de la Statistique (DPS), who will be working with CREA in the implementation of the survey. Most recently, Leopold Sarr was involved in the successful field test in an urban and a rural area in September. Cornell will help CREA with revisions based on the field test results in the coming weeks. The actual implementation of the survey will take place in January, 2003; the delay is due to the implementation of the national census this fall.

3. Other Related Activity

Review and Coaching of SISERA Research Proposals

Since the May announcement of SISERA’s research competition, partner institutes have submitted 14 research proposals for funding, with most coming in the past two months. An ad hoc committee of Elias Ayuk (SISERA), Steve Younger (CU), and Joe Abbey (CEPA, Ghana) has given each proposal a preliminary review. To date, two proposals have been sent directly to external reviewers; three have been assigned to resource people for coaching (two at Cornell and one to a former Cornell faculty now at International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); three proposals were returned to their authors as clearly inappropriate for the SISERA competition; and the rest are awaiting an initial decision.

Meetings

October 29, 2001:	Our meeting with Cornell and Clark-Atlanta SAGA principals, Rita Aggarwal, and Diery Seck discussed, in a limited way, the parameters of the technical assistance program. We agreed in principle to share these responsibilities between SISERA and CU/CAU.
November 15, 2001:	David Sahn and Mesfin Bezuneh traveled to Dakar to meet with the SISERA directors to discuss the SAGA research program. This involved presenting the research agenda, discussing opportunities for access technical assistance, and the procedures and purpose of the competitive grants program.
January 4, 2002:	Steve Younger, Mesfin Bezuneh, and Diery Seck again met to discuss the technical assistance program at the ASSA meetings in Atlanta.

Possible Workshop on Multidisciplinary Methods

N’Dri Assié-Lumumba had discussions with CIRES in Abidjan, CREA in Dakar and SISERA about possible areas of cooperation. A common area of interest mentioned by her and which stirred considerable interest is the possibility of organizing training activities/workshops on multidisciplinary methods. While the SISERA affiliate members commonly tend to be uni-disciplinary, focusing only on economics, they all indicated that the current socio-economic challenges require multi-disciplinary approaches and cross-disciplinary dialogue.

Previous Section | Next Section

Return to SAGA Progress Report (October 2002) Table of Contents