SAGA PROGRESS REPORT (12/03-12/04) &
UPCOMING WORKPLAN (1/05-12/05)

• IAAE—Analytical and Empirical Tools for Poverty Research, August 16, 2003, Durban, South Africa
  This one-day learning workshop was co-sponsored by SAGA as a lead in to the 25th triennial meeting of the International Association of Agricultural Economists (IAAE). The workshop, co-organized by SAGA co-PI Chris Barrett (Cornell) and Csaba Csaki (World Bank), featured five hour-long sessions by leading poverty researchers introducing frontier techniques in poverty research and a 90-minute panel featuring shorter remarks by five distinguished scholars on research and policy priorities for addressing rural poverty. A range of international donors, including GTZ, IDRC, the World Bank, the Kellogg Foundation and others, supported the registration and travel costs of delegates from developing countries. More than 110 participants from at least 22 different countries registered for the learning workshop, including economists and other poverty researchers or program managers from line ministries in various African governments, universities from six continents, USAID, the World Bank, CGIAR centers, and other national and multinational organizations.
  
  
• Qualitative Methods and SAGA: Community Studies Meeting, April 2002.
  While SAGA’s methodological and disciplinary center of gravity is very clearly quantitative and economic, the original proposal recognized the value of a limited broadening out from this base to take in qualitative methods and other social sciences. We therefore held a brief workshop to discuss the way forward on integrating qualitative techniques and other social science disciplines into our research and technical assistance.
  

• Q-Squared Poverty Analysis, 2006
  This multi-country conference follows the conference organized jointly by Cornell University and the University of Toronto in May 2004, with financial support from DFID and IDRC. In the third stage of this project, the focus will be on combining mixed methods in the context of policy making and policy dialogue.
  

• Ghana at the Half Century, July, 2004
  This major conference included presentations of approximately 45 papers, selected from submissions in response to an international call for papers. The event had a high level of participation by policy makers. The launch meeting of the Economy of Ghana Network (EGN) coincided with this conference.
  
  
• Understanding Poverty, January 2004
  The authors’ conference on the first drafts of papers for Understanding Poverty in Ghana was organized by our partner institution, the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER), in January. The conference was opened by the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana (who is himself an author of a paper for the volume), and the final session was chaired by the Director General of the National Development Planning Commission, which is the agency charged with coordinating the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy.
  
  
• Workshop on Panel Data Sets for Ghana, February 2003
  There is a glaring gap in data on poverty in Ghana—the lack of panel data sets that allow us to do serious analysis of poverty dynamics. Ghana simply does not have the household panel data sets that are essential before a whole host of dynamic questions — on risk, on poverty, on health and nutrition, on informal insurance, etc — can be answered. We therefore set for ourselves the task of developing a comprehensive research proposal that will develop, for the first time, such a data set and such analyses, for Ghana at Yale, which included ISSER and several global leaders in the area of poverty dynamics.
  
  
• Qual-Quant Workshop, May 2003
  The disconnect between qualitative and quantitative approaches to poverty analysis in Ghana is quite marked. We began to address this problem, at the workshop attended by approximately 30 participants, including economists, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and statisticians. Participants came from academia, think tanks, government, NGO's, and donor groups. Under the SAGA project ISSER will take the lead in forming interdisciplinary teams to address many issues that were highlighted as being best addressed by qual-quant analysis—and in seeking funding for these studies in the Qual- Quant tradition.
  
  
• Design of the SAGA-Ghana Research Program, October 2002
  A Workshop was held in Accra in October 2002, with a range of stakeholders and, in consultation with the USAID mission, it was agreed to pursue four lines of enquiry: (1) a volume of papers, primarily written by locally based Ghanaians, on “Understanding Poverty in Ghana“; (ii) launching a project on collecting and analyzing panel data sets for Ghana at the community level; (iii) building bridges between quantitative and qualitative analyses of poverty; and (iv) analyses of land tenure issues in Ghana.
  

• Mixing Qualitative and Quantitative Method of Poverty Analysis in Kenya, March, 2004
  SAGA organized this workshop, hosted by KIPPRA in Nairobi on March 11, 2004. The workshop was attended by 50 or so representatives from various government ministries, the Central Bureau of Statistics, donor agencies (e.g., USAID/Kenya, USAID/REDSO, World Bank, DfID, EU), Kenyan universities and research institutes, international research institutions (e.g., CIMMYT, ICRAF, ILRI), as well as several different national media outlets (print, radio and TV). The program featured an opening address by David Nalo, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Planning and National Development, eight papers by scholars from different social science disciplines exploring different dimensions and experiences of mixing qualitative and quantitative methods of poverty analysis in Kenya, and an expert panel discussing how best to integrate qualitative and quantitative methods of poverty analysis in emerging policy-oriented research in Kenya. Highlights of this workshop are found at
  
  http://www.saga.cornell.edu/saga/q-qconf/qqconf.html.
  

• IPAR Policy Conference 2005
  First drafts of SAGA-Kenya research papers will be presented in an intra-team meeting to be held in Nairobi on Friday, November 19, hosted by the World Bank Country Office, with a videoconference link to Cornell University. Each institution within the team will present preliminary draft presentations that day for comment by the team. These presentations, and the papers from which they are drawn, will subsequently be revised and summarized in short policy briefs for presentation at a policy conference to be held in late January or early February 2005, hosted by IPAR (exact dates and venue to be determined). This event will involve policymakers and donors on the program and will be well-publicized to the Kenya press. The background papers from the policy conference will then be reviewed, revised and edited into a published volume.
  
  
• Regional Conference, 2006
  Discussions are underway with the Office of the President’s Arid Lands Resources Management Program about the possibility of hosting a regional conference on Pastoralists, Poverty and Vulnerability: Policies for Progress, likely in January 2006. The following sub-themes will be covered at this workshop: (i) The role of producer organizations in reducing smallholder vulnerability; (ii) Agricultural marketing systems, price volatility and vulnerability of smallholder producers and poor consumers; (iii) Improving factor market access to reduce rural vulnerability; (iv) Safety nets in marginal areas.
  

• SAGA Participatory Planning Workshop, March 2003
  This meeting was organized by Cornell University and our SAGA partner, the Centre d’Etudes Economique (CEE). Attending from Cornell were Christopher Barrett, David Stifel and Bart Minten. The purpose of the workshop was to define the SAGA research agenda and the participation of various government agencies and stakeholders in the SAGA program.
  

• Conference on Education, February, 2005
  The first of two conferences, at the completion of the “Etude sur la Progression Scolaire et la Performance Academique en Madagascar” Project will present descriptive results of the study to policy makers and stakeholders.
  
  
• Conference on Education, 2005
  A conference, tentatively scheduled for the end of 2005, will present the findings of the different research areas investigated by the “Etude sur la Progression Scolaire et la Performance Academique en Madagascar.”
  

• DPRU Conference on Poverty and Policy in South Africa, October 13-15, 2004
  This conference was jointly organized by DPRU, Trade and Industrial Policy Strategies (TIPS) and Cornell, with support from USAID under the SAGA program. It included papers selected from an international Call for Papers. The program is available at:
  
  http://www.commerce.uct.ac.za/dpru/dpruconference2004/Programme.htm
  
  and the conference papers can be downloaded from
  
  http://www.commerce.uct.ac.za/dpru/dpruconference2004/DownloadPapers.htm
  
  
• Workshop on Analysis and Measurement of Poverty and Inequality, June 23-July 4, 2003, Cape Town, South Africa
  SAGA researchers Paul Cichello, Ravi Kanbur, and Stephen Younger worked with the Development Policy Research Unit (DPRU) and the National Institute for Economic Policy (NIEP) to present a two-week poverty and inequality workshop for faculty at South Africa’s historically disadvantaged universities. The aim of this course was to provide participants with competences in working with South African survey datasets, particularly in the fields of labour markets, and the analysis of poverty and inequality. The course included formalized reading time and lectures based on the assigned readings. Practical computer-based exercises using the statistical software package STATA drew on the readings and lectures. Program content for poverty analysis included household surveys as an instrument for measurement, derivation of poverty lines, alternative classes of poverty measures, poverty decompositions, and uses of poverty measures with applications to developing countries. Topics for analysis of inequality included building and choosing an inequality measure, modelling inequality, decompositions of inequality measures, and the application of inequality measures to developing countries.
  
  
• Workshop on Analysis and Measurement of Poverty and Inequality, March, 2004, South Africa
  The success of the June 2003 training workshop at the Development Policy Research Unit (DPRU) of the University of Cape Town led to demand for more such workshops. Ravi Kanbur, Paul Cichello, Ching-Mei Chen, and Stephen Younger worked with the DPRU to offer a two-week training course in poverty and inequality analysis for the Department of Social Development (DSD), the government agency charged with design and management of most of South Africa’s transfer payments. The workshop was held in Pretoria at the government’s information technology training center. The course covered both theoretical and empirical aspects of poverty and inequality analysis, with daily hands-on training with Stata software in a computer lab.
  

• EPRC/SAGA Research Conference, 2005
  This conference will be targeted to mid-level, technical staff from the government, donors, and NGOs, along with academic researchers at universities and think tanks in Uganda, to present the findings of the SAGA research program. We have invited Simon Appleton to discuss the recent controversy over poverty changes in Uganda between 1999 and 2003, as well as presentations from EPRC and Cornell researchers.
  
  
• EPRC-SAGA-World Bank-Bank of Uganda Conference, January, 2005.
  This policy conference will have a high profile program, including David Bevan, Paul Collier, Louis Kasakende, Benno Ndulu, and Jeffrey Sachs, in addition to the participation of EPRC researchers Godfrey Bahiigwa, John Okidi, and Sara Ssewanyana. SAGA’s research provides the background for the EPRC presentations. The conference was originally scheduled for October 2004, but has been postponed until January, 2005.
  
  
• Survey Data Analysis Workshop, August 26-September 6, 2002
  With joint coordinators Stephen Younger from Cornell and John Okidi from the Economic Policy Research Centre, Uganda’s SISERA partner in Kenya, this workshop brought together researchers from EPRC and neighboring SISERA institutes, Makere University, and the Bank of Uganda to develop skills for survey analysis. This technical assistance was designed to address the imbalance between abundant data and scarce researchers in Uganda. 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. We also included participants in a day-long consultation with government representatives, donors, university faculty and the press, to define specific policy-relevant research topics.
  

• Identifying Policy Needs in Education, May 2002
  Cornell University, CREA and the Ministry of Education organized this conference with the support of UNESCO and UNICEF to identify information needs for policymakers in Senegal charged with re-designing the countries education strategy.
  
  
• Dissemination Workshops on Informing Education Policy, June, 2005
  CREA, Cornell University-USAID, INRA, the World Bank, UNICEF and the Ministry of Education are collaboratively planning two large conferences with a broad range of stakeholders, researchers, and policy-makers in the next year to disseminate the research results from our recently fielded surveys.
  

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