Collaborative Research - Poverty Project

Pervasive and worsening poverty in sub-Saharan Africa convinced AERC to establish a theme and corresponding research group within the nexus of interrelated components consisting of poverty, employment, labour markets, human capital and the fiscal role of government with reference to human resources. The thematic group was complemented by a collaborative research project with similar aims.

While it can be taken for granted that faster and more stable economic growth will eventually contribute to poverty reduction, immediate adjustment and complementary measures are nonetheless necessary if sustainable long-term growth with poverty reduction is to be achieved.

To design and implement such measures, policy makers need information about key aspects of poverty. They need to know which subgroups of the population are most afflicted by poverty, the determinants of poverty and how poverty has changed over time. They also need help with determining costs and feasibility of implementing antipoverty measures.

Phase I of the AERC Poverty Project explored some of these issues, concentrating on poverty measurement, construction of poverty profiles and the operations of labour markets. Phase II of the project extended the scope of research activities to better meet the needs of policy making and research capacity building in sub-Saharan Africa.

Accomplishments of Poverty I
The Poverty Project began with three main components: research, training and policy advising. In the research area, the project examined and analysed a number of crosscutting issues at the Africa-wide level as well as several other more specific questions within the context of particular country-level circumstances.

Research
The research had two distinct but closely interrelated elements. The first consisted of research that was broadly analytical and empirical in nature but region-wide in scope and focus. Twelve papers written by the most respected scholars in this field provided the broad conceptual framework and the state of the art assessment of the various dimensions of poverty in Africa. A volume consisting of these papers is being processed for publication.

The second research component comprised country case studies. Each study was conducted by a team of African researchers, assisted in some cases by non-African researchers from collaborating institutions. The studies focused on poverty assessment, profiles, and analyses of macroeconomic and sectoral policies to alleviate poverty within the context of economic growth. The case studies emphasized the money-metric dimensions of poverty.

There were 12 country case studies in Phase I: Benin, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Although the studies used different methodologies to construct poverty lines, they all arrived at similar findings. For example, they uniformly report that poverty is concentrated in rural areas, and in many countries it is more pronounced among female-headed households. The poverty profiles show poverty declining sharply as education levels increase, particularly beyond the primary school level, although the mechanisms underlying this pattern are not articulated in any of the studies. Interestingly, the same finding and the same lack of interpretation occur in studies from outside the Africa region.

All the case studies were completed in December 2001. Abridged versions are undergoing review for possible publication in a special issue of an international journal.

Training
Several mechanisms and activities supported the training component. The most successful of these was the twinning of African researchers with training institutions in North America and Europe. Twinning provided African teams with the opportunity to improve their skills during the implementation of their research through closer contacts with renowned scholars and institutions in the field of poverty analysis.
For many of the research teams, poverty analysis required new types of data, many of which needed a lot of processing before they could be used. During visits to the twinning institutions, the teams were able to work through the details of their analyses from the theoretical base to data management and analysis, benefiting from the superior research facilities of the host institutions.

The universities of Cornell (USA), Laval (Canada), Copenhagen (Denmark) and Gothenburg (Sweden) collaborated closely on this project. The principal role of the collaborating institutions, in addition to establishing the twinning relationships, was to organize and conduct training workshops to enhance the capacity of the researchers. All teams benefited greatly from institutional visits and the various forms of twinning arrangements.

Policy advising
The applications of the research results from case studies and training obtained via workshops and twinning arrangements to policy making in Africa are the most satisfying aspects of the Poverty Project to date. Because of their training and hands-on experience in conducting poverty studies, members of country research teams were prominently involved in the preparation of poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs) in their respective countries. The PRSPs have come to be considered as governments’ blueprints for reducing poverty.

The PRSPs are also used for three key purposes: as tools for negotiating development loans with the international development agencies, principally the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; as mechanisms for attracting development assistance from bilateral donors; and as guidelines for setting national development priorities.
It is no exaggeration to state that without the Collaborative Poverty Project, African countries could not have been in a position to prepare the PRSPs on their own. The project built an indigenous capacity to prepare these plans. This specific benefit was an unintended outcome of the project, as the aim was to build general analytical capacity in poverty analysis in Africa without targeting it to a particular policy need.

Accomplishments under Phase II
The second phase, launched in 2000, continues the two broad goals of Phase I: Case studies to build capacity for poverty analysis and the use of the project to generate information to assist in the design and implementation of poverty reduction policies.

The specific objectives of Phase II are:

• To enhance the understanding of poverty trends and poverty dynamics in specific countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
  
• To diversify poverty measurement to include non-money metric measures such as nutrition- and asset-based measures.
  
• To study the relationships among poverty, malnutrition, disease epidemics (especially HIV/AIDS and malaria) and human capital in general.
  
• To assess the responsiveness of poverty to economic growth and income distribution.
  
• To examine various dimensions of poverty in the context of economic policy reforms, including labour market reforms.
  
• To study linkages among poverty, social capital, agricultural development, rural institutions and globalization.
  
• To inform policy makers, donors, the corporate private sector and the civil society of the status of poverty in Africa.

As in Phase I, the modalities of twinning and hands-on training via case studies and workshops are the principal modalities for accomplishing the project objectives. Fifteen case studies from 13 countries are in progress: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda. In addition to merit-based formal reviews, the criteria for selection of case study countries were regional representation and availability of data and researchers in countries, as well as “balanced composition” of study teams. In this last respect, research teams with members from both universities and government departments, and involving both men and women, were particularly encouraged.

The project, whose life is about four years, is in its fourth year of operation and its activities are generally on course. Twinning arrangements have been finalized with Cornell and Laval universities. The first drafts of the research reports from the case studies were due in December 2003, after which a workshop will be organized to discuss and finalize the reports.

Since 2000 AERC has collaborated with the World Bank on a project on malaria and poverty under the general umbrella of the Poverty Project. (Malaria is second only to HIV/AIDS as a killer of Africans, and may be number one in terms of direct morbidity, especially among children.) The purpose of this subproject has been to examine the implications of malaria for poverty, and the converse, given the very high prevalence of the disease in sub-Saharan Africa. Four country case studies from Eastern Africa (Kenya), Central Africa (Cameroon), Southern Africa (Zambia) and West Africa (Nigeria) have been completed. The papers are being processed for publication.

The Collaborative Project on Poverty in Africa added a number of features to the AERC network. First and foremost, it introduced a microeconomic perspective into AERC’s policy research agenda that was conspicuously lacking, thus adding completeness to the overall design of the research programme (and indeed the training work) of the network. In particular, “poverty, income distribution and labour market issues” became a full group under the thematic research mode.
The project has, moreover, rightly directed attention to the exceptionally low standards of living in Africa. It has thus enhanced the policy relevance of the work of AERC because it is dealing with the most visible policy problem of the day – how to overcome extreme poverty.

Another feature, the twinning mechanism, has helped African researchers study and conduct research in some of the best research universities in the world. And in mentoring younger researchers, experienced scholars in Africa and in the twinning institutions have had to rethink their models and theories of poverty, thus advancing the understanding of the development process generally. For example, measures of poverty have been expanded to include non-income metrics, in recognition of the importance of other dimensions of welfare.

Finally, the project has produced a new cadre of policy analysts in Africa: economists and statisticians capable of analysing large household data sets and drawing relevant policy conclusions from their analyses. This point is evidenced by the prominent participation of project team members in the preparation of PRSPs in Africa. Indeed, one of the most serious factors constraining policy research in Africa is the lack of capacity to conduct rigorous and timely analysis of large survey data sets. In helping alleviate this constraint, the collaborative Poverty Project has made a major contribution to policy making in Africa.