This Annual Report 2019/2020 provides details of a productive year in which the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) endeavored to provide an excellent service to its network. The AERC has expanded significantly over the last twelve months, notching up a number of particularly notable achievements. Major projects we recently embarked on have progressed very well. These include the launch of a new strategy to shape our future as well as harnessing technology and innovation in the wake of the Covid-19 global pandemic. Many new opportunities are also opening up. We consequently closed the year with the outlook of an exciting future.
The AERC is an organization with multiple components, including research, training, and policy outreach, with heavy emphasis on capacity building. The organization integrates high-quality economic policy research, postgraduate training, and policy outreach within a vast network of researchers, universities, and policymakers across Africa and beyond. As the organization continues to grow and strengthen partnerships, thus opening new opportunities, it has continued to act as an umbrella organization for independent researchers working in the field of economics. Efforts to raise the quality of thematic research from proposal stage through to publication in high-end refereed journals started during the fiscal period with restructuring of the incentive mechanism. The research administration and the management process also improved immensely.
On the training programme, AERC is in the process of upgrading the training curriculum in its entirety to reflect the frontier of economic teaching and knowledge base. This has amplified the work of the Academic Advisory Board (AAB), whose role it is to efficiently monitor and advise on programmatic activities and the delivery/pedagogy mechanism of the online training programme. The success of these efforts will feed into training activities in the coming years. During the fourth quarter of the fiscal year, AERC onboarded the African Communications Media Group (ACG), as an agency of record. ACG is a pan-African communications agency with a global reach that will assist with the implementation of AERC’s Visibility Strategy, reorganization of the website, publication of online policy briefs as well as outreach activities. The goal is to consistently increase the reach and profile of AERC on the continent in various markets as well as the policy environment in which our key stakeholders and funders operate.
To prepare the AERC network to raise the bar for capacity building and to support policymaking in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) economies, a new AERC Strategic Plan for 2020-2025 was launched. This strategy was developed with strong support and input from the stakeholders. In this Plan, a new approach is mapped out for capacity building that takes a broader perspective. It is a fundamental change to the way AERC operated in the past, moving from an objectives-based approach, to a theme-based strategy, focusing on outcomes and impact measurement.
The Strategic Plan also presents new ways of engaging across the region through incubator projects for funders to consider throughout the five-year planning period. One critical consideration to the AERC Strategic Plan 2020-2025 is that it will enhance AERC’s mark of improved quality, define its own momentum of sustainability and create a new era of policy influence in SSA economies. These three themes will require a shift from a passive to a proactive stance regarding economic policy decision-making in Africa, that will be the cornerstone of an institutional theory of change for AERC. This will also form the foundation for many years to come, and not just the five-year planning cycle. As this Annual Report shows, the AERC’s activities in the past year already reflect the spirit of continuous innovation as it paves the way for the new strategy to serve the AERC network. The network that the AERC serves is at the core of AERC activities and it drives the commitment to improve the delivery of capacity-building activities and information flow.
As is evident from AERC’s financial statements, the AERC Secretariat meets best practice and upholds high standards within a robust and comprehensive accountability framework. We understand that learning lessons is the key to improvement. This means engaging meaningfully with our beneficiaries and giving them a voice with a range of feedback mechanisms. Within our network, we foster a culture of sharing information and knowledge, which is underpinned by sound monitoring and evaluation. This allows us to identify trends, strengths and weaknesses at all levels. This AERC Annual Report 2019/2020 documents our evolution so far with regard to the strategic objectives that were set for the last year of the strategic period 2015-2020. I invite you to have a look and see just how visionary AERC is today – nearly 35 years after its establishment. In summary, it has been a great year. We are satisfied with the continuing growth of our organization and are looking forward enthusiastically to the year ahead. I hope you enjoy reading this report.
Njuguna Ndung’u Executive Director, AERC
Louis Kasekende Chair, AERC Board of Directors