Regional Research Projects

Priority issues of common interest provide the basis for intra-regional collaboration in research. To help ensure quality and comparability across countries, PADI plans to support a series of research projects led by top level academic and implemented by local research teams.

Project selection. The PADI executive committee is proposing a menu of regional research projects to participating countries. The menu consists of priority research areas as identified in national PRSP documents, and through recent discussions with PADI participants.

PADI participants will be responsible for sharing the document and engaging in local discussions with policy makers, researchers and data providers to develop the list of research projects their country would participate in.

Selected projects would be implemented in two or more countries in the region, and count with a project leader and with local research teams.

The executive committee would establish a schedule of implementation for selected research projects, identify study leaders, and issue a call for proposals to select local research teams.

Study leaders. The study leaders would be top researchers in their field, with excellent analytical and didactical skills. They would be responsible for:

• developing the analytical framework for the study,
• contributing to selection of local research teams
• providing training session on methodology
• developing the survey instruments/modules etc if and when necessary
• undertaking one case study,
• leading the interim study meetings with the rest of the researchers involved in the study
• providing technical assistance and guidance to all local research teams from start through completion of the study, during the research project meetings and electronically, and
• organize publication.

Local research teams. The local research teams would be responsible for undertaking their case study along the analytical framework provided by the study leader, including attending training, identifying and using relevant data, participating in meetings, presenting results and drafting final case study for publication.

Quality control. Study leaders will submit to the Executive Committee a proposed list of peer reviewers for the case studies included in their project (two per study). The Executive Committee will retain the right to make changes and additions.

B. Regional Research Agenda

1. Poverty Measurement

The research on poverty measurement issues takes both structured quantitative approaches and more qualitative, participatory approaches, and will cover the full spectrum of measurement issues—from data collection techniques and survey design, to measurement approaches.

Household survey design. There is now a growing literature on how to approach the design of a survey to measure the living standard of households. Such surveys are also invariably used to estimate consumption poverty. For this, accurate measures of consumption are called for—and measures which are consistent over time if poverty trends are to be obtained. Approaches to survey designs (sampling, questionnaire design, drawing panels etc) vary between countries. The proposed activity would review and assess the survey design issues raised in the PADI countries, with a view to obtaining agreement on good practice in this area. The specific topics to be addressed in this work would involve:

Sample design issues, focusing on the feasibility and usefulness of incorporating household panels in a random-sampling design. Uganda has formed a panel using its 1992 and 1999 surveys, and its experience with this will form the basis of the review.

Measuring household consumption: Most poverty measures are derived from estimates of household consumption, and yet the challenges that are presented in gathering data on consumption are not often appreciated by data users and analysts. This component of the work will set out the choices, highlighting the strengths, weaknesses, and tradeoffs of different approaches. It will include experience with the diary method, multiple versus single visit designs, recall errors and other types of measurement error, etc.

Prices and poverty: Variations in prices both over time and across regions of a country need to be taken into account to obtain correct poverty rankings. Yet price data are often the weakest component of poverty measures in Africa. This component of work will review the different sources of prices data, and assess their appropriateness for poverty measurement. The review will also present an analysis of Purchasing Power Parity poverty measures, and how they can be improved through better price data.

Deriving the poverty line: typically measures of poverty in the African region are nutritionally based, with some allowance made for essential non-food consumption. Yet, the specific methods and assumptions used in deriving the benchmarks are not widely discussed (among policy makers, local researchers, and the wider civil society). Methods used in other countries (for example Jamaica, Russia) to obtain ‘subjective’ poverty lines from the household survey are uncommon in Africa, and will be reviewed here.

Community-level poverty profiles: Poverty maps are now becoming available at unprecedented detailed levels of geographic disaggregation (using small area estimation techniques combining household survey and population census data). For instance, Kenya and Uganda have just completed a poverty map (and Tanzania has started on producing one). New approaches are now being developed to: (a) examine the socio-economic dimensions (profile) of poverty at detailed levels of disaggregation by drawing on the census data; and (b) complement these small area poverty estimates with additional socio-economic and agro-climatic information to build a geo-referenced community level database to examine poverty determinants at this level.

Participatory poverty assessment. The above analysis focuses on consumption poverty, concerned with economic dimensions of welfare. But poverty is a complex and multifaceted human condition that extends beyond economics. A proven method to handle the multidimensional character of poverty is to obtain qualitative information across a wide range of dimensions, using tools of social enquiry that are unstructured and open in nature—letting the respondent define the specific domains of interest. Such participatory poverty assessments have been used to good effect in many countries, including more recently in Uganda. The 2000 round of the Uganda Participatory Poverty Assessment Project adopted the same sample of communities that were enumerated in the structured household survey (the 1999 Uganda Integrated Survey). In this way the findings of both methods of social enquiry could be compared and synthesized to give a balanced assessment of the poverty situation. The PPA process also has the potential to empower local communities, and to inspire renewed efforts to improve the lives and livelihoods of poor people. The suggestion here would be to field carefully designed PPAs in countries that have so far not done so, and to bring the various research teams together to review the approach and the findings.

Proposed event: Workshop to be held in May 2004, in Mombasa, Kenya. This will have the following agenda:

Day 1: Review of main issues surrounding consumption poverty measurement
Day 2: Presentation of papers by country participants summarizing the approaches adopted, ending with panel discussion.
Day 3: Discussion on mixed (qualitative and quantitative) approaches to poverty measurement.

2. Poverty and social impact evaluation
The objective of impact evaluation projects is to validate the effectiveness of key government policies and programs in reaching desired poverty and social welfare objectives. Impact evaluation methodology helps isolate the impact of a particular policy intervention on a desired outcome while controlling for other factors that may contemporaneously affect outcomes. As such, impact evaluation studies are important learning tools to improve the design of government programs as time goes on.

Because first best impact evaluation studies require baseline and follow up data, evaluation sensitive design of policy interventions, and a significant amount of resources and advanced technical (statistical and econometric) skills, study selection will heavily depend on country conditions.

PADI participants identified several issues as possible candidates for evaluation. Other surfaced as a result of current research activities being undertaken in the region. These include:

• Impact of selected education interventions on schooling outcomes. Work undertaken in Western Kenya looks at the impact of health initiatives (e.g. deworming) on school performamce and community health, and of education initiatives (including textbooks and parental participation) on school performance (Michael Kremer (Harvard)/Christel Vermeer (Oxford)).
• Impact of community-driven development (CDD) projects on community outcomes. Work currently being undertaken in Ethiopia looks at the impact of the Women Development Initiative projects on poor women’s empowerment outcomes (Arianna Legovini (WB)). CDD projects at identification and design stage could be good candidates for inclusion in this study.
• Impact of road construction on community welfare. A study was undertaken by Michael Lokshin (mlokshin@worldbank.org ) in Eastern Europe combining survey and project data to look at the impact of road construction on community outcomes. This could serve as an initial basis for work in this area.
• Impact of financial services on poverty reduction. Most PRSP in the region include microfinance initiatives but evidence from other regions suggests that available financial services (mainly credit) may not be effective as poverty reducing tools. Evaluating the impact of these initiatives in the East African context may provide invaluable recommendations.
• Impact of food aid interventions on medium-term self reliance and vulnerability.
• Impact of trade liberalization on poverty. This study could use different methodologies to establish the impact of trade on poverty from using geographical poverty maps to trace the first order impacts on poverty geographically, to analyzing the full impact on poverty using a general equilibrium framework.

3. Delivering services to poor people

Research projects in this area would look into the institutional processes through which public spending translates into effective services for poor people, and would inform the public expenditure choices that are made. Topics include:

• Decentralization and service delivery to poor communities
• Public expenditure tracking studies
• Benefit incidence studies
• Developing score cards on public service delivery
• Services for the urban poor (delivering services to urban slum areas)

4. Agriculture, risk and rural poverty

Studies are currently underway (under Norwegian/ESSD funding) on the interactions between agricultural development and poverty reduction in Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya. Given the centrality of agriculture in the livelihoods of most poor households in the region (and its role in the poverty reduction strategies of many countries), research on this theme is long overdue. Options include investigating further the problem of risk (rainfall variability, illness etc) in the lives of farmers, and what can be done about it. Another could focus on specific groups of farmers, identifying the constraints to expanding their income opportunities (for example pastoralists; women farmers, etc).

Proposed event: Workshop to be held in Tanzania in early February 2004 which will take stock of the existing information base, analytical methodologies and case studies in the PADI countries. The workshop seeks to inform future data collection and analytical work to develop ways to measure vulnerability, sharpen our understanding of its determinants, and analyze the effectiveness of vulnerability reducing interventions.

5. Labor markets and poverty
The key issues for a labor market study would be to gain an understanding of the urban informal sector, availability of income-earning opportunities for poor urban dwellers, non-farm opportunities for rural poor, and, more generally, the functioning of the labor market.