Beyond EASST: CEGA Extends its Global Networks Program to West Africa
Development Impact West Africa (DIWA) will provide training and networking opportunities to researchers and policymakers in Ghana
This post was co-written by Chelsea Downs, Senior Program Associate and Charles Amoatey, Director of the Academy of Leadership and Executive Training (ALET) and Senior Lecturer at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA).
Evidence-informed policymaking is not new for the African continent: over the last decade, many institutions, governments, and think tanks in the region have routinely used research to inform the design and implementation of social and economic development programs. Starting in the early 2000s, several African countries began to establish National Evaluation Systems. In January 2017, the Government of Ghana created the Ministry for Monitoring and Evaluation, with a mandate to track real-time performance of key government projects and policies and evaluate their impacts. This new development presents an important opportunity to bridge academia and policymakers to generate rigorous, transparent evidence on national development programs rolled out over the last 20 years in Ghana.
In light of this context, CEGA and the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA) launched Development Impact West Africa (DIWA) in 2019 with funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. While CEGA has several international collaboratives, DIWA is our first initiative in West Africa and an exciting step for growing our network beyond East Africa and Bangladesh.
Over 3 years, the pilot project will equip Ghanaian academics with the expertise to conduct rigorous impact evaluations of public programs, increase decision-makers’ use of these evaluations through targeted trainings, and establish collaborative research projects together with US-based researchers. GIMPA is uniquely positioned to carry out these activities as a top training institute for public sector institutions engaged in development programming in Ghana and across West Africa, as is CLEAR GIMPA, which builds the evaluative capacity of governments in the region, including the Ghanian Ministry for Monitoring and Evaluation, mentioned above.
What’s unique about this initiative, and particularly excites us, is the focus on targeted policymaker and researcher engagement, including seeding three-way research partnerships between US academics, Ghanaian academics, and Ghanaian policymakers. We are kicking off DIWA with a series of training and matchmaking sessions convening these groups. GIMPA has already held two convenings of policymakers from the Ministries of Food and Agriculture, Monitoring and Evaluation, Health, Education, and Energy, to introduce the project, understand policy priorities, and identify projects prime for evaluation.
While our training and matchmaking workshop set for March 24–27 in Accra was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, the team is thinking creatively on how to sustain momentum until we can meet in-person. As a first step, we are hosting a virtual training and matchmaking workshop this month and working to incorporate impact evaluation into the many executive education programmes that GIMPA runs, in addition to its core economics and evaluation coursework. Watch this space for future posts on the collaborative and the results of the online workshop!
