Building Capacity in International Development: Insights from WGAPE
This post was written by Alex Dobyan, CEGA Administrative Associate and coordinator for the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE).
In 2016, CEGA’s Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE) received support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to do what many scholars of African politics in the U.S. have long advocated for — create stronger links to their counterparts at African institutions. Since 2016, the Hewlett grant has enabled seven competitively-selected African scholars to attend WGAPE’s annual meeting.
WGAPE is a unique type of academic conference — there are no prepared talks, no slides, and everyone attending has thoroughly read through all of the papers in advance. During the conference, 30–40 active participants discuss each paper in depth, providing a rare opportunity for authors to receive constructive feedback from their peers.
The inclusion of scholars from diverse disciplines, sectors, and backgrounds — especially those based on the African continent — enhances the experience for all participants. Africa-based scholars bring local knowledge and insights that are particularly valuable to U.S-based researchers, especially early career faculty and graduate students with limited field experience. U.S.-based researchers can provide technical input as well as links to funding and scholarship opportunities.
WGAPE ultimately seeks to hold meetings in Africa. A new “international WGAPE,” held annually at NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus, has gotten us closer to this goal by reducing travel time and costs for African participants. Still, most WGAPE meetings continue to be held in the U.S.
Despite the distance, we’ve made an effort to include as many seats for African researchers at the table as possible. CEGA’s ties to African scholars through its Global Networks programs, together with Hewlett support, have allowed us to greatly increase representation from this important group. Nearly one-third of participants at our most recent WGAPE meeting at UCLA hailed from African institutions.
One thing stands out when bringing students and faculty from Nairobi, Lagos or Cape Town to California — the flights are long. Combined with the headaches scholars in some countries face obtaining visas to visit the U.S., the participants are making a big investment to be part of WGAPE.
When planning our U.S. meetings, we’ve made an effort to provide a worthwhile experience for these participants. In the span of a few days in Los Angeles, this year’s group attended a seminar and a training on research transparency, had lunch with top UCLA social science faculty, workshopped their own research ideas, and still had time for a hike with UCLA PhD students.
Over the years, the WGAPE team has learned a lot about crafting capacity-building opportunities for scholars visiting the U.S. from Africa and other regions (to be fair, it’s the scholars themselves who have taught us!)
Here are three insights that stand out:
1 — (Structured) networking time is incredibly valuable: Often, our African participants cite researcher matchmaking sessions — which pair researchers working on similar topics for 15–20 minute conversations — as the best part of each meeting. WGAPE networking activities have catalyzed collaborative research projects, follow-up meetings in the field, and new positions for students as research assistants. These conversations help diffuse critical knowledge gained from diverse experiences, enhancing the relevance and impact of ongoing work; as such, we have come to prioritize structured networking time during our workshops.
2 — African scholars are eager to learn about research transparency: On several occasions we’ve incorporated research transparency trainings run by the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) into WGAPE’s pre-meeting activities. They are always a lightning rod for conversation. Many of the African scholars I’ve spoken with bemoan hierarchical, restrictive academic norms that inhibit data-sharing and incentivize fishing for statistically significant results. The millennial generation of African social science researchers is keen to learn and use tools that can make academic research more credible, transparent, and reproducible.
3 — Context is critical when discussing the generation (and use) of evidence in developing countries: Researchers in sub-Saharan African institutions face unique constraints when conducting research. Effective capacity-building programs that engage scholars from Africa and other low-income regions will acknowledge these constraints and provide workarounds. For example, when an RCT is not feasible given political or financial constraints, we can support the use of other rigorous methods. Deeper knowledge of the local context can help African researchers credibly evaluate programs and policy changes that might otherwise go un-researched. Consider Yared Seid’s use of a natural experiment in Ethiopia to evaluate how introducing mother-tongue instruction in schools impacted later labor market outcomes.
Another constraint is how governments produce and use data. There are idiosyncratic differences from one country to the next as to who can access government statistics, or influence the use of evidence in decision-making — whereas in one country a local connection might be necessary to obtain a dataset or gain traction with a policymaker, a Western researcher might be granted special access to data and policy influence in another. These contextual details shape which development questions can realistically be evaluated, the most appropriate methods and tools to be used, and the best way to achieve policy impact.
