{"id":1478,"date":"2013-06-10T14:07:57","date_gmt":"2013-06-10T19:07:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/articles\/\/"},"modified":"2016-01-21T14:12:05","modified_gmt":"2016-01-21T19:12:05","slug":"supporting-think-tanks-series-economic-policy-research-institutes-in-sub-saharan-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/onthinktanks.org\/articles\/supporting-think-tanks-series-economic-policy-research-institutes-in-sub-saharan-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Supporting think tanks series: Economic Policy Research Institutes in Sub-Saharan Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Editor’s note: This is the third of a series of posts based on\u00a05 think pieces prepared<\/a>\u00a0for the evaluation of pilots for the Indonesian Knowledge Sector Initiative.This was\u00a0prepared\u00a0by<\/em>\u00a0Stephen Yeo,\u00a0Chief Executive Officer of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).\u00a0The views expressed in these publications are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Commonwealth of Australia. The Commonwealth of Australia accepts no responsibility for any Loss, damage or injury resulting from reliance on any of the information or views contained in this publication.<\/em>]<\/p>\n

Background<\/h2>\n

The macroeconomic impact of the oil shocks of the late 1970, combined with slow macroeconomic adjustment and large imbalances, gave rise to a massive recycling of surpluses from the OPEC countries to Latin America and Africa via the US and European banking systems. The resulting macro imbalances followed proved to very difficult to manage, and were soon followed by programmes of \u201cstructural adjustment\u201d. A popular conception of how these programmes were designed involved a delegation of technicians from Washington, who arrived at the Ministry of Finance, briefcases and laptops in hand, and told the Minister and Permanent Secretary what was happening in their country and what needed to be done. The Minister and the Permanent Secretary were essentially on their own, with few well-trained economists to advise them, either within their Ministry or in local universities or think tanks. One result was a strong reaction against policies imposed “from outside”.<\/p>\n

During late 1980s a consensus began to emerge that a different approach was needed \u2013 \u00a0\u201cPolicy is better if it is made locally\u201d. Donors in North America and Europe responded with programmes to build capacity in economics, especially in Africa (Latin America had more human capital and seemed to be better able to retain it). Here some of the key actors were the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, IDRC in Canada, and some bilateral donors such as USAID. Three specific initiatives are worth mentioning: the African Economic Research Consortium, the Secretariat for the Institutional Support for Economic Research in Africa, and the African Capacity Building Foundation.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0African Economic Research Consortium<\/a>\u00a0(AERC) was launched in 1988, growing out of an earlier IDRC initiative in East Africa designed to improve macroeconomic management. It was led Jeffrey Fine (a former IDRC Programme Officer), and Benno Ndulu, a Tanzanian academic who is now Governor of the Central Bank. They established AERC as a network of individual researchers, with a strong focus on research training at the individual (not institutional) level. The network is still expanding and active today, and commands support from a wide range of donors and foundations. It focuses on MA and PhD programmes run in collaboration with African universities, and biannual training workshops for established researchers. University-based researchers were the target audience for most of AERC\u2019s initiatives: this was understandable, given the collapse of many African universities in the 1970s and 1980s.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Secretariat for the Institutional Support for Economic Research in Africa<\/a>\u00a0(SISERA) had a very different focus. Launched in 1997, like AERC, it was initially supported by\u00a0IDRC<\/a>\u00a0(more information on SISERA<\/a>).\u00a0Unlike AERC it focused on building capacity in institutions, not individual researchers, by providing a combination of medium-term core funding and technical assistance to policy research institutes across Africa (many of whom had been established and supported by ACBF, as noted below). Other donors, for example USAID and the EU, later joined IDRC in supporting SISERA. Unlike AERC, which has expanded steadily since the 1980s, SISERA\u2019s activities were wound down after 2006, when IDRC decided to devolve SISERA to an African institution but was unable to find a suitable host institution.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0African Capacity Building Foundation<\/a>\u00a0(ACBF) was launched in 1991 as a multi-donor initiative led by the\u00a0World Bank<\/a>. Its mission (not surprisingly) was capacity building in Africa, but its focus was on capacity within government, and it funded training programmes and established training institutions (\u201ccivil service colleges\u201d) for the public sector. In addition, during the 1990s it began to set up think thanks in many African countries. These were typically rather \u201ctechnocratic\u201d research institutes, set up as part of a partnership with the Ministry of Finance or the Ministry of Planning to provide economic analysis to government. These think tanks were typically independent of the government, but had senior civil servants on their boards. ACBF provided untied, core funding to these think tanks in four-year tranches. The intention was that there would be three or four funding tranches, at which point the think tank would (in some unspecified sense) be self-sustaining. In practice, ACBF has found it difficult to end its support even after the fourth tranche, and instead seems to decided instead to provide levels of support that gradually diminish over time.<\/p>\n

This cohort of African think tanks, many of them initially supported by ACBF (and subsequently by SISERA), faced serious challenges as a result of the demise of SISERA and the uncertainties of ACBF funding. The arrival of the\u00a0Think Tank Initiative<\/a>\u00a0(TTI), launched in 2008, was therefore very opportune.\u00a0The model TTI adopted was broadly similar to SISERA: a combination of technical assistance and medium-term, untied or core support awarded on a competitive basis to existing think tanks. \u00a0Unlike SISERA, TTI operates in East and West Africa but not Southern Africa. To a some extent this gap in Southern Africa has been filled by bilateral donors such as DFID, with its recently launched Economic Advocacy Programme (EAP), designed to strengthen think tanks and the policy dialogue process in Zambia; and (in a very different way) the International Growth Centre, which is active in a number of countries in the Southern Africa.<\/p>\n

The Dilemma<\/h2>\n

In making these investments in institutions donors have faced a dilemma: How to ensure organizational effectiveness of think tanks while still respecting their autonomy and independence, which is important in allowing them to develop as credible players in the policy arena. All institutions need to put in place systems to ensure effectiveness and good performance. In the private sector the pressure to adopt these systems comes ultimately from customers and shareholders. Non-profits, which do not face the same market pressures, rely on their “stakeholders” \u2013 in practice a combination of clients (users of their services), financial supporters (often donors), and the institution’s own formal governance structure.\u00a0In practice is it often the financial supporters who play the most active role in this respect. But if the financial supporters are “external” and play such an active (and visible) role, this may undermine the think tank’s credibility among its domestic audiences and render it less effective in the long run. This dilemma is not easy to resolve.<\/p>\n

Compounding the Dilemma<\/h2>\n

There are a number of factors that make the challenge even more difficult to solve:<\/p>\n