 And we're really happy today to welcome members of the board of the Africa Economic Research Consortium. They've been having meetings in Washington, and we thought this was a great opportunity to take advantage of that and give a little profile of a network that I actually am not that familiar with, and I imagine others in Washington may not be that familiar with, but I think is really worth knowing something about. The consortium aims to build a cadre of African researchers that really can help guide African economic policy makers and managers in planning and strategy. And I think the importance of the network really is in generating a body of empirical evidence on Africa's economic challenges in developing a culture of policy-relevant research and equally important, a culture of evidence-based policy-making, so really building that bridge between academia and research and policy makers. It's a challenge everywhere. The think tank phenomenon is not that prevalent in Africa. Here in this neighborhood, if you throw a stone, you're gonna hit a think tank. But so I think in some ways AERC has been well ahead of its time. It's now in its 25th year. It's been doing this very successfully, and we're eager to hear how it's gonna move going forward. I mean, issues and global issues, technologies, the kinds of deals that need to get made and the kinds of problems African countries are facing in the coming 50 years, and I think we'll hear about that, are becoming increasingly complex. And research networks like this one really can extend the capacity of African governments to understand these. And very few policy makers have the time or inclination to go into the deep, deep analysis. But I think research consortiums like this can play a huge role. So we have a great panel. I mean, if you look at the board members, it's a pretty impressive list. But we have a representative sample here. We have with us the, let's see, I'll go in order of which they're gonna speak, Professor Lemma Senbet, who is the Executive Director of the Research Consortium. He's the William Mayer Chair and Professor of Finance at the Smith School of the University of Maryland in College Park, so he's a local, Director of the Center for Financial Policy. He's been, his work is focused largely on corporate finance, international finance, financial contracting. He's been an advisor for the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the UN, and many others. He's written prolifically on issues of finance and has equally important, I think, help mentor a new generation of economic researchers going forward, many of whom hold prestigious positions now at universities here in the U.S. With us also, we have Professor Mutuli Kubei. He's Chairman of the Board and Director of Large of the AERC. He's also Vice President and Chief Economist with the African Development Bank, where he's responsible for knowledge management, economic strategy, and he supervises the Departments of Research Development, Department of Statistics, and the African Development Institute. He holds a PhD in economics, specialized in mathematical finance from Cambridge University. I won't go into all the degrees because we have a highly educated group here, so. And he's taught at the London School of Economics at VITS, and let's see, where else? Okay, well, you get the picture, Cambridge, you get it. Finally, we have Professor Beno Ndulu, who's a Director at Large with AERC, and is Governor of the Central Bank of Tanzania, where he was appointed in 2008. He too has a long pedigree, a PhD in economics from Northwestern, and I think early in the 1980s, he worked at the University of Dar es Salaam as a professor, held a series of seminars there that eventually helped kind of inform the reforms that took place in the 1980s and began to turn Tanzania around. He then had a long career at the World Bank and the lead economists with the macroeconomic division, and Professor Ndulu was one of the people that really helped found and stand up the AERC, so he's seen the evolution over the years. So here we have a great group of people who had their base in the strong academic setting, but have really kept that focus on and moved towards policy relevance and policy making, influencing national policy makers and international as well. So we're gonna start with Professor Senbet to tell us a little bit about the structure and the objectives of the consortium. Yeah, thank you, Jennifer. I wish to thank CSIs and Jennifer Cook for hosting the AERC board. This wonderful facility in partnership with USAID. Now, we have just celebrated our 25th year anniversary. 25 years ago, policies in Africa were made on heuristics, judgements, and ideologies, and very little base relating to evidence base and rigor. So AERC actually came into existence to fill that gap. What I'd like to do is actually talk about a couple of very innovative mechanisms of the AERC employed at the initial stages and then how progressively moved into other initiatives. Beginning with research 25 years ago, we came up with five separate teams and what goes on is that we get researchers from around the continent at some place in Africa because it's a pan-African organization and then assemble these researchers in five separate rooms. They present research in various stages of development and then they review each other and we call that the peer review mechanism. And over time, this peer review mechanism has been monitored by resource individuals from around the globe. In fact, that's how I got engaged with AERC. Then the collaboration amongst researchers who have actually gone through this peer review mechanism and resource people from around the globe to actually work on big issues that could not be conducted by one individual. Issues on climate change, food security, and so on. This collaborative framework then became a foundation for innovating collaborative training programs. So we have collaborative masters in economics. We have collaborative PhD program also in economics where thesis presentations are actually done in the same peer review by-angle workshop. Now, with reference to this by-angle workshop which actually occurs twice a year, attracting the largest contingents of economists from Africa. We had a variety of side meetings, one of which is known as Plenary Conference. It is a conference based on a contemporary topic of policy interest and based on thought leaders from anywhere around this globe and with the purpose of actually exposing our researchers to best practices. Now, we have been in existence for 25 years which means that we can actually show and witness some long-term payoffs from capacity building because the business of ARC is capacity building to advance research and training to inform economic policies. So one of the consequence of capacity building is actually at this podium. You have Mithuli Nkube who is Chief Economist and Vice President of the African Dulu Open Bank. Beno Ndulu was the second actually Executive Director of the ARC and eight to nine other governors of central banks who have actually gone through this program who have been nurtured and actually you find ARC alumni everywhere in the continent. I was mentioning today at the board meeting, I didn't quite appreciate it until once I stepped into the research department of the Kenya Central Bank and I was actually looking for data and at that time I was not in this position and I find that every researcher there every employee there has an ARC stamp basically ARC including the governor of Central Bank of Kenya. So it's an organization which has become actually a true African success story. What I told you is the long-term consequence of what ARC has achieved over time but we also mixed that with short-term approaches and mechanisms where we take the collaborative research as I mentioned earlier and decimate that to policy makers. We have senior policy makers consisting of governors of central banks, ministers of finance in the same room, dialoguing on the collaborative research and we do that for two purposes one of which is that we are introducing what has been researched to policy makers and at the same time we're getting feedback from them which will in turn actually help us design or redesign what we're doing. And so we have senior policy seminars at the continental level and then as a result of these papers that have been developed, we combined those with country case studies and from that we identify issues of particular concern to particular countries and then we actually conduct national workshops. So apart from long-term consequences, we also have an item we can actually point to a variety of collaborative projects which have more direct interface with policy. For instance, there was a project on poverty and growth syndrome led by one of our global resource persons, Eric Torberg of Cornell University which actually was used to inform poverty reduction strategies adopted by many African countries. Now, the other is, I have a friend, Gail Martin she's from the World Bank, the World Bank and the African Economic Research and Survey, actually partnered on this highly successful project called Service Delivery Indicators. And that has been actually inaugurated in a number of countries, Kenya. I think the next one is Nigeria. So those are just a couple of examples in terms of this interface between research and policy. Now, I want to be brief now. Moving forward, this is an organization that has done so much, that has created so much value but is poised to get and move to the next level of excellence. We are going to capitalize on advanced technology to integrate technology in all of ARC's operations and also these collaborative training programs to take full advantage of blended learning and so on. And then the whole area of communication, the organization has become so complex. So you have guys who research, not communicating with training and so we're actually creating synergy across various products and services of the ARC. We are also going to get out of the old public domain mentality of what we've been doing to get more robust engagement with the private sector. And then I'm going to end here. Thank you. Fantastic, that's great. We're going to turn to you, Professor Ndulu. Is that the plan? No? Okay. Okay, we're going to turn to Professor Ndube. I think you'll talk a little bit about what's the agenda that's out there now and on the economic scene in Africa looking for the big challenges. Thank you, Jennifer. Good afternoon, colleagues. Thank you for listening to us this afternoon. I must say that I'm thrilled and most honored and privileged to be the chair of the Board of the ARC, really a truly successful African story. I think I can just pick up from where Emma left, which is about having the way we've got the ARC alumni everywhere in Africa and also globally in institutions here, of policymaking here in Washington, in the World Bank, the IMF and other institutions, they are there and they are making their mark. It is no coincidence, no coincidence, I repeat, that Africa weathered the financial crisis so well. We had policy makers of quality at the Central Bank of Quality in the Ministry of Finance instituting those necessary counter-secular measures to deal with the crisis as it came, making sure that they're able to use the fiscal and monetary shock absorbers to absorb that shock. And I think that the ARC had something to do with the quality of those policy makers and the action. Africa has been growing at what, 5.2% in the last 10 years. And again, it is the same policy makers we have delivered this growth in terms of guiding the economies. Of course, I must say that it is all macroeconomic management that are other factors. I don't think the policy makers are responsible for the degree of urbanization. Maybe they are, that is taking place, the growth of the middle class. I mean, we have got people sort of living in the middle of the pyramid in Africa between what, $2.1 a day and $20 a day. We have got about 330 million people and they constitute in the middle of the pyramid that has been driving some of the domestic demand that you see, which has supported this growth. And of course, on the external front, I mean, we do expect that the natural resource boom has also been supportive to this growth of 5.2% that you see, that is true. So it's both internal and external, but macroeconomic management and guiding these economies, guiding policy has been critical and the ARC has been the suppliers of the human capital for this purpose. But let's see how they perform as we go through the risk of QE tampering and other such things, but I think they will fare well. Of course, I must say that the shock absorbers are where eroded during the height of the crisis, but I'm certain that they will again weather the storm, at least do the right thing. Already we see the impact of QE tampering in South Africa where the round has been quite volatile in sympathy with every other emerging market, India, tech, and so forth, Argentina, the PES. And of course, you can see the, for instance, Ghana has been exposed quite a bit with the city collapsing and the budget deficit is in the current account position, showing those unhealthy imbalances that need to be fixed, but they will be fixed. They will be fixed. We can already see the impact of QE on some of the African countries, just to mention a few, but I have no doubt they will rise to the occasion. Well, in terms of the Africa that we see in the next 50 years, certainly the African leaders have an aspiration and it is an aspiration that myself personally and my department and the bank assisted in crafting, which is a vision in 2063 of a continent that is prosperous, that is at peace with itself, that is integrated and other such glowing words. But of course here, what we mean is that fragility, conflict will be dealt with, should be dealt with. Original integration should be accelerated and must be made more broad. It should go beyond goods and services. It's about movement of people. It's about movement of capital. It's about the regional institutions of excellence in education. It's about building regional institutions for dealing with conflict, regional institutions of governance, like IGOT in East Africa or indeed ECHOAS or whatever, strengthening them to deal with fragility. So really we have this aspiration, a vision of Africa, but also we are not the drivers of change, let me say this. If Africa is going to grow, let's say at about 4.5%, which is plausible in the next 50 years, the GDP will move from something like $2 trillion to about what, $15 trillion. GDP per capita will move from the current just under 2000 to about $2,000 per person to about $6,000. It's still less than South Korea by the way, even now it's still less than that, but we're talking 50s and that's really conservative 4.5%. Chances are growth will be a lot higher than that. The population of Africa will rise by an additional one billion people from the current two billion to, sorry, current just over a billion to just over two billion people with a very young population. Growth is expected to be of the order of just below 2%. Now, so that's in Africa that we will emerge and just oppose that with the aspiration I talked about earlier, the vision and so forth, and how Africa is doing now. It's quite clear that to do better than the vision or really to realize the vision, we have to deal with some of the drivers of change, some of the things that are really going to drive Africa going forward. The first issue is the infrastructure deficit, which we know is of the order of $50 billion a year, which goes unfunded every year and that is holding back African growth by as much as 3% of GDP, so it's very costly. So that's something that needs to be done when you invest in infrastructure. And number two is the whole issue of urbanization. Currently, 65% of Africans live in the rural areas and the remainder is in the urban area. So this is going to change significantly, significantly. So dealing with it, realize that the urban areas are sources of growth. They are creating the GDP, frankly, that you see. Dealing with that, the infrastructure challenges and all of that come to urbanization is an issue. The third issue is institutions building, strengthening and building institutions, institutions for service delivery and that I'm including, governance is instituted. We still have, from time to time, an explosion here and there, South Sudan. Please forgive South Sudan, it's a young nation. They'll get it together for one day, but one day. But if Mali, there are other issues that need to be dealt with there and it's a complex issue. It's a complex issue. It's going to do with inclusion, social inclusion and all those things and building social cohesion. I think Africa will get that. The other driver change is going to be climate change. It's not just about global warming. Climate change in Africa is a source of fragility. Some of the issues you hear in the Sahel region have to do with the encroaching desert. People are running out of water, running out of living space, no matter if they're animals. It creates social pressure and that could be a cause of fragility apart from other things. So it just goes beyond a 2% rise in temperature around the world to something more real on a day-to-day basis in terms of survival. I've already talked about the issue of dealing with fragility, strengthening institutions for combating fragilities in the region. Those are issues that are still to be dealt with. On regional integration, I've already referred to the need to broaden what we understand by regional integration into movement of goods, movement of talent, movement of capital, movement of people, institutions of excellence in the region. I talked about the 1 billion people being added to the African population in the next 50 years. The half of those, at least young people, there is a big issue around developing skills, youth and skills development. So tilting the education agenda towards more vocational education, producing more job-ready youth out of the schooling system or indeed entrepreneurs, for that matter, is critical to really recognize in Africa. That's something that needs to be done. I can assure you every government in Africa has woken up to this. You speak to every government, they're all thinking youth employment. What should we do about this? This is a driver of change, a challenge, but also an opportunity. And finally, natural resource management. Every other country in Africa I know has something underground. It is very valuable. It's natural resources, oil and gas, and a range of other minerals, frankly, including the areas around the sea, continental shelf and all of that. So managing this natural resource boom is critical. The figures that we have, that the current value of natural resources in Africa, which have just been discovered up to the end of last year, is the order of 800 billion dollars. So that's already, what is that? Is that another 30% of GDP, current GDP or something? I'm trying to figure it out quickly. So it's significant. And managing these resources in terms of negotiating fairer contracts, transparent contracts, the governance of that, the whole natural resource governance issue. And then putting in place transparent means for managing the revenues from that. Your sovereign wealth funds transparently managed and well managed. And there are good cases in Africa as to where this is being done. Botswana is a good example. I'm just mentioning one. In fact, one of the best sovereign wealth funds in terms of management in the world is in Botswana, by the way. So, and then thinking through about how you use these natural resources in terms of building infrastructure for education, training, rebuilding human capital. These are some of the drivers of change. And I think that one of the roles of the ARSC is in thinking about the collaborative research themes and so forth, is really attacking these issues from different angles because these are the drivers of change. That's what will deliver in Africa that Africans desire for themselves. That I think the world desire of Africa too, which is prosperous, less poor, at peace with itself and well integrated. And I see ARSC at the core of this delivery. Thank you. Thank you, Jennifer. What I'm gonna do is to give you a sense of what I found outside of the research world when I stepped into the current position where I've served, now this is my seventh year as a central bank governor. There are three good things that I saw, virtually immediately. First one, is that when ARSC began, when ARSC began, one of the main goals that we had was to see whether we can localize the capacity for policy making. That was the time, 88, 89, 90, when most of our programs were actually developed outside of the country. And typically, whatever was called negotiation was just a process of agreeing or accepting what was being developed elsewhere. One thing I saw when I arrived in the policy world was actually that change had taken place. Programs are not drawn from outside and actually it's the local capacity to a very large extent, which now gets engaged in the preparation of the policy frameworks that govern countries. In that respect, having in between my ARSC days and the current position I've served in the World Bank, I saw clearly what that difference meant. And I think this is one thing that I must say as almost can be considered almost revolutionary by any standards. Even those now that are coming to work with us, like the International Growth Center, actually they work with us to develop exactly the policy frameworks that we to start with have thought through and we work at par and as colleagues. And this, I think, is extremely, extremely satisfying. Second, I found the bulk of the workhorse of policy analysis really as products of ARSC, where yeah, we have at the Bank of Tanzania, we have about 15 PhDs in the central bank in terms of economics, maybe about eight to 10 of those. Actually, ARSC graduates and those that with masters and other graduate degrees, most of them again, ARSC graduates. And the impressive quality of the work that they do is partly what, again, has given me a lot of comfort. And it is not because I used to be in ARSC, I'm saying this partly because they actually stand toe to toe with those that have gone to the best school. And the good thing is that contextually, they're well informed and hence making the supportive work for policy analysis and policy making much more robust. Third is the power of ARSC research networking that I also have come to appreciate in my job. I'll give you an episode in 2011 in Eastern Africa, we had a currency attack simultaneously in all our five, six countries. Fortunately, the governors of central banks of all the five countries have met in the context of ARSC network. We trusted each other and we could very clearly depend on each other's experience without raising doubts. So the transactions course of simply determining whether to trust or not to trust, those were totally out of the context. And therefore, we coordinated our policy interventions with our teams of experts, again, who are part of the network, who knew each other. And therefore that trust wasn't just at the leadership level, but also at the technical level. And we were able actually to win that fight. It wasn't easy. It needed coordination. That coordination was facilitated simply by the fact that we were one network. Esprit Decaux, with Esprit Decaux that was unquestionable and we could have trust amongst each other. Now, I just used much more localized examples just to give you a sense. When you scale that up to the level that Lema has described for the whole region, it definitely accounts for a much more potent knowledge exchange and definitely in terms of implementation. So I wanted really to highlight those three and then just close with one major challenge that I see the new context of policy making has brought to the fore. Policy making is much more competitive now across constituencies within any of our countries. Evidence has tended to strengthen the position of anyone who wants to have successful uptake of their position. And therefore, it is not only important that ARC learns to work with government in terms of policy making, but ARC has now to work with a much wider range of constituencies for policy making in the country. And part of that is through working with knowledge intermediaries, which are national entities such as policy think tanks that interpret fairly complex knowledge and make it available to a much wider range of policy interested groups. So in that context, part of the challenge of ARC in terms of making research meet policy is to ensure that it's able to make that knowledge available to a much wider range of policy interested groups in our country. Thank you. Before we open up for questions, we'd like to turn to Professor Kenneth Pruitt, also a member of the board. He's vice president for global centers and Carnegie professor for public affairs at Columbia University. You're welcome to stand up or? I want you to stand up. Oh, great. Okay. Okay, good. If you press the button. Over 25 years ago, AERC existed, but it existed as a program of the IDRC of Canadian AID agency, as many of you know. It had as its director, a member of the IDRC staff and Beno was the director of research. And then for various reasons, it became important to shift this to a different venue and the Rockefeller Foundation stepped forward. I was then the vice president of Rockefeller Foundation, senior vice president managing lots of stuff, including all of the Africa program. And so I was approached about whether this made sense. And so I was part of the founding, which in effect means that Beno hired me as his first board chairman. And it wasn't because I knew anything or anything to say, but I had a checkbook. And I hope Beno, you think that was one of your better hires. So it's an enormous pleasure in many ways to follow Beno to the mic. Look, here's the situation. What he said is true. This institution has been an enormous success at capacity building. There is nothing else like it on the continent and not many things like it on any other continent. I can tell you the foundation world at that time 25 years ago was frustrated because they could not get headway. The only way you can make any kind of headway is move people at a huge expense from Africa to US universities, give them PhDs and hope they go back and so forth and so on. It was not a good situation. And AERC in the field of economics corrected that situation with an extremely important coalition, if you will, of universities in which you could move students around, move courses around and so forth. So the underlying mechanism was a capacity building mechanism and it worked. And it's a huge success. It still needs to be done and they're still doing it. However, and this is my point, the world's a different world today. And the question as we all know is, well, what have you done for us lately? And we swim in a sea of impact and performance measures and prove your worth. Why invest in you until we know that you are making a difference and every think tank in Washington knows what that swimming pool feels like. So what I was asked to do was come back on the board and be sort of an irritant on this question. And I've done so, I wouldn't say successfully, but certainly I've been an irritant. And this is my last shot. I'm about to go off the board so I'm about to be an irritant yet again. It turns out that the social science community does not understand anything about impact. In 1978, the National Academy of Sciences created a committee, wrote a report called Knowledge and Policy, the Uncertain Connection. 1978, heavy day, right? Doing social experiments doing, in the United States, doing think tanks are growing weekly. Huge amount of money is pouring in. We're getting good at all kinds of things. So the Academy says, let's take a look at how's it going? Policy schools, the whole business. And here is what the National Academy of Sciences said in 1978. Although the need for large scale federal support for social R&D is widely accepted, question concerning its relevance to the making of social policy have become more insistent. What are we learning? Who is making use of what we know? I call that the big wine. We know so much wine in the world don't they pay attention to us? And here is what was concluded in 1978. Unfortunately, we lack systematic evidence as to whether these steps are having the results their sponsors hoped for. The Uncertain Connection in the title was not uncertain about whether it was happening, but uncertain about how and why and how much and so forth. We knew we were having an impact. We had anecdotes, endless anecdotes. So, good, 1978, 35 years later, National Academy says, look, so much has happened. We have evidence-based policy. We have evidence hierarchies where randomized field control trials, which have now moved to Africa, made your way. We have translation research. We have intermediaries. We have typologies of use, all starting with Carol Weiss and Limbloom and Cohen and that literature and the knowledge utilization literature that grew up and so forth. So let's take a new look and sort of see what we now know about the use, the impact of our research. And this committee, I have to say, I'm sorry to say this, but it's true. I wrote it, I chaired it, but that's not the point, but I would feel awkward if you picked it up and found out I hadn't mentioned it. I'm obviously not selling it. It's free, but so, group 15, standard National Academy of Science apparatus, spread across very, very smart people, struggled with this question. Spent over $2 million, went on and on for five or six years, sent it out for review, came back and said, rewrite it. It really is a hard question. And we concluded the same thing that was concluded in 1978. We actually don't have a social science of the use of science, not just the use of social science, but the use of science. We have anecdotes, we have stories to tell, but we don't have anything systematic. Now, let me stop there and say this brings me back then to AERC. It is simply not true, according to this report, that just getting the science better and better and better, better methodologies, better theoretical constructs and so forth, and just communicating it more clearly results in use. We say that to ourselves because that's what we know how to do. We know how to get it right and we know how to try to communicate it clearly. But just learning that does not answer the question of will it be used. I don't have time, obviously we'll stop in just a few minutes, I don't want to go through this report. But what we discovered is that what we don't have is a social science that looks at the use problem from the inside out. We have a lot of stuff, knowledge typologies and evidence, blah, blah, blah, about looking at the process from the outside trying to look in and guessing about what's going on inside that system. And that's odd because sometimes we're in that system ourselves as people like Beno and our chair is and so forth, we're back and forth across the system but nevertheless we have not figured out a way in which to understand the flow of what we know and we know what you use but it's amazing. Now, so here's one short, short version of the finding. And I have two, I'll give you the first one. It is not evidence-based policy. It is evidence-influenced politics. Policy comes from politics. It doesn't just descend from agencies. It comes out of a political process. And if the evidence influences the political process, then it will have a handle on how to actually influence the policy. So you think about it, well that sounds kind of simple-minded, but think more about it because it is not simple. It's a fundamentally different way of thinking about it. Secondly, the use of research in the policy process is itself a social process, which means has all the characteristics of how groups make decisions. By the way, you're not individual decision-makers almost ever, it's always a group arguing back and forth and what about this trade-off and that compromise and so forth and so on. And it's political, it's ideological, it has to be, we live in democracies, they're supposed to be political and ideological and so forth and so on. So we now have a phenomena which is necessarily a social phenomena. Not just the use of social science with the use of engineering, the use of physics, the use of math, the use of chemistry. We don't care what it is. Once it is being used, it is a social phenomena. It has to be understood by social scientists. And one of the things we say is we need real help from behavioral economics. The behavioral economics is really thick into how we make decisions, how to group dynamics and decision-making and so forth and so on. So the really good news, and this is what I leave you with, this institution, which has figured out how to create serious capacity to do intellectual work on the continent of Africa is now going to take up this question. They have actually made real headway. They've created new kinds of mechanisms that go beyond the mechanisms we have here, as a matter of fact. These senior policy and the details go beyond what we've done here. And I actually think their position, factoid, if you ask yourself how many economists on the continent of Africa in World Bank and Development Bank, African Development Bank and universities and so forth, about how many really important ones are in a position to take research and translate it into effective policies. The estimate is somewhere between 500 and 1,000. Over 100 of those are alums of AERC. If it's only 500, we're 20% of the way there. You know, we've already. Anyway, my point is stay tuned because on the continent of Africa, this is an institution which is now saying we've got to go beyond capacity building, we've got to take the next step and figure out how do we understand whether what they know will be used and what goes on in the use process and that itself becomes a focus of analytic attention. Thank you. Thank you very much to all our panelists. Maybe I can start a first question. Following on that, in terms of what is, kind of what is the demand signal you get from policy makers in terms of does that, is that what influences what you choose to focus on? The second one was the question of the private sector, which we hope becomes more and more of a driver going forward but is probably equally in need of research in terms of the trade-offs and so forth. And I wonder what your strategy, what you're thinking in terms of strategy of engaging the private sector is on that. Finally, links perhaps with US institutions and others. I just wondered if that's part of our global, or institutions more global. That's three questions, so I'm sorry about that. Should we take a couple and then come back to the panel and we'll just run down. Or why don't you take that first set and we'll have to address that. So these are very interesting questions. One really has to do with how do you go about designing policy-oriented research. It's really, it's not that straight. We do it first on our own vision, what we think would be important and become proactive. But the second is what I said earlier. We have senior policy seminars where we attract governors of central banks, ministers of finance and also senior level policy makers where we dialogue on collaborative research that is done by the ARC network. The network includes African researchers, global resource persons outside Africa as well on big issues. And in that setting, what we are trying to do is to kind of influence conversation about a cutting edge issue of policy. And then in that process, we also become guided by them and going back and then revisit. The second approach is that ARC has been an institution which has been evaluated and re-evaluated. In fact, one of the things that I have difficulty is keeping track of how many evaluations I've actually gone through. I'm relatively new, right? And in fact, right now we have actually undergone through four evaluations of thematic research which is the framework I described earlier, the entire strategy of ARC. So what these evaluations are actually helping us is again guiding. We have Steve O'Connor in our audience. He and a World Bank economist actually looked at this thematic research. Again, based on conversations, a variety of stakeholders, they came up with a menu of suggestions, one of which is actually revisiting the entire thematic research area. So that's how we actually... So it's really like feedback, it's bottom-fourth. Now, the private sector agenda, it's not going to be just for its own sake. There are very important issues of mutual interest. Take for instance, like small-holder farmers. People do not seem to appreciate it, that's the private sector. And we have a training program that actually addresses both research and training related issues regarding small-holder farmers. And then take for instance finance. We both in research and training, issues of risk management, governance, financial regulation, are very relevant in terms of impacting our research agenda. They're also very relevant in the training arena. In order to force it for, if you take a financial institution, which is incapable of conducting appropriate credit risk analysis, it is bound to make distorted choices and decisions that will distort economic performance, it aggregates into economic performance. So having like talented financial manpower, not only through the efforts of the public sector, also the private sector. And then also in the senior policy seminars that I mentioned, and also national workshops, we will have a conglomeration and mix of private sector actors. So in the plenary conference that I mentioned earlier where we begin the entire biennial, last time we decided to have one on financial inclusion innovation. What we did this time was not just policymakers coming from a public sector, but also private sector actors dialoguing on the issue of financial inclusion, because we think that financial inclusion is important and becomes an input, this conversation that's going on in Africa about inclusive growth. This is African growth syndrome which is very, very impressive. Now the jury is still out on inclusive growth. By the way, as a footnote, I must say that one of the factors of production of this growth syndrome is informed policymaking. So this thing is not accidental. And ARC has been there for the last 25 years, those guys are all over. So I haven't done like an empirical evidence, but I know that that's an important factor. On linkages, this is something that we are going to do more of it moving forward, but our approach is one of very deep African perspective with best global practices. And so we have actually concluded that the kinds of things that we can do to move Africa forward depends, those who are, say, in North America, Europe, Brazil, or China, who have interest, actually leveraging the talent that's on the ground. And I came to appreciate that when somebody made an announcement of my appointment at the University of Maryland, the group that showed a lot of interest for the School of Public Policy. And it turned out that there are a number of those guys who really, really are very eager to do cutting edge research on Africa, but they are kind of handicapped with data. They don't have linkages. So it's North, South, South, South linkages is one of the things that we are going to push into our next strategy. We're actually in the process of getting our next strategy 2015, 2020. Thank you. Bob Byrd, I was Senior Advisor of the Economic Commission for Africa for 10 years when we tried to work hard with AARC very successfully. Two questions picking up from Ken and this discussion dealing with capacities. One is based on the rebasing of GDP in Ghana and now shortly in Nigeria, bringing us to realize again that basic statistical services are not strong. And so therefore research costs a lot more to do to pull up statistics that others should be doing as a public service. Wondering whether AARC has recommendations about how to get more focus on that. And secondly, I found it and shared the DAC group on evaluation and tried to persuade my colleagues, not very successfully, that evaluation of development assistance belonged in host government. And now there are some small movements in that direction, but certainly in Tanzania it's always been a case study that of the donors tripping over each other, taking up enormous amounts of government time to study the government's development. And is there an idea of how one could rationalize this and place more focus on home country research and home country governance? Hi, Connie Freeman. I am a professor at Syracuse University now, but I'm delighted to be here today to see my colleagues from AARC. I too was a board member at one point of AARC when I was the regional director for IDRC in Nairobi. And we worked very closely together for a 10 year period and Dr. Andulu kindly spoke at our 40th anniversary. So it's a great pleasure to be here. I was struck as you all were speaking that within the US where I now live and work and teach, there's an increasing awareness of the economic opportunities in Africa, of greatly improved growth rates, but I don't think there is a full appreciation of the increase in that talent pool which you mentioned and you exemplify sitting there. Nor is there the level of respect for that talent pool that will be extremely necessary if we're going to work together more creatively and get over this idea that the West still should be instructing Africa. A second comment is as you discussed the business about policy and research and reflecting on my time with IDRC, there were two elements that I thought were particularly relevant and we worked on hard at that time. One you talked about in detail, it's called networking and that's what IDRC provides is a network and the other is actually communications. It's how do you present the research to the policy maker? Because if they can't digest it, they can't use it and academics tend to present research in undigestible fashion. Thank you. Hi, Gail Martin, World Bank. Together with the ARC, the World Bank and the African Development Bank are partners in this initiative that Alema mentioned called the Service Delivery Indicators and I just want to maybe mention that for those who are not familiar with the ARC and their network is that we conduct surveys in schools and health facilities across Africa and in each country the implementation model is where an affiliate of the ARC where it's in Kenya, the Kenya Institute of Public Policy Research or in Uganda, the Economic Policy Research Center, Tanzania, Senegal, et cetera. These are all talent that's on the ground that makes it possible for us to run an Africa-wide program and it's also talent with credibility on the ground and in the bank, we always talk about the convening power of the bank. Quite frankly, I'm riding on the coattails of the convening power of the ARC and a more specific, maybe not in the name of ARC but certainly in the name of those research institutes on the ground and I think that this makes, this initiative a really powerful model because often it is said that when you do surveys you are replacing a mechanism that should be built in government information systems and I want to offer the notion that surveys like that collect this kind of information on quality which cannot always be generated through routine information systems because you need a third-party opinion to assess quality. So the partnership with ARC and the African Development Bank, I look forward to that and also welcome you to go to the SDI website, thanks. Well, the approach of the ARC on the issue of statistics, which is important, is really one of collaboration with other institutions. For a start, the ARC has been running this database now on the agricultural sector. Then I can give more detail working with the world food program on farmers, African farmers and so forth. Now, the things like this, there'll be collaboration between the ARC and the African Development Bank. The AFDB has been investing in statistics capacity building for the last four years very aggressively. We've been able to connect, I would say now about 30 to 35 statistics bureaus in Africa to one statistical hub. This is called the African Information Highway and that is what is being made available to the researchers of ARC. Most of the data consists of macroeconomic data and recently we've agreed that with the IMF that from now on the African Development Bank is going to collect the data on Africa and pass it on to the IMF. Of course, after that it will be branded IMF data, which is fine with us, but the idea is then is really one of collaborating with the ARC so that this data can be utilized for research. So I agree that capacity development in statistics is very critical, but it costs a lot of money and I don't think that it is the ARC that's going to pay for it is the people like the African Development Bank, the World Bank will pay for it, but really it's for use by researchers of the ARC network in order to inform policy. I must say that this program is really advanced. I mean, if you get into the system, it's mind-blowing. You can do anything on that data platform. It's incredible. And we've moved on to a position now where we can start collecting data by mobile phone. Actually, the trial personally in Tunisia where I was able to sample 20,000 people in one hour in terms of youth employment and we did another survey in Congo DRC who were able to survey basically half a million people in five hours or by SMS-based Q&A requesting responses on that and question us. So it's collaboration. It costs a lot of money. It's really all hands on deck, but it's important. We just need better data. But also what's required, I think is some repository on specialized data. Let's say on unemployment, the agricultural sector that I talked about. Lemma can say more about that. And then on gender issues, on service delivery. So just data on that, what Gail Martin was still speaking about. So, but also household surveys so that then the macro data could begin to be, to be tallied to at least speak to the micro data. So both micro and macro need to be somewhere where it can be accessed, but it should always be improved. Well, we did assist Ghana on the rebasing of the GDP figures. We did the peer review. And by the way, every continuously, we produce what is called a statistical quality survey and ranking of all African countries. It's a public document. I can share that with you. We rank, I can tell you, number one in South Africa, followed by Mauritius, da, da, da, da, all the way down. We got the ranking. And we tell the country, this is where you're ranked now. You need to improve, but of course everything is relative. So, I mean, that's a long answer to a very short question. Maybe, yeah, this idea of how to present a policy brief that Freeman talked about. This is important. It's an art. It's an art. Just making sure that the heading of the two-page policy brief communicates a message. And the idea that if you are putting this together, you must put yourself in the shoes of the policymaker. What is his or her problem? What problem are they grappling with? Politically, their fears, what is it? And then trying to work out how the research is then going to inform or deal or be a solution for that problem. It has to speak directly. I must say that I'm always struck when I speak to the Center for Global Development how they do it with their one pages. I'm very impressed, actually, when I speak to them, they've got a few tricks on how to do this, where they spend a lot of time researching literally the mind of the policymaker. What are their fears? What are their concerns? And you start from there in terms of, you already have your research, it's in the back pocket, but in terms of framing it to them, it's important to know how they think and the politics that they are subjected to, which Ken was talking about earlier. Let me just stop here, I think my colleagues. My answer on the communication, I mean, it's something we grapple with, kind of translating. You can get things taken up by a technocratic cadre, but not necessarily from the people who decide on policy. So you do have to reach also a broader audience than just even the government, I think, in getting media, moving public opinion and understanding. I wonder, Professor Angelou, would you like to say something on that from having sat in both the, trying to communicate and. Well, I wanted just to speak to the question of evaluation being done as an in-country. You know, unfortunately, Bob, on that score, I think we are moving backwards. We had gone to a point where either through a general budget support framework or aid coordination framework, we had set up a framework for doing joint evaluation with development partners. And at some stage, even to have an independent evaluation of both parties, like the Halayna independent-type report, giving scores on both sides in terms of what they had committed to do and whether or not they did. I think, unfortunately, we're moving away from both of those. I know for sure in Tanzania, independent evaluation disappeared about three years ago. No, about four years ago. And now, general budget support is disappearing, so evaluations will go back through the silos in each one of the sectors. So we'll have again, most likely, most likely, evaluations being done on the basis of provision of support in various places. And this is happening despite Paris and rhetoric moving in the opposite direction. So some of us are struggling with that just to see what went wrong. But this is, I think, what's happening. I'm sorry, I don't have much better news on that. We are struggling with that. Some of us are trying to see whether we can at least salvage the evaluation part, even if money starts flowing in the old ways. But it's very hard to see how you keep that without the reward of putting money together. So I think it would be another Nobel Prize for somebody to come up with that, yes. Yeah, so there was a question regarding database and then there was a mention of data on agriculture. And I wanted to say a couple of words about that. Maybe as a preamble, I think Mutuli is correct that ARC does partner with many of the institutions, the World Bank, the IMF, UNU, wider universities and so on. So WFP, as you know, has a pretty huge purchasing power. And so they have this program called Purchase for Porcas. Basically they buy from small holder farmers and they have been data gathered at country offices. So they came and actually partnered with ARC on data, basically cleaning and analyzing and reporting. And so what we are doing now is actually using it for two purposes. One is that we have an opportunity and infrastructure for a data repository, not only in agriculture, but also in non-agriculture. We haven't done that in the past. And also, as I mentioned earlier, when we go through evaluation and reviews, we revisit what we do. And when we went back and looked at our five of our teams, like poverty, income distribution, microeconomic policies, regional integration, finance and so on, now we're actually in the next strategy we are going to have a focused team on agriculture. And I think that this WFP database partnership is going to be very useful and we're going to actually get this connected with a network. This brings back one message about ARC. We are a vast network, a network of researchers, resource people, policymakers. And the organization has become a little bit complex. Sometimes I have difficulty communicating it. And the first attempt that I tried to communicate to my friends in the U.S. was with Jim Poterba, who's the NBR president. And so our meeting was, he had gone to the website and then said, you know, what is this? Is this NBR? And I said, yeah, it's NBR, but it's not just NBR. Then, is it Brookings? Yeah, it's Brookings, but it's not just Brookings. How about NSF? Yeah, it's NSF, but it's not just NSF. So we have a very complex organization which is kind of a combination of Brookings, NSF, and NBR, and it's very difficult to replicate. So what, and as a result of that, there has been communication gap between the research guys and the training guys. And also, not only outside Africa, also within Africa. So we're actually embarked in the area of very important communication strategy, really communicating ARC, that's what we're doing currently. And even take it, actually, we then recognize that like we do in this country, there is an opportunity to have an alumni organization. So now we have alumni from Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, CSAE, Oxford University actually, partnering, great momentum, they're going to come up with an announcement. So as we reduce communication gap, as we create more synergy and before greater value, what we're seeing as emerging is very powerful unified voice for African development. I'm very, very excited about that. And I'm going to end with that. Thank you. Actually, we are a little over time, in fact. So I'm afraid for the last two, we're not able to take those, but I think maybe you can, we are gonna show, I don't know, we'll take a quick break, but we'll show a small, short five minute clip of a film on ARC. If you're not able to stay though, we webcasted this event. It will be on our website and we'll also put a link to the film and we'll be sending that kind of a synopsis out to the whole invitation list. So with that, I want to thank all of our panelists and the AERC, A for coming to CSIS and sharing that with us. And I hope we can serve as a platform for communication of some of your research going forward, so we'd love to do that. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.