 My name is Wisdom Aqbalu and I joined UNU WIDA from January 2014. Prior to joining WIDA I was an associate professor of economics at the State University of New York at Farmingdale where I was teaching courses in economics, doing research mostly on sustainable development issues in developing countries, specifically Africa. And I was also chairing the Department of Economics before I joined WIDA. And I'm originally from Ghana, I would like to say, but I'm now an American citizen and I'm now back in Ghana trying to help with capacity. When I was young and I was thinking of what to do in life, I was very curious about why some countries are doing better than others. I used to watch the news, read some papers and I realized that most African countries were struggling and other countries were doing okay. So my curiosity eventually lead me to try to find answers and that is what brought me to economics when I had someone who introduced economics to me as a discipline that can help me address some of those questions. And then within economics I got quite interested in a number of issues or areas. And one area that I got interested in was environmental economics because I realized that natural resources form a very strong basis for Africa's development. And then I also got interested in econometrics because I was interested in using quantitative methods in trying to address some of these important issues that are confronting the continent. When I was teaching in the US, every summer I go back to Ghana and then go to my former university, which is the University of Cape Coast, where I meet my former students, my colleagues and then some new students. And then every time I went there, I saw the need for me to go back and help because there were so many people who wanted to have what I had, to have the knowledge I have, very smart, passionate young men and women who really wanted to also become researchers. But there was lack of capacity to actually train them. And I felt that at some point I needed to come back and help build that capacity and also try to make my research, which I have done mostly on Ghana, in part policy because being there, being in Ghana and taking part in discussions is quite different from being abroad and working on Ghana. So I had all these thoughts. And then when I saw the advert that why I was looking for someone to be a part of a program that was geared towards capacity building in Ghana and Africa at the PhD level in development economics, I got overly excited and I didn't even think twice. So I applied for the job and then here I am at WIDA. My connection with WIDA is like a marriage made in heaven because we seem to have so much in common. First of all, my research has been primarily on natural resource management in developing countries. And I've worked on fisheries, gold mining, demand for biomass fuel by household and a couple of other things. And I realized that those are the issues including climate change by the way. And those are the issues that WIDA has also been very passionate about. WIDA is very concerned about doing policy, we say that will have policy impact. We say that can influence developmental processes that are taking place in Africa. And those are the same issues that I've been working with, trying to make impact in the very little way, the very small way I came. So that was the first thing that motivated me to come to WIDA. Secondly, in my own way I've also been trying to build capacity. Every summer when I go to Ghana I organize quantitative research workshops where I teach the young lecturers and sometimes even people in the medical field and other fields how to do research, how to collect data, analyze data and write reports. So I realized that here was a situation where WIDA was doing research that I was passionate about and then also trying to build capacity, something I've been thinking about for a very long time. So I realized that was something I really wanted to do. And moreover, there are some incredible smart researchers at WIDA who are working on the same issues that I'm working with so we could collaborate and work together on many exciting problems in Africa and make the impact that I've always been wanting to make. So I felt it would be great for me to come back and do just that. I just hope I will be able to continue to make whatever little impact I've been trying to make through my research. But even bigger is the fact that now I have an institutional backing, an institution that is also doing similar things that I'm very interested in and then they try to as much as possible reach out to policymakers. So I hope that my being here will make it possible for me to communicate my research output directly to policymakers. And I also hope that my coming will help establish this graduate program, a PID program in economics in Ghana to be a very good one which will be sustained over a long period of time and then train the resources, the people that we critically need to address those issues, people who are living with those problems and have good understanding of those problems to train them to be able to acquire the skills, to be able to do the necessary research, come out with policies that could address those problems. I'm quiet a bit on fisheries economics and when I started working, you were right. There has been a few things that were done but not in fisheries economics so I tried to make some contributions in that direction. First of all, I tried to find out reasons why small-scale fishes are violating most of the fishing regulations in Ghana. For example, the fish with nets that have smaller net sizes. So why do they keep doing this? Although we all know that if you have a resource that can replenish itself, that is renewable. If you have us too much today, there is little to have us tomorrow. So why will these fishermen be doing those things to themselves? And then I also tried to find out the extent to which those variables that we think about in crime and punishment like the risk of being punished and then the severity of punishment, that is the probability of being caught and fined to what extent do those play roles in societies where people can bribe their way out of problems when they are caught. And they also investigate other new factors such as the rate at which social factors, social factors, religious factors and the rate at which people discount the future. In other words, if fishermen are more impatient, does it affect the intensity at which they violate the regulation? Also try to see whether people who violate the regulation are intrinsically different from those who do not. For example, we found out that a fisherman who is less skillful is more likely to go out there and fish illegally. And of course it makes some sense. And then there has been other findings like we have a situation where the small-scale fishers who are those who are mostly concerned with they fish near the shore and we have other fishers who fish far away. According to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, Ghana has 200 nautical miles but if we cannot fish close to the length of our region then Ghana has to give path out for these international fishing companies to come and extract. And then we have a situation where areas that were supposed to be natural reserves supposed to produce the fish for the fishermen to catch are also being fished by these boats. So how do we design incentives, taxes so that they don't overfish there and as long as they overfish and they catch too much it will affect what the small-scale fishers are getting here. So how do we make policies that will ensure that they catch just enough so that the small-scale fishers who harvest the fish for their livelihood will continue to have catches from one period to the other. And there has been other findings, other interesting findings as well.