A two-year initiative to address the local capacity gap and enhance education decision-making processes across Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2023, the program supported four fellows—from Cameroon, Gambia, South Africa, and Tanzania—to undertake in-country education policy analysis projects. While conducting their research, the fellows benefit from networking opportunities as well as capacity building in evaluating educational research, developing performance data, and engaging local stakeholder to integrate evidence into decision-making.
PEP has joined a consortium of distinguished research and educational institutions from across Europe for the Sustainability Performances, Evidence, and Scenarios (SPES) project. This three-year initiative aims to improve policymakers’ understanding of economic growth, human well-being, and sustainability.
PEP is contributing to analytical work using the Computable General Equilibrium modelling approach. PEP’s role in SPES is key to ensuring that the insights developed are globally applicable. PEP is also engaging and consulting with the government institutions in Southern countries that have been selected as case studies.
As the Ethiopian Health Insurance Service(EHIS) introduces a new health insurance contribution system (one that is tailored to the economic capacity of households), a team of local PEP researchers will assess the effectiveness of the policy.The policy aims to increase access to equitable access to health care services in Ethiopia.
The research team is conducting a randomized controlled trial impact evaluation to analyze the cost-effectiveness of the new sliding scale system. The project aims to improve the distributive impact and sustainability of community-based health insurance.
The remaining three new initiatives are all funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada and support women’s empowerment:
The Impact of the War in Ukraine on African Economies program received new funding from the IDRC to extend the research into a second phase. Phase 2 focuses on evaluating the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war on gender in Egypt and Kenya.The research team is looking at how trade shocks caused by the war in Ukraine spill-over to the labour markets (particularly the effects on female workers) and to households (particularly female-headed ones) in these two African countries.
This initiative aims to generate robust evidence to inform policy reforms that foster resilience, adaptation to climate change, and inclusivity in the agricultural sector—particularly for women and youth—in Burkina Faso, Kenya, Uganda, and Vietnam.
Teams of in-country researchers and stakeholders will engage with policymakers and practitioners, conduct rigorous evaluations, and design strategies tailored to each country’s unique needs and circumstances.
By empowering rural micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) operating in the agricultural sector through sustainable policy change, this initiative supports the increased use of renewable energy technologies to modernize agriculture.
PEP is developing a self-paced, interactive, bilingual online course to strengthen researchers’ capacity to integrate gender equality and inclusion (GEI) principles into their research.
The course emphasizes the African experience, drawing on the expertise of primarily Southern-based experts, and focuses on GEI-related concepts, analytical frameworks, methodologies, data gaps, and strategies for inclusion.
Many researchers lack the knowledge and skills to incorporate GEI into their work, leading to gender-blind research and the exclusion of vulnerable groups. The course aims to address this gap by providing training in a gender and inclusivity perspective, emphasizing intersectional approaches, and focusing on various forms of inequality and discrimination.
