In this webinar “How to reach the (extreme) poor through inclusive development policies in sub Saharan Africa?”, Nicky Pouw and Marleen Dekker will introduce a policy analysis framework to understand inclusive development from a bottom-up perspective of the poor and diversified vulnerable groups, the stakeholders involved and the importance of uncovering the transaction costs related to access and reaping the benefits of the interventions, programs and processes.
Second, the webinar will briefly discuss the results of three empirical studies on inclusive development policies, programmes, interventions and processes and the hidden costs in accessing and using them, especially from the perspective of the ones who are, or risk being, left behind. These range from specific social protection programmes or selected agricultural value chains to technological and institutional innovations and investment behaviour.
Specifically, we shall address what could be done in the context of the specific multi-level policy and action instruments to reduce the hidden costs and promote more equity, and how this is related to the specific regulatory, socio-economic and political context in which the study is set and the specific population groups and actors concerned.
This will illustrate what can be done to make development more inclusive (the extra mile to leave no one behind) and under what conditions (i.e. instrumental and contextual features) a policy, intervention, investment or action can be successful. And conversely, it will demonstrate how and why inclusive development can fail due to insurmountable thresholds to access public goods and services, private sector markets and social and political institutions, and to find poor people’s needs and priorities effectively catered for.
Participants in the webinar will be invited to share their experience and a collective reflection on the proposed conceptual framework.
Nicky Pouw is Associate Professor in Economics of Wellbeing at the Governance and Inclusive Development research programme (GID) of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Amsterdam. She is a development economist with over 25 years of research experience in international development studies, mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa. She currently leads a number of research projects which collaborate with local governors, ministries, NGOs, civil society organisations and other stakeholders on the ground. Besides these applied projects, she is deeply engaged in pushing the scientific and public debates on inclusive development and rethinking the economy from a broader wellbeing perspective.
Marleen Dekker is Professor of Inclusive Development in Africa at Leiden University. She is trained as a human geographer and her interdisciplinary research analyses the role of social norms and networks in accessing markets and local socio-economic development. The focus of her work is on behavioural determinants of access to and use of formal and informal financial services, including informal insurance networks, community-based health insurance and intra-household resource sharing.
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Source: European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), 20 March 2020