This five-day meeting in Accra, Ghana will consist of a combination of design clinics, research presentations, and teach-ins on topics critical for designing impact evaluations and field experiments intended to measure the effects of policies, interventions, and programs. Teach in topics will include randomization, statistical power, and threats to the estimation of treatment effects. Throughout the week participants will work to develop their own research designs together with peers and more senior researchers.

Funds are available to reimburse flights, accommodation and meals. Applicants short-listed for participation will be contacted to arrange necessary details. You can apply be sending a short motivational statement and a CV to abigail.long@columbia.edu before March 27, 2015. For more information, go here. 

Anthony Mveyange, a current EASST visiting fellow,  is  pursuing a PhD in Economics from the University of Southern Denmark. He is presenting this paper at a seminar on 3/13/2015 at Colorado State University, where he spent two years as a Fulbright scholar. 

The transition  from low to high growth performance has been a central feature  of policy discussions on Africa’s economic prosperity over the last decade. These growth spurts have also brought along growing concerns over income disparities across regions (see, WorldBank, 2012, for more discussions). The existing evidence on income inequality in Africa is polarized between two extremes. At one extreme there is the micro evidence that uses individuals and households as units of analysis, and at the other extreme there is macro evidence that uses countries and supra-nations as units of analysis. However, virtually  no evidence exists on regional - the meso level - income inequalities in Africa as a whole. Kim (2008) asserts that the main reason for this vacuum has mainly been the lack of reliable and consistent sub-national income data.

In this paper I employ night lights (henceforth lights) data to circumvent these data limitations and estimate a proxy for regional income inequality in Africa. The main hypothesis is that lights are good proxies for regional income inequality in as much as they are proxies for income (Papaioannou, 2013; Sutton et al., 2007), economic growth (Henderson et al., 2012; Chen and Nordhaus, 2011) and wealth (Ebener et al., 2005). To test this hypothesis, I i) construct regional income inequality (henceforth regional inequality) indices (i.e.  Gini and Mean logarithmic de- viations - MLD)  based on spatial income data and light data in 423 regions across 32 countries in Africa for years 1995, 2000 and 2005. The estimated indices are based on total and income per capita and total and per capita light intensity. ii) follow Henderson et al. (2012)’s statistical framework to test the extent  to which light  intensity inequality predicts income inequality in Africa during the same period. This allows statistical inference on whether light-based inequality indices are good proxies for income-based indices. iii)  use light-based inequality indices to estimate and show the trends of regional income inequality in Africa during 1992 − 2012.

See below for upcoming funding and research opportunities available through the EASST network. Go here for other funding and research opportunities available to East Africans. 

The EASST Collaborative invites East African researchers to apply for a 4-month fellowship (sabbatical) at the University of California Berkeley, to be completed during the 2015-16 academic year. To be eligible, researchers must be residents of an East African country (Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, or Uganda) and hold a staff or student position at a research institution, university, or other organization headquartered in East Africa. Applicants must have a PhD. or Master’s degree. Researchers from economics, epidemiology, statistics, and other quantitative social science disciplines are encouraged to apply.  The full request for applications call can be downloaded below. Please submit your application file online at:  http://tinyurl.com/Submittable-EASST-2015-VS

EASST invites pairs of researchers from the CEGA faculty network and East Africa to submit grant applications for the evaluation of innovative interventions in health, education, economic development, energy, and other sectors. The ceiling for grant requests is USD $50,000 per project, and a total of $120,000 in research funding will be awarded across all projects. Successful projects will achieve two primary goals: (i) creating new knowledge that will improve the design of development programs in East Africa, and; (ii) enhancing East African researchers’ skills and capacity to lead further evaluations. Please see attached RFP for full details on how to apply. Proposals must be submitted via our online platform: http://tinyurl.com/Submittable-EASST-2015-RGC.