Data Driven Development in Africa Conference May 2018

Title: Renewable energy and environmental degradation: accounting for political economy dynamics

Presenter: Samuel Adams

Description: One of the core challenges of African countries is access to energy, which represents a vital factor for achieving sustainable economic development. Keeping pace with rising energy needs therefore is at the top of the agenda for policy makers.

Title: Budget Analysis and Tracking on GBV financing: The Case of Selected Government Ministries in Tanzania

Presenter: Rasel Madaha

Description: The analytical paper focuses on the national budgets under the Ministry of Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children; Ministry of Home affairs; and Ministry of Constitution and Legal Affairs (formerly known as Ministry of Constitution Affairs and Justice) with a specific focus on the priority issues within National Plan of Action to end Violence Against Women and Children (NPA-VAWC).

Title: Managing Transitions To Meritocracy in Clientelistic Democracies

Presenter: Sarah Brierley

Description: Meritocracy exists on a continuum. History demonstrates that competitive recruitment for certain positions can co-exist with pervasive partisan hiring for others.

Title: Can Massive, High-Frequency, Hyper-Local Citizen Feedback Improve Public Services? A Field Experiment

Presenter: Mark Buntaine

Description: Governments around the world are investing in technologies that allow massive, frequent, and localized contact with citizens to improve services through the collection of dispersed data, though there is little evidence about the impacts of these efforts.

Title: A Comparative study of local own revenue mobilization in Accra and Nairobi

Presenter: Colette Nyirakamana

Description: Raising local revenues has been an ongoing challenge for Sub-Saharan urban municipalities. The difficulties of raising more revenues lead to the weak capacity of local actors to fund local programs valued by the citizens while increasing their financial dependence on central government budget transfers and international organizations financial assistance.

Title: Peer effects and externalities in technology adoption: Evidence from community reporting in Uganda

Presenter: Romain Ferrali

Description: Do social networks matter for the adoption of technology for political communication? We collect complete social network data for sixteen Ugandan villages where a new political communication technology was introduced, and show robust evidence of peer effects on technology adoption.

Title: Re-conceptualizing Ethnicity and its Effects on Development

Presenter: Adam Harris

Description: A large body of research has found that ethnic diversity undermines cooperation and hinders development. While diversity has been found to be an important predictor of development, the literature’s focus on diversity assumes the ethnic divisions are important regardless of their social salience. We seek to improve upon the dominant approach to ethnicity by moving beyond diversity and considering the degree to which the norms and rules governing social behavior are ethnicized.

Title: Technology and the Formation of National Identity: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

Presenter: Benjamin Laughlin

Description: An important part of statebuilding is the formation of national identity. A long line of theoretical literature leads us to expect that technological advancements facilitate the adoption of a national identity. We investigate the effect of one dimension of technological progress: the expansion of mobile phone coverage across sub-Saharan Africa, which is believed to induce broad changes in political and social life.