EGC and Sub-Saharan Africa: A history of engagement
April 16, 2024
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In the early 1950s, the Ford Foundation asked Lloyd Reynolds, then the economics department chair at Yale, to travel to Africa to research decolonization’s economic impacts. His daughter, Priscilla Roosevelt, called this trip a “turning point” that inspired him to switch his research focus from labor to development economics.
Reynolds, Simon Kuznets, and others founded the Economic Growth Center in 1961 with Ford Foundation funding. One of EGC’s first initiatives, under its Country Studies program, was to send Gerry Helleiner to Nigeria to analyze its economy, believing this former British colony would play a powerful role on the continent.
Later, EGC engagements with sub-Saharan African countries became more collaborative. In 2009, Yale EGC faculty led by Chris Udry collaborated with partners in Ghana to launch the first wave of the Ghana Socioeconomic Panel Survey (GSPS). As of 2024, four survey waves have been completed in collaboration with the Global Poverty Research Lab at Northwestern University and the Institute of Statistical, Social, and Economic Research (ISSER) at the University of Ghana. In November 2022, the first three waves were made freely available via Dataverse and the EGC website. Since then, the dataset has been downloaded over 400 times.
Today, EGC affiliates collaborate with African researchers on a wide range of topics, which include early-childhood development in Ghana, gender-inclusive pathways to digital inclusion in Kenya, and last-mile vaccine delivery in Sierra Leone. EGC, Inclusion Economics (based across EGC and the Yale Macmillan Center), and the International Growth Centre hosted a March 11 event in Kigali chaired by Dr. Jean Chrysostome Ngabitsinze, Rwanda’s Minister of Trade and Industry, and featuring Peter Salovey, the President of Yale. Yale affiliates Lauren Falcao Bergquist and Kevin Donovan, who are conducting research in Rwanda, and senior policymakers discussed research-policy collaborations designed to evaluate and promote levers for economic growth. To further engage with African students, EGC launched in 2022 a scholarship for students from Sub-Saharan Africa for the Masters program in International Development and Economics (IDE) at Yale, which has supported five students thus far.
With the 33rd annual Simon Kuznets Memorial Lecture on April 4, we welcomed Chris Udry back to EGC to speak about his recent research on agricultural productivity and structural transformation based on data from six sub-Saharan countries. I had the chance to sit down with him and our Kuznets visitor Francis Annan for our Voices in Development podcast and discuss productive ways to collaborate with local researchers – in Ghana and elsewhere. Chris observed, “I view my work as more trying to support my local collaborators in providing them with the resources and the tools and maybe the authority to make recommendations to government. So I view myself as sort of a cheerleader, maybe a coach, for the athletes who are going to do the real policy."
We at EGC are proud to support and learn from our many affiliates and visitors who play such roles in engagements across Africa and around the world. I invite you to listen to the conversation with Chris and Francis and watch Chris’s lecture via the links below.
Rohini Pande
Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics
Director, Economic Growth Center
