LCT's Introductory Workshop @ The ESRC//Dar es Salaam

On Friday, the Economic and Social Research Foundation (ESRF) in Dar hosted our introductory workshop. The aim of the session was to communicate to stakeholders what our project is about, and to generate engagement, discussion and debate.

Attendees were from a range of backgrounds and disciplines, with representatives from The World Bank, the Tanzanian government, the Tanzanian Gender Networking Program, and from Tanzanian academic institutions.

Presentations were given by Dan Brockington, Olivia Howland, Christine Noe and Moses Mnzava, outlining the project's substantive basis, methodologies, and collaborative elements.

The workshop aimed to be an opportunity for debate, and we were pleased that our presentations did indeed prompt discussion and feedback. One central theme of the discussion was gender related. We and our stakeholders are committed to including gender dimensions in the research data and analysis. Indeed, many of the domestic units from our pilot study site have been found already to be headed by women. Given the insufficiency of female representation in existing surveys, as discussed at the workshop, we are keen to make this a priority in our work.

There was discussion with respect to our proposal to utilize data from fairly small-scale surveys. This is because in order to create the panel data set, we require the names of the original respondents and domestic unit heads. With larger scale survey work, such as the LSMS, participants’ names are anonymised. This makes it impossible for us to use these data to create a panel which could be revisited at any point in the future for follow up surveys.

We hoped that the session would allow for greater involvement of Tanzanian researchers, as currently in the research group they are in the minority. This is something we very much want to change. From initial feedback, it is hoped that we might be able to locate more Tanzanian academics to become part of the project.

Thank you to everyone who attended and contributed. We will be making contact with all of you in the coming weeks, and if there are any comments or questions, then please do contact Dan or Olivia.