AERC OVERVIEW
African Economic Research Consortium (AERC)
Bringing Rigour and Evidence to Economic Policy Making in Africa
Established in 1988, the African Economic Research Consortium is a capacity building institution to inform economic policies in sub-Saharan Africa.
AERC has three primary components: research, training and policy outreach. The organization integrates economic policy research, postgraduate training and policy outreach within a network of researchers, universities and policy makers in Africa and worldwide.
Research Programme
The key components of the Research Programme are thematic and collaborative research projects, complemented by other capacity building initiatives. The programme approach aims to improve technical skills of local researchers, allow for regional determination of research priorities and strengthen national economic policy research institutions.
Training Programme
The AERC Training Programme supports postgraduate studies in economics and Agricultural economics and enhances the capacities of the respective departments of economics in African public universities. The key components of the training programme are the Collaborative Master’s Programme in economics (CMAP), Collaborative Master’s Programme in Agricultural and Applied economics (CMAAE) and the Collaborative PhD Programme (CPP). In both cases the collaboration features joint enforcement of standards through annual evaluation and assessment by external examiners, a common curriculum and its development, a joint facility for teaching subject specializations and electives, and joint development of teaching materials.
Mission
AERC’s mission is to strengthen local capacity for conducting independent, rigorous inquiry into the problems facing the management of economies in sub-Saharan Africa. That mission rests on two basic premises.
- That development is more likely to occur where there is sustained sound management of the economy.
- That such management is more likely to happen where there is an active, well-informed group of locally based professional economists to conduct policy-relevant research.
AERC’s objectives are to:
- enhance the capacity of locally based researchers to conduct policy-relevant economic inquiry;
- promote the retention of such capacity within the continent, and
- encourage its application in the policy context.
History
The launch of AERC goes back to the late 1980s, when a small group of Africanists and African scholars began to recognize the disconnect between economic policy making and economic research in sub-Saharan Africa. Available research results, applied to other economies, did not always seem appropriate to the African context. And where such results were available, they were too often not put to use.
Their concern swelled into a full-fledged idea; they had a discussion about a vehicle for pooling their expertise and applying it to the development of economic policy capacity in sub-Saharan Africa. And instead of sitting around mumbling about the problem, they decided to act. Thus, the AERC was born. The idea was fairly simple– to set up a framework for supporting sound economic research on themes of importance to the management of economies in Africa and make existing expertise available through experienced economists who could serve as resource persons to the researchers supported under the framework. First, they were able to convince one donor to support the idea, then a small group of donors.
That group of donor agencies grew into the actual Consortium itself. Based in Nairobi, AERC was formally established in 1988. A postgraduate training programme soon followed the research efforts, and then a publishing and communications component. Today the Consortium reaches across sub-Saharan Africa, with research and training alumni serving in central banks, ministries of finance, economic departments of universities and policy research institutes.
Organizational Structure
AERC is registered 501c3 non-profit in the United States, hosted in Kenya as an international non-governmental organization, supported by donor governments, private foundations and international organizations.
The organizational structure of AERC was deliberately designed to foster both the independence of the research agenda and the accountability of resource management. The structure is composed of three interlinked, but independent organs: The Board of Directors that approves policy directions and multi-year strategies; the Programme Committee that sets the agenda and goals of the Research and Training Programmes; and the Secretariat, headed by an Executive Director that manages the AERC’s activities.
Alumni Network
AERC alumni can be found in central banks of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Botswana, Nigeria, South Africa, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Zambia and in the Ministry of Economy and Finance, Cameroon, Ministry of Finance, Côte d’Ivoire, Ministry of Finance/Treasury, South Africa, The World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., universities across sub-Saharan Africa, and policy research institutes in Africa.
