UNRISD Continues to Support Capacity Building in Africa

UNRISD Research Coordinator Ilcheong Yi this year continued the Institute’s long-standing collaboration with the UN-IDEP* course Social Policy for Development Planners. Focusing on lessons to be learned from the East Asian development experience, Ilcheong Yi presented one of the eight modules in the course, which trains mid-level and senior African development officials and decision makers and took place on 4–15 August 2014 in Dakar, Senegal.

Participants came from 25 African countries, and included the Assistant Director of the National Planning Commission of Nigeria, the Assistant Minister for Research and Technical Services from the Liberian Ministry of Gender and Development, and a macroeconomics planner from the Prime Minister’s office in Togo.

Largely based on UNRISD’s Social Policy in a Development Context research, the course brings together officials from different sectors to understand how the synergies between policies across different domains can contribute to better social development outcomes. The stated objective of the course is to provide officials with the knowledge “to design and manage development plans in which social and economic policies and strategies are fully interfaced to deliver (…) transformative outcomes.”

The course was initially commissioned in 2011 by the African Union’s Executive Council, which requested the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) to facilitate capacity building activities for social policy analysis for Member States and devise strategies for successful implementation of the 2008 Social Policy Framework for Africa, which itself draws its inspiration and rationale from UNRISD work. Social Policy for Development Planners was subsequently developed by UN-IDEP in collaboration with Prof. Jimi Adesina, who had coordinated the sub-Saharan regional component of UNRISD’s Social Policy in a Development Context project. Thanks to the success of the course so far it is set to continue for another five years following recent budget decisions.

*UN-IDEP: Institut Africain de Développement Economique et de Planification (African Institute of Economic Planning and Development)

Photo: UN Photo/P Mugabane CC BY-NC-ND 2.0