Having worked on the synthesis document, I’m very interested to see that the issues you identified of corruption, inappropriate policy and funding priorities and low M&E and data collection capacity also came up in our research, and not just in Tanzania (where a small number of respondents came from), but also across Africa and other regions.

Do you know of examples from other countries of how governments have engaged with youth in meaningful ways to inform policy processes, or those that have indicators relating to them?

Global Political Economy is an academic discipline within the broader umbrella of social sciences. Its cuts across many other different disciplines, like economics, politics, international relations, history, globalization and sociology. Sometimes, it is referred to as International Political Economy (IPE).

IPS is concerned basically with intersection between Economics and politics. How decisions and interactions by political forces (states, institutions, governments, and policy actors, etc.) influence economic interventions; business decision, investment, monetary policies, market strategies and the like. And Vice versa, it also looks at the effect of economic interactions have upon political structures and their likely outcomes.

You can read more on IPE from this paper by Michael Veseth. What is International Political Economy? (http://www2.ups.edu/ipe/whatis.pdf )

Please feel free to visit the blog again and subscribe to RSS feeds. You also might want to check the knowledgebase for more research papers on key development issues (www.gdnet.org/~knowledgebase).

Are the material of those workshops on research uptake organised by Drussa made public? If yes, could you please share the link with me?

I take this opportunity to invite you to check out what we have on research communications and uptake:
http://cloud2.gdnet.org/cms.php?id=research_communications_handouts
http://cloud2.gdnet.org/cms.php?id=capacity_building_how_to_guides

Last year, DRUSSA (www.drussa.net) presented two postgraduate short courses in three locations across Sub-Saharan Africa (Stellenbosch, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; and Accra, Ghana) in an effort to improve researchers’ individual skills sets around the practice of research uptake. A clear sign that knowledge and skills around RU are needed was the over-subscription to these courses, respectively Science Utilisation and Impact, and Science Communication. This year, more short courses will be offered. These can ultimately form the basis for credits towards the DRUSSA MPhil degree offered by the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST) at the University of Stellenbosch, which sees its first intake of students next month. We also work with our participant universities (24 in all) to establish and/or improve institutions’ organisational structures to accommodate and facilitate the practice and management of research uptake. Of course, once we see some results, we’ll share methodologies, processes and so on with other universities.