African Center for Gender and Development

ECA Major Partner in PEPs Conference on Research for Poverty Reduction

16 June 2006

The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa is hosting the 5th Annual Meeting of the Poverty and Economic Policy (PEP) Research Network (June 18-22, 2006), expected to be attended by almost 150 researchers, policy analysts and resource persons from over 40 countries working on poverty measurement and impact analysis.

High-level Ethiopian Government officials, Representatives of Embassies, UN Agencies and the donor community including bilateral agencies based in Addis Ababa are also expected tpo attend this weeklong event.

Collaboration with the PEP Network goes back to 2004 when ECA' African Center for Gender and Development, mainly in developing gender-aware micro-simulation and macro economic models to evaluate impacts of polices on poverty reduction.

Given the relevance of PEPs meeting to the Commission's work and orientations, ECA and PEP agreed in 2005 to jointly organize an international conference/training workshop on 16-22 June 2006 in AddisAbeba, Ethipia. Other partners included in the organization of this important annual get together are the Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies of De La Salle University (Manila) and the Centre Interuniversitaire sur le Risque, les Politiques Économiques et l'Emploi (Laval University).

The PEP Network that is funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC-Canada) is comprised of three sub-networks: the Modeling and Policy Impact Analysis, the Poverty Monitoring, Measurement and Analysis, and the Community-Based Monitoring System. .

The specific objectives that the PEP Network will pursue during its weeklong meeting are mainly to: to present and discuss research proposals submitted to it, select new proposals to be financed by the MPIA-PMMA and the CBMS sub-networks, and convene the meeting of the PEP and sub-network steering committees.

In addition, two Training workshops of the Modelling and Policy Impact Assessment (MPIA) and Poverty Monitoring and Measurement Analysis (PMMA) sub-networks will b held in the wing of this Annual Meeting.

Apart from the major purpose of sharing experience among researchers and other participants, the PEP Meeting hopes to come up with new research proposals selected to be financed by the MPIA network, and identify areas of collaboration with ECA within the context of poverty reduction activities.