African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research: Partnerships and Capacity Building for Economic Development

Seven of the world's 10 most unequal countries are located in Africa - this while the continent's population is bound to take a rapidly rising share of the world's population in the next 30 years. Understanding Africa's inequality dynamics is a key component of the international inequality puzzle.

The establishment of the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research (ACEIR) directly addresses the analytical, empirical and data needs that are required for policy interventions and civil society action the tide against inequality. ACEIR's current partner universities are located in western, eastern and southern Africa.

The Centre's launch research programme is aimed at improving the quality and accessibility of relevant data on inequalities in Africa. Equally as important, the ownership of local knowledge production on national and continental inequalities will underline the voice and agency vested in African scholars and research institutions.

ACEIR's goal is to contribute to deep, multidimensional and interdisciplinary understandings of inequality in each country context, and a continental and global understanding of how inequalities can be overcome. Our approach includes building capacity for frontier data scholarship and the interpretation of analyses for policy. Textured country-level analyses of inequality that are also anchored in historical legacies of the political economy of African development is in the process of being undertaken. ACEIR researchers will link processes related to inequality within each country to international measurements such as the Sustainable Development Goals. The initial research programme sees researchers working with the national statistical offices to:
- Use census, survey and administrative data to profile and map inequality and poverty;
- Analyse the dynamics of poverty and inequality by using panel data; and
- Use the evidence generated by a set of tax and social expenditure benefit incidence analyses as a platform for dialogue on strategies to overcome poverty and inequality.
Each of the Centre's nodes are members of the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA). ACEIR has its hub at the University of Cape Town (UCT), which also hosts the southern African node. The western and eastern nodes are hosted by the University of Ghana, Legon; and the University of Nairobi, respectively. The hub and each node are led by researchers of stature and who are well-established in the contemporary African and broader international inequality communities. This grant will facilitate connecting the Centre into these broad networks, including their own countries' statistical agencies. DataFirst, based at UCT, has over twenty years' experience in the curation and dissemination of data and is the only data service on the African continent to have achieved the CoreTrustSeal certification as a trusted repository. Over the last decade DataFirst has also developed a specific competence in the assessment of data quality issues and in the harmonisation of data. DataFirst will play a central role in the Centre's data preparation, harmonisation and training activities across the three nodes initially, with a longer term view to extending support to the Centre's other partners, including the current partnership with the University of Bouaké, Côte d'Ivoire, and partnerships in the process of being explored, with Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, and also Kenyatta University, Kenya.

The Centre's establishment is supported by an initial start-up grant from the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) as part of the Research Facility on Inequality funded by the European Union, as well as awards from ARUA and each partner university.

The inauguration of President Ramaphosa in February 2018 offered South Africa an opportunity to put the project of Nelson Mandela back on track. But this requires confronting, head-on, the lack of progress towards a more balanced distribution of opportunities and incomes and the difficult political and economic questions that this raises. Will the benefits of political change be limited to a narrow elite or is more broad-based equitable development possible? What kinds of social, economic or institutional change might contribute to more rapid transformation of opportunities for the bottom half of the household income distribution? What kinds of constraints on power and privilege might contribute to fairer outcomes at the top tail of the distribution?

These difficult practical and political questions are of interest both in South Africa and internationally, and they are of considerable complexity. It is not just that a continued widening of inequality is unacceptable morally, it seems likely also that it threatens growth, social order and sustainability. Inequality reduction is under the spotlight in many countries and much work has been done internationally and in South Africa in understanding inequality.

Inequality has many adverse effects on the texture and functioning of our societies. Thus, there is a very strong mandate to research - seriously - policies and broader strategies to overcome inequality. The Centre seeks to take up this challenge and position African researchers centre stage of the analysis of our inequalities and to build the quantity and quality of African researchers working in this area.

While poverty dynamics form a crucial part of the work of the Centre, there are dangers in focusing only on the poor in an unequal society. We will therefore locate our analysis of how poverty arises, is reproduced and can be overcome within a picture of the dynamics of the whole economy and society. It is important to understand why, at the same moment in a society, some citizens flourish and why others remain trapped in destitution. Our work will seek to make substantive contributions to understanding the livelihoods of the poor and bottom end, the middle classes and the top-end elites of each society, giving detailed attention to each and especially the relations between them.
The research programme includes a series of dialogues between the researchers and key stakeholders, including government representatives, business, organised labour and civil society - to seek advice, test ideas and contribute to consensus on possible policy reforms.