2013 Gaps in Research Grant

The African Growth and Development Policy (AGRODEP) Modeling Consortium is issuing its second annual call for competitive grant proposals to support research on emerging issues in Africa that have previously received little or no attention.   

The selected topic of this year’s GAPS IN RESEARCH grant is “Barriers to the expansion of agriculture and agroindustry in Africa”. 

The grant will support research that promises to fill the existing research gap by shedding light on at least one of the following key aspects of the topic, of course in an African context: impact evaluation of government policy in development of infrastructure for agriculture production, irrigation, and transportation; access to fertilizers; advisability of seed and fertilizer subsidies; case studies concerning rural and agricultural structural projects; impact of regional integration; value chain analysis for key agricultural commodities (moving up the value chain, diversifying exports, enhancing value addition, job creation and economic development).

From a methodological point of view, research projects may use impact evaluation methods as well as Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models and Partial Equilibrium models.   Concerning CGE modeling, the structure of the agricultural sector is a primary concern. It is important to have very disaggregated Social Accounting Matrixes (SAMs) in a bid to properly tackle the issues on the nexus between trade and agriculture, as well as its implications in terms of growth and poverty reduction.

The grants for gaps in research will give priority to the design of “out-of-the-box” economic modeling and research projects that extend beyond the traditional representation of an economy under perfect competition, perfect mobility of productive factors, etc. For example it could be interesting to design an “out-of-the-box” representation of the production process and of the transmission of policy impacts through rural economies like village-wide models (Taylor and Adelmann, 1996) or its extensions like disaggregated rural economy-wide models (Taylor, Dyer and Yunez-Naude, 2005) or appropriate representation of the mobility of productive factors like “dual-dual CGE models” (Thorbecke, 1993, 1994 and 1997; Stifel and Thorbecke, 2003).

AGRODEP also recommends the use of partial equilibrium models either commodity-specific or disaggregated at a HS6 level. The grants for gaps in research gives priority to the development of detailed databases in agriculture in order to make them available to the AGRODEP community.

AGRODEP encourages researchers or research centers to apply, especially if they have already been engaged in some capacity addressing the issue, but could use the funds to complement their efforts and produce high quality research on the topic.

GRANT AMOUNT:

AGRODEP anticipates awarding a total of US$50,000 per year to address gaps in research. The size of each proposal may range from US$10,000 to US$15,000 or more, depending on the quality and the potential for innovation that it exhibits. 

ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA:

All researchers or research organizations in and outside of Africa are invited to apply. AGRODEP members are also eligible to apply.

DEADLINES:

• All proposals must be submitted electronically to grants@agrodep.org by Friday, August 30, 2013.
• AGRODEP will notify the selected proposals by September 30, 2013.
• The duration of the project is expected to be from October 1, 2013 through September 20, 2014.

PROPOSAL GUIDELINES:

AGRODEP does not require the use of a particular proposal template, but proposals need to be a maximum of four (4) pages long and include at least these key elements of standard research proposals:

• Introduction
• Brief literature review, including any previous or ongoing research on the topic that you have or are currently conducting
• Methodology & Data
• Project Timetable
• Authors: who will be involved in the study and in what capacity
• Funding required from AGRODEP as well as any additional sources of funding
• References