Watch 3 minute video clip on persuading policy-makers: WMV (1.5mb)

I'm Charles Lwanga Ntale. I work with Development Research and Training, which is a non-governmental organisation based in Kampala, working in the areas of research, policy analysis and capacity building. We collaborate with a number of other institutions, such as the Chronic Poverty Research Centre. We also collaborate with some projects within the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and with a wide range of other institutions both in and outside of Uganda. In the last five or so years, we have had quite a lot of involvement in the area of both policy research and policy engagement. This work was in part sparked by findings in the early 1990s that poverty was still a major problem in the country and also that policy, as it was being implemented at the time, was clearly not responding to the needs of the people. The challenge that emerged then was what needed to be done in terms of changing policy so that it was more responsive. The chronic poverty research came in quite handy at that time.

The experience that we had [persuading policy-makers about the importance of chronic poverty] was not an easy one. First, it was very difficult to get chronic poverty, as a concept and as an analytical framework, accepted in the mainstream of government. It was a new thing and very few people even knew what opportunities and options there were. Noone wanted to experiment with something that was completely new. Most people prefer to work with the things they know best. Convincing policy-makers was a challenge, even when we were able to produce what we thought was wide-ranging evidence that showed that a large number of people were affected by chronic poverty, and that these people were unlikely to benefit from mainstream development interventions. Thus, we spent the first three to four years trying to convince key policy-makers that something needed to be done and making very little progress.

The crunch came when we held a major workshop symposium that brought together policy-makers, researchers and activists. We asked the policy-makers what it was that would make them, as policy-makers, appreciate the important of the issues that we were talking about. It was at this point that a few key contacts in the Ministry of Finance who were close to the policy-making process raised three things, as I remember. The first was that you need to demonstrate to them the magnitude of the problem that you are talking about, and that if they do not deal with it, there would be a subsequent problem. The second was that you need to demonstrate to the policy-makers that it is politically expedient, because if it is not, they are not going to spend massive amounts of resources worrying about things that are not politically sensitive. Thirdly, you also need to demonstrate that it is doable, because if it is not doable then they could spend masses of time and resources doing something that is never going to make an impact. So we went back to the drawing board and we brought on board well known scholars and analysts on a wide range of things.

First of all, we wanted to have rigorous analysis of the numbers, so we got a very good economist who fully analysed all the data that was available. This demonstrated that over 7 million Ugandans out of a population of 26 million were chronically poor, and the numbers were likely to be rising. That immediately sent a message. We were also able to engage other analysts who demonstrated a number of challenges that the country was facing, such as social disillusionment, increasing crime, especially in urban areas, and a host of other vices that were in part due to this feeling of helplessness and hopelessness amongst a large section of the population. This showed that it was going to be politically expedient and it was something that needed to be addressed.

However, in the same breath, we were able to look at the policy implications and policy options. For example, we were able to demonstrate that social protection is one possible approach to addressing chronic poverty issues, but that it would also help to build and support the agenda of government that was already being developed and implemented. This meant that it was not a completely new thing, but neither was it going to be just another layer added onto what government was doing; it was going to be supportive of efforts that were already being undertaken. Indeed, we were able to demonstrate that some of the interventions, without thinking that much about it, were social protection-type interventions and that if they were better supported they could make a lot of difference. Take, for example, the introduction of universal primary education. It has brought a number of children into school, but still many kids were still not going to school because they were not able to afford either school feeding costs or uniform costs or the costs of basic text books, and so on.

The lessons we learnt here were several. The most important of them was that it is always important to talk to the policy-makers and the decision-makers in high-ranking offices and to know what their expectations are. If we had done this before we embarked on the process of research and analysis at the very outset, we would probably have spent less time than we did. We also learnt that it is very important to have connections and links. There are individuals within key government ministries, people who we know personally, who made it possible for us to understand how the policy-making process works and how certain things get accepted or rejected. These same people also knew what the opportune moments were to bring things on board. After going through this exercise or process, we were very pleasantly surprised that when the new poverty reduction plan (which is Uganda's PRSP) was being developed, we were asked to make a contribution in the form of a paper. At the time, we were preparing the chronic poverty report for Uganda. We shared a copy of the report as well as a brief summary of the key issues and options and then the next thing we saw was that chronic poverty had been written into Uganda's PRSP. It was recognised. The government wanted to do something about it. Some proposals were there. And that was followed very quickly by other policy documents recognising this and taking it on board, the most important of which is the social development sector plan. So this has been quite an experience.

Can you tell us something more about the first four years of research that did not really influence policy-makers and what you think, with hindsight, was not compelling enough about it?
There are two reasons. The first is that when we started, it was an almost purely academic approach. We convened a meeting that brought together researchers and a few policy-makers to identify the issues that we needed to understand better in the area of poverty, and we developed a research agenda. After developing the agenda, we went on with the usual approach, which is to develop the methodology and frameworks of analysis and then carry out the actual research, analysis, and writing, etc., and we produced a number of papers. To give you an example, in the first workshop where we developed ideas, it was clear that we needed to understand more about disability and poverty, we needed to know about mental health and poverty, old age and poverty, exclusion and poverty, remoteness and poverty, and so on. So we carried out studies in all these different areas, which brought back results that we then tried to use to persuade policy-makers.

I am not saying that that research was not useful - it was quite useful - but it was not sufficient. With hindsight, I would say that we still use the same rigour, but perhaps use a wider cross-section of respondents, and we communicate with more people. As you develop the research process (from conceptualisation of the problem, to analysis, right through to dissemination), it is important to bring on board these key decision-makers and get a feel of what they want and whether the research is helping to get to what they want answers on.

I think the other point is that it is important to recognise the right moment. The right moment struck when the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper was being revised and the government wanted new information. They were asking what was new in what they were preparing in this new PRSP. This was a time when various institutions and individuals were asking who had good evidence, who had well-analysed evidence, what sort of outcomes we were looking at and how the evidence could help us to deal with the issues that we needed to focus on. So that was a really good opportunity for us and we got money to get the idea across.

How did you get your evidence about social protection and how did you develop that policy solution?
Social protection is an area in which very little analysis had been undertaken. Although I mentioned some of the specific approaches already there, as an approach it had not been very much undertaken in Uganda. We brought in two people. We brought in a person who was very experienced in social protection approaches, cash and social transfers, both in design and implementation: Armando Barrientos from IDS, who had previously worked with the University of Manchester and was part of the chronic poverty research partnership. He was able to demonstrate the evidence to different government officials, individuals, research institutions and politicians - and these were all people that we selected purposively. We had these interactions over a period of just over a week. That made a very big difference because it meant that we were there with a cross-section of institutions, people and professionals in country, listening in to a well-known scholar and analyst in the area of social protection and hearing the message we were putting across, which was based on the research we had undertaken. The three connected very well together, which meant their decision was a lot easier.

In a way, that was what someone has called the boomerang effect. It did work well in this regard.

Was it because of Armando's role as an expert or because he was good at communicating?
It is not very straightforward to answer. I think it is a matter of lots of things working together and connecting: the role that Armando played, combined with the role of researchers in Uganda, the role of our champions in the government, and the role played by other institutions that have been supporting the chronic poverty research process in Uganda. In addition, of course, Uganda's development partners played a role - many of whom are also still struggling with what kind of approach they need to adopt to get Ugandan people to break out of this long term persistent poverty. So it is a combination of things and each factor was important in its own right. I will not say it was just one or the other.

Did you have difficulties persuading civil society groups to adopt the concepts and how did you go about persuading them?
I must say that we are in a privileged position as an organisation. My own history or background in this work is rooted in the civil society sector but, prior to coming to civil society, I worked for six or seven years in government, so I know a bit about how government works. I also had lots of allies and associates in the civil society movement. Prior to chronic poverty research work, we were involved in the design and implementation of the participatory poverty assessment project, which turned around a number of people's thinking about poverty and how to deal with it. However, there were still questions about how we should move to the next stage. The involvement that we had with the previous processes also brought in a lot of capital.

Other civil society organisations were always very keen to find information that was credible and that they could take and use to advocate for particular positions, and they found the research work that we had commissioned and carried out extremely useful. They kept coming back to us to for copies of the report and we had to reprint reports because of the demand that was created. So civil society organisations were very excited about the idea, they wanted and are still demanding more information because they want to engage.

I guess one of the challenges in the country today is that on the one hand, we have academic research, which sometimes seems to be rigid and so on, and on the other hand, we are beginning to see emerging research from institutions aligned to civil society. These institutions are better placed to be able to understand the culture, the issues and the challenges in the community context and therefore, when the research is carried out, it will be closer to what they want to hear, which makes it easier.

How do you balance rigorous research with people's voices and participatory approaches?
It is always a very difficult balance but it is an essential balance. There are people who only understand numbers, or who are only impressed by numbers, but I would say that a lot more people are interested in stories and understanding the narratives behind those numbers. I remember when we launched the chronic poverty report, we got inundated with requests from media houses to go and give presentations on FM radio stations. I made a few presentations and we had people calling in and I was responding to questions. People kept saying, "we have tried all these things for all these years, why is that we still cannot get people out of poverty?" Those kinds of questions kept coming and so you got a feeling that people out there really wanted to know what was behind those numbers but, more importantly, I think that we were able to show that behind the numbers there is a lot more sophisticated analysis. It is not enough to state the magnitude of the problem. It is important to note the magnitude, but noting the complexity that is contained in that magnitude is even more convincing. We did actually did find it extremely difficult, but in the end once we had the numbers and we also had the stories, putting the two together was a lot easier.

However, the challenge we have continued to face is that of keeping the academic community (or as I would call it the hardcore research community) interested and continuously interested in this. The tendency is for researchers to want to define a problem, find a framework for analysis, do the research and then to write up and publish it, and that is it. That is not bad, but that should only be part of the story. Let's get a wider story and let's involve more people, let's put it in context and let's see how it can be helpful in responding to the wider problem.

How do you think that incentive structure can be changed so that they will be more motivated?
We need to do a lot more communication. If you ask me what else I would do to make this work faster, I would have a much more aggressive communication strategy - aggressive in the sense that it would aim to reach out more to those people who are often ignored, or are assumed not to be interested. I also think that it is a fallacy that researchers are always in the know. There is a tendency to feel and believe that because he or she is a researcher, they are on the other side of the story. Often, they too are struggling with things and we need to understand what those things are and reach out. Reaching out with a good communication strategy to a cross-section of people should enable us to bridge that gap.

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