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I am the Director of the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research at the University of Ghana. The relationship between research and policy is still growing in Ghana. The government needs to have well informed policies, and this has been particularly the case over the last twenty years of reform. Government increasingly needs to support or at least appear to be supporting research, so there are institutions which seem on the surface to be independent think-tanks, but which also have links to government. Some of these are also supported by international agencies, like the ACBF or SISERA, both of which have supported the Centre for Policy Analysis in Ghana and the Institute of Economic Affairs. These are seen as independent bodies that are able to compete quite well with the university-based institutions in pure research. The links between researchers and policy-makers have become closer than ever before and this is very important for Ghana.

There have been a few times when, in response to requests by the World Bank mission or the IMF, the government has mobilised a team of economists from the universities or these think-tanks to meet for what they call the CG meetings. This was the first time I had seen policy-makers deal directly with researchers in Ghana, or respect researchers enough to bring them into the policy debate. Through an initiative which we pioneered, every two years in Ghana we have a National Economic Forum, which brings together policy-makers, researchers and other civil society members. These forums allow us to discuss in frank terms what we think the research agenda should be and the issues which we think government should be focusing on. In this sense, we have made some efforts ourselves as a community of researchers to influence policy. The government has not really shied away from that challenge.

Even though the government has been actively supporting research, it has not put in any money for research and this is a pity. If you look at the funding that investors get, it becomes very clear that government could do a lot more by financially supporting research. My own institute, which is university-based and is therefore publicly funded, receives very little to support research beyond our salaries. It would be good for government to support research financially and also to guide what sort of research is done.

Researchers could be more aggressive in marketing their research. One or two people may do this but in general we do not do enough to market our research and this is one area I would like to see addressed. Making people aware of what we do is one part of the equation, but the other is finding out what kind of research people want to be done in Ghana. It is important that we use every means possible to find out from policy-makers, from civil society and from donors what kind of research they think would be relevant.

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