Onwybiko Agozino
Transcript of video interview
I work with the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) in Nigeria.
We also have an office in London and in Abuja in Nigeria. We are
a research-based non-governmental organisation with a strong interest
in advocacy and training for people in civil society to empower
them and help them to build their capacity and effectiveness as
members of a democracy.
If we identify interest in an issue we commission a research project
on that area. We also publish occasional papers, books and a journal
called Democracy and Development to which we invite guest editors
for special issues of the journal. On a national level, the link
between research and development is not strongly emphasised. Instead
there is a lot of consultancy. The reason for this is that a lot
of the government projects are supported by aid and the donors usually
bring a string tied to the aid that they would also bring in the
consultants who would work on the project. Perhaps this is for financial
accountability, I do not know. In that direction, it might be useful
to advocate to the Nigerian and other Third World governments the
setting aside of a budget each year to give grants to researchers
to develop policy ideas and to evaluate existing policies. Most
industrialised countries do that and have a budget for research
grants. The budget for all the universities in Nigeria is only around
$100,000, which is perhaps the equivalent of one research project
in Liverpool or London. It is obviously not enough. The link between
research and policy should be more heavily emphasised. Perhaps then
we would be overcoming some of our technological weaknesses.
We are trying to bridge this link in CDD and I believe that most
NGOs are doing the same. However we are an organisation involved
in advocacy. Not all the NGOs are engaged in pure research and most
of our research will be applied research, but even pure research
to develop theory and methodologies should also be encouraged. There
is not a lot of that going on.
If there were three things which researchers could do better to
influence policy, the first of these would be to train policy-makers
in research methodology. Sometimes they do not have a clue what
research is about and I believe that if policy-makers were trained
in research methods they would understand more about the importance
of research linkages with policy issues. Secondly, perhaps donor
conditionalities should include the commissioning or development
of local researchers as part of any project that is going to be
implemented. This would not be a huge percentage of the project
budget, but an amount should be set aside to promote research capabilities
in the receiving countries. Thirdly, those research results would
need to be brought out through publications and that would mean
not only funding but providing access to journals, internet access,
and putting the research reports online, or summarised in such form
that they could be debated more widely in the places where the research
was carried out.
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