The Chairman called upon the Acting Executive Director of KIPPRA, Dr. Hezron Nyangito, to make welcoming remarks. Dr. Nyangito
formally welcomed participants to the workshop and gave some brief remarks about KIPPRA’s involvement with other research organizations
and its participation in SAGA projects. He then invited Prof. Christopher Barrett to give a brief of the SAGA project. The Permanent Secretary,
Ministry of Planning and National Development, Mr. David S. Nalo, then gave his speech as the Chief Guest.
Welcoming remarks: Dr. Hezron Nyangito, Acting Executive Director, KIPPRA
Dr. Nyangito started by thanking all participants for attending the workshop and thanked all the institutions collaborating on the SAGA
projects. These institutions include Cornell University, the Institute for Policy Analysis and Research IPAR, Kenya Institute for Public Policy
Research and Analysis KIPPRA, Tegemeo Institute Egerton University, and the University of Nairobi. He highlighted KIPPRA’s
involvement in poverty analysis since the inception of the Institute in June 1999, and underscored the importance of collaboration between
institutions, citing KIPPRA’s benefits from collaboration with the Central Bureau of Statistics CBS, IPAR, the African Economic Research
Consortium AERC, and Cornell University, among others. He noted that the Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Planning and National
Development, who was the chief guest, helped in poverty mapping while he was at the Central Bureau of Statistics, and which was done
together with KIPPRA. The Acting Director finally thanked the Permanent Secretary for attending the workshop.
II: INTRODUCTION AND OFFICIAL OPENING SESSION
Chair: Professor W. Oluoch-Kosura, Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Nairobi
SAGA Project brief: Prof. Chris Barrett, Cornell University
In his remarks, Prof Barrett gave a brief of the SAGA project. SAGA Strategies and Analyses for Growth and Access is a project of the
United States Agency for International Development USAID, created by its Africa Bureau with an intention of linking American researchers
with their counterparts in Africa, especially through the Secretariat for Institutional Support for Economic Research in Africa SISERA. It is
through SISERA that SAGA has established partners in African countries including Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Senegal, South Africa, and
Uganda.
The SAGA project involves four themes: Education; Health and Nutrition; Empowerment and Institutions; and Vulnerability and
Poverty Dynamics. SAGA organizes its presentations around these themes. Therefore, the purpose of this particular workshop was to share
with the participants on where the efforts of poverty analysis are: integrating qualitative and quantitative methods for data collection in
poverty research and analysis.
Speech by the Chief Guest, Mr. David S. Nalo, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Planning and National Development, Kenya
The Permanent Secretary started by thanking the workshop organizers for inviting him to address and officiate over the workshop. He
commended the re-union between institutions and researchers in sharing their works, saying that such a culture was good for the
continuity of knowledge as there had been decay in knowledge, and the integration of research work in policy making. He highlighted the
poverty and income inequality status in Kenya as revealed by different reports, including the Kenyan Human Development Report. The
Permanent Secretary noted that the poor have real needs that could not be easily captured using statistical surveys alone.
To understand the underlying causes of poverty and the impact of various growth strategies on the well-being of the poor requires that
there be integration of qualitative and quantitative methods in data collection and analysis. He observed that over the years, data collection
methodologies have been overemphasizing the use of quantitative techniques, which tended to leave out certain issues that need deeper
understanding than surveys can provide. Noting that there was no universally accepted definition of poverty, the Permanent Secretary
observed that some definitions used income, while others used basic needs approach. Mother Teresa, he noted, considered a person as poor
if that person is deprived of love from the community at large. This, he said, provides a dilemma for researchers and statisticians, and
wondered how such different dimensions could be quantified into meaningful categories.
In conclusion, the Permanent Secretary noted that researchers must come to terms with the fact that there is no single way of measuring
poverty. Therefore, both qualitative and quantitative approaches were theoretically and practically valid, while acknowledging that both
approaches had strengths and weaknesses. The challenge was, therefore, how to integrate the two approaches in data collection and analysis to
exploit their respective strengths. He identified a number of areas in which integration of the approaches could particularly be useful. These
include areas of governance and corruption, budget tracking, security, gender, intra-household relational aspects and coping mechanisms.
