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The African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) hosted a team from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) on Wednesday, 28 February 2024. Led by Ms. Erin Tansey, IDRC Director for Sustainable Inclusive Economies (SIE) who was visiting Nairobi from Ottawa, Canada. Ms. Tansey was visiting the AERC to familiarize herself with the organization and engage on future collaborations.

Prof. Dominique Njinkeu, Interim Executive Director, AERC in his remarks commended the visit, observing that the IDRC has been AERC’s partner since its inception. While expressing gratitude to the team for being part of this productive meeting, Prof. Njinkeu, underscored the fact that AERC has created a robust enabling environment for high-quality economic policy research in Africa by facilitating a coordinated policy response, interventions for communicating and disseminating evidence-based economic policy research across the continent.

“AERC has built a critical mass of economists in sub-Saharan Africa by broadening access, safeguarding quality, and ensuring sustainability of collaborative graduate training and we are now gearing for a transition to a renewed and stronger AERC to improve the quality of research and efficiency,” said Prof. Njinkeu.

Ms. Erin Tansey noted that just like AERC, IDRC has been enhancing its investment in knowledge translation and dissemination of research to move evidence into action so as to address development challenges. “We are pursuing a more systematic focus on sharing of knowledge between partners,” she added.

It is worth noting that IDRC has been supporting prorammes focussed on inclusive growth for decades. The goal is to support rigorous and policy-oriented research that generates new insights and options for promoting policies that facilitate inclusive growth. Their collaborations with researchers, policymakers, and international development practitioners have tremendously helped to foster leading thinkers with well-informed views. This is because their diverse insights and opinions represent their commitment to advancing knowledge and using rigorous research to find sustainable solutions to international development challenges.

One important issue that came up in the meeting is a proposal on Greening Financial Inclusion (GFI) for sustainable development in Africa. AERC observed that this would bring the two strands of environmental sustainability and access to financial services together. The whole concept involves extending financial services to underserved populations with the aim of promoting environmental stewardship and supports the transition to a green economy. To note is that GFI helps to develop climate resilience, mitigation, and adaptation to the effects of Climate Change (CC).

The two organizations had very productive dialogues and committed to further consolidate and expand their collaboration in the envisaged renewed AERC.