Decolonizing Development Economics: The STAARS Experience
By Kibrom A. Abay (International Food Policy Research Institute), Khadijat B. Amolegbe (University of Ilorin), Christopher B. Barrett (Cornell University), Kelsey L. Schreiber (Cornell University), and Joanna B. Upton (Cornell University)
Development economics – the subdiscipline that explores processes of economic transformation and stagnation in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) – is, like most academic fields, dominated by scholars from high-income countries (HICs). Several luminaries from the Global South notwithstanding – e.g., Nobel Laureates W. Arthur Lewis, Amartya Sen, Abhijit Banerjee – the vast majority of the published scholarship, especially in leading journals, originates from elite global universities in HICs. Much of that research is assisted by collaborators based at LMIC institutions, but the organization of research generally follows the global hierarchy; scholars at privileged institutions define the research agenda and design, exercise intellectual leadership, and accrue most of the associated rewards from those collaborations. Most development economists have engaged in such projects, some of which generate important findings with demonstrably favorable impacts for LMIC communities. But there remains an undeniable colonial tinge to this mode of doing development economics research.
The Structural Transformation of African Agriculture and Rural Spaces (STAARS) program was created to flip the script. STAARS competitively selects early career African researchers who design and propose their own scholarly projects, then matches them with senior scholar mentors from Cornell University and other elite global institutions who can support the African Fellow and their intellectual agenda, rather than the other way around. Because African scholars, especially those trained in and working on the continent, face serious structural disadvantages, STAARS also actively works to fill gaps in prior training and to leverage the considerable resources Cornell-based scholars enjoy. These trainings focus just as much (if not more) on often untaught curriculum that is learned peer-to-peer rather than through typical classroom instruction, textbooks, or journal articles. In this vein, STAARS also appoints a peer mentor – typically a Cornell post-doc or advanced Ph.D. student – who can provide more hands-on assistance with technical details, such as data management, visualization, and advice for navigating the academic environment. The STAARS team adapted the trainings and support over time, learning from Fellows in the initial cohorts what gaps in their prior training needed more structured attention and what components of the STAARS program they found most (and least) valuable.
Now in its seventh year, growing evidence supports the idea that the STAARS model works. When compared with otherwise-identical STAARS applicants for whom the program management could not find a suitable mentor, the data suggest that STAARS Fellows engage in more research collaborations and have stronger publication records post-STAARS. 1 (footnote) But perhaps the greatest gains are less easy to capture in narrow bibliometric measures, arising from the empowerment of talented early career scholars otherwise constrained by the structural deprivations of higher education in Africa. In the next two sections, the two lead authors of this essay, Khadijat Amolegbe (STAARS 2018) and Kibrom Abay (STAARS 2016), reflect on these impacts through their own stories. These are of course just two Fellows’ experiences. Their stories, however, offer a window into what is possible if we put the privileges enjoyed by those of us at elite HIC institutions to use in support of the scholarly agendas of those who have comparable talent and ambition but are saddled with great structural disadvantages.
Upton and Amolegbe during a Cornell visit for the STAARS program.
One Woman’s Experience
It is often said that to be born in Africa is to start out one step behind your peers in other parts of the world. To pursue higher education in Africa can then be a trap, leaving one structurally unable to compete effectively with holders of similar foreign degrees. This situation resonates deeply with many early-career African scholars, who face systemic failures and entrenched bureaucracy throughout their academic careers. These challenges are compounded for African women, who face additional gendered discrimination and family pressures that often make them more likely to be trapped in these weaker institutions while their male peers leave to seek their degrees abroad.
Khadijat felt this disadvantage, and its impact on her potential, acutely through her experience pursuing an academic career in Nigeria. She graduated among the top 1% of her class in an upper-tier undergraduate program and then landed an opportunity to intern at the Central Bank of Nigeria. There, she met and interacted with experts and consultants with degrees from top universities around the world. Through those interactions she garnered skills and knowledge that set her buzzing with ideas she expected would flourish with a graduate degree.
Throughout her M.S. and Ph.D. training in Nigeria, however, she felt that her ideas stagnated, in large part due to a lack of access to basic academic resources such as textbooks, journals, and software. The same constraints also contributed to a lack of strong mentorship and collaboration; her instructors unsurprisingly could not inspire and lead her in developing research ideas, given their own inability to access new teaching methods and materials. The bulk of her education was effectively self-taught. She identified various online resources, such as lecture materials and seminars, that some top global universities share publicly. She used these to build an impressive toolkit in applied econometrics. But she also lacked close interaction with experts and classmates to ask questions, clarify thoughts, or test out new ideas.
The STAARS fellowship program struck her as an opportunity to “learn by doing.” The fact that most of the collaboration was remote – with just a brief visit to Cornell – also made full participation possible, even while she raised a family in Nigeria. Remote access to library materials and other resources (such as software packages) was revolutionary for her, as was the opportunity to share and develop ideas with like-minded and interested scholars. She readily absorbed the skills and advice of her (all-women) mentor team, whose greater technical skills and ability to support her originated from the profound difference in the opportunities and peer groups that they had experienced in their North American education. She flourished with the opportunity to just reach out, whether for a bit of Stata code or advice on a potential collaboration opportunity. She led in the development and publication of a research article that was published in a top peer-reviewed field journal and has already garnered many citations.
While she has continued to engage with her STAARS network and has forged many opportunities for herself, she continues to struggle within the structural limitations of academia in Nigeria, which renders it near-impossible to continue to grow as a scholar and to provide her students with more opportunities than she had herself.
Accessing One’s Chosen Research Path
Many African scholars wish to break from the constraints of African academic institutions by pursuing higher degrees in Europe or North America. Family-related customs limit this path to predominantly men, however. And with the supply of scholarships falling far short of demand, even those who succeed in securing a fellowship to study in Europe or North America often face significant limitations in where and what they study. Few are fortunate enough to work with supervising faculty who are experts in their chosen subfields. So the escape from the constraints imposed by African universities is often incomplete, as scholars talented and lucky enough to win a coveted foreign doctoral fellowship are unable to pursue their scholarly passions.
Kibrom’s story exemplifies this experience. After graduating at the top of his undergraduate class from Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia, he secured a Danish Government Graduate Student Scholarship to pursue an MSc in economics at the University of Copenhagen. While he wanted to return to Africa to acquire field research experience after completing his MSc before pursuing a Ph.D., there was no assurance that he would be able to return to Denmark to continue his studies. He could, however, continue straight into the Ph.D. on funding faculty had already secured. So Kibrom set aside his longer-term career ambition to research and contribute to Africa’s rural and agricultural development challenges and instead undertook a funded dissertation project focused on transportation and discrete choice modeling, with an application to road safety in Denmark. Although he was grateful for the training and mentorship received at Copenhagen, Kibrom still hoped to shift to work on issues relevant to African rural development and to pursue a career in development and agricultural economics.
Thankfully, Kibrom found and was accepted into the STAARS program. As the STAARS program allows Fellows to engage in a broad range of topics relevant to African rural transformation, Kibrom developed his own project that fit his career research ambitions. The STAARS program provided supplementary training to rectify mismatches between the research skills he developed in a different subfield and those he needed to pursue his research passions. The wealth of African rural development research areas covered by STAARS Fellows and mentors gave him the development economics collaborator network missing from his graduate training and the chance to work with and learn from leading researchers in his chosen subfield.
The opportunity to study in Denmark had liberated Kibrom from some of the local university constraints he would have faced had he remained in Ethiopia (as Khadijat did in Nigeria). But STAARS gave him access to the research path he had always hoped to pursue. The networks and publication opportunities made available through STAARS facilitated him publishing several papers in leading development and agricultural economics journals, including an award-winning paper, which in turn helped him pursue his chosen career path and return to Africa, both physically and topically. Long after completing his STAARS fellowship, Kibrom has continued collaborating with those he met through the program. Indeed, he has routinely been the intellectual lead and lead author on those projects. In time, Kibrom made the transition from being a STAARS mentee to a mentor, supporting projects defined and led by subsequent groups of STAARS Fellows and upholding his commitment to support other young African researchers who face such familiar challenges. The STAARS program ultimately aims to scale-up and replicate such mentee-to-mentor transitions.
A Small Step Toward Decolonizing Development Economics
As the oft-repeated adage holds, talent is universal but opportunity is not. The limited opportunities confronting Africa’s most promising young scholars go beyond finding funding to continue their studies or even the ability to study at elite universities abroad, although this serious problem indeed needs increased attention and funding. The limited opportunities equally concern young scholars’ opportunity to focus on their preferred subfield(s) of study and to set the intellectual agenda for their research. This matters in research domains, like development economics, in which a rich understanding of context and a deep, personal commitment to finding robust answers and identifying durable solutions are crucial to both rigor and relevance. The field suffers when too few scholars from the Global South define and lead the research agenda. The missed opportunity is not just for the young scholar, but for the whole field.
The two cases we highlight – and those of the other 76 STAARS Fellows to date – do not begin to change the state of African higher education nor the nature of development economics research in or focused on Africa. But they are a step in the right direction, toward shifting the leadership paradigm in a scholarly domain that should fundamentally be led from LMICs not HICs. Research capacity remains low in most LMICs. We need more and larger programs like STAARS that not only build research capacity in early career scholars, but that encourage them to set the intellectual agenda, and improve the matching of talents and opportunities. Elite HIC universities can facilitate this at quite low cost; the average total cost per STAARS Fellow has been less than US$15,000, much of it for travel to bring Fellows and mentors together for a few weeks. The most valuable asset elite universities can contribute is a network of experienced mentors committed to supporting early career scholars’ emergence as intellectual leads. African researchers face multiple layers of structural and institutional challenges that reinforce each other, but programs such as STAARS can help address some of these challenges, offering a small step towards decolonizing development economics.
1 Quantitative findings are naturally limited due to a small sample size and non-random selection into STAARS. For more detail on this evidence, along with additional background on the STAARS program, see Schreiber et al. (2022).
**********************************************************************
Kibrom A. Abay is a Senior Research Fellow in the Development Strategy and Governance Unit at IFPRI, based in Washington, DC. Immediately before moving to Washington, DC, Kibrom was the Country Program Leader for IFPRI's office in Egypt. He is a development and agricultural economist with research interests covering rural development, agricultural transformation, urbanization, food and nutrition security, and behavioral economics. Most of his research involves impact evaluation methods. Some of his recent studies examine the behavioral and inferential implications of mismeasurement in household surveys. Much of his current research focuses on Africa South of the Sahara and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Before joining IFPRI in 2019, he has worked as Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). Kibrom received his PhD in Economics from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Khadijat Busola Amolegbe is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Ilorin, Nigeria. Her research interest is at the intersection of agriculture and development economics, covering topics on food security, poverty, women empowerment, climate change and digital economy. She was a visiting researcher at Cornell University, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and the Nordic Africa Institute (NAI). Khadijat has also worked as a consultant to Mathematica and the University of Georgia. She is currently running a field experiment to explore the nexus between digital literacy, output market access and demand for rural e-commerce. Khadijat received her PhD in Agricultural Economics from the University of Ilorin, Nigeria.
Chris Barrett is an agricultural and development economist, the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and an International Professor of Agriculture at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, as well as a Professor in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University. He is an elected Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, and the African Association of Agricultural Economists. His work is motivated by social justice concerns rooted in his religious beliefs. A straight white man born to middle class parents in the US, he has always enjoyed unearned benefits denied others who are equally or more deserving and seeks to address that structural inequity using the considerable privileges afforded a tenured professor at an Ivy League university.
Kelsey Schreiber is a Research Support Specialist in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell. While pursuing degrees in Systems Engineering (B.S.) and Agricultural Engineering (M.S), she was drawn to issues of food and water injustices in the developing world and has since worked in various positions, both professionally and personally, to combat these inequities. In her current role, she runs the Structural Transformation in African (and Asian) Agriculture and Rural Spaces (STAARS/STAAARS+) programs and manages research on both international and domestic food and water security issues.
Joanna Upton focuses with her research and outreach on food security, food policy, and resilience in sub-Saharan Africa, and has a passion in particular for working on questions with concrete, policy-relevant applications. She is currently research faculty in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. She feels honored to work closely with a wide range of collaborators, including academics from diverse disciplines and institutions around the world, CGIAR institutions, UN organizations, government agencies, think tanks, and non-profit organizations implementing programs in developing countries. Joanna also thrives on working with students and mentees, both in the classroom and in the field. A happy resident of Ithaca (by way of the California Sierras, Boston, and Niger), when not working Joanna enjoys time in nature, engaging in water sports, growing and cooking food, and spending quality time with friends and family around the world.
Institutional Context: Cornell University was created "to do the greatest good," as a place "where any person can find instruction in any study." Founded on egalitarian ideals, to serve both women and men of all races and all socioeconomic classes, Cornell was designed to be inclusive in a way that other mid-19th century American universities were not.
Snapshot Institutional Profile (for comparative purposes as part of the broader project described below, via National Center for Education Statistics IPEDS):
**********************************************************************
This entry is part of a Public Writing Project, Higher Education for the World We Need, co-edited by Eric Hartman, Shorna Allred, Jackline Oluoch-Aridi, Marisol Morales, and Ariana Huberman. Initial reflections in that writing project will be posted here, on the blog of the Community-based Global Learning Collaborative (The Collaborative). The Collaborative is a multi-institutional community of practice, network, and movement hosted in the Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship. The Collaborative advances ethical, critical, aspirationally decolonial community-based learning and research for more just, inclusive, sustainable communities.
Save the date for, “Stepping into the Work: Expanding understanding of global positionality, responsibility, and opportunity,” a Collaborative gathering in partnership with the Global Engagement in the Liberal Arts Consortium at Haverford College, immediately outside of Philadelphia, November 10 and 11, 2023.