Behind the research
Author: Yrla van de Ven
Conducting economic research often goes beyond the confines of an office and can be far more adventurous than one might expect, as demonstrated by VU alumni Kacana Sipangule and Menusch Khadjavi. The researchers, who are partners in life, spent a lot of time in Zambia getting to know the local setting in the rural areas and adjusting the research questions to fit the local needs.
The motivation for their research lies in the researchers' personal experiences. Sipangule grew up in Zambia and Khadjavi has visited the country nearly ten times. “I experienced first-hand the implications poverty can have on people’s’ livelihoods,” says Sipangule. “In rural Zambia, most people are dependent on rainfed agriculture, making it really difficult to break out of poverty traps. So we are really motivated to make a difference by trying to use the skills that we have, to understand how livelihoods can be improved.”
The researchers work closely with local partners. “As we planned the research questions, we were already actively engaged with stakeholders in Zambia,” says Sipangule. “This is not the kind of research that you only do within the university stuck in an ivory tower, it really involves engagement with the local community. We came up with a research question and then engaged with stakeholders from the onset, to make sure that the research questions really match the needs of the people that we're looking at.”
Khadjavi and Sipangule also find it important to share their results with the local community. “We have been working on a larger research project in Zambia for some years now, and when the first paper was published, in 2021, we shared the results with many stakeholders. We met with government officials, local researchers, the Farmers Union, non-governmental organizations and other stakeholders,” says Khadjavi.
“This is not the kind of research that you only do within the university, stuck in an ivory tower… It really involves engaging with the local community.”
Challenges on the road
There are several challenges that one can face when doing research in a different country, especially when the institutions and public services are different from similar institutions in the Netherlands. “Of course it helps that I am Zambian and already understand the culture,” says Sipangule. “But one of the challenges is that it is hard to find the right data. In the Netherlands, the statistics agency has a wide ranging data set that provides you with longitudinal information on individuals at a certain level. But in Zambia, the information is less fine grained. So prior to collecting data, we spent a lot of time in the Zambia Statistics agency to be able to understand the data collected from different regions,” says Sipangule. Khadjavi adds: “There are many remote villages in rural Zambia that are not on Google Maps and not easy to identify. We needed to talk to local government officials and look at their maps and information together, to randomly select the villages”
Another challenge is to win the trust of the local communities. “For some people it was their first time participating in research studies, so we needed to gain their trust before conducting the study. We first went to the Ministry of Local Government and Development to explain the goals of our research and get a letter of introduction, which we could present in the villages. In addition, we formed a research team with bachelor student graduates from Zambia, who spoke the local languages in the regions,” says Khadjavi. Sipangule: “We spent a lot of time trying to understand the local research conditions and requirements before conducting the research.”
The efforts were not in vain, because almost everyone in the selected villages participated in the surveys and experiments, which is important for the validity of the results.
“There are many villages in rural Zambia that are not on Google Maps and are not easy to identify.”
Nobel price
Experimental field research in lower income countries like Sipangule and Khadjavi are conducting used to be a novelty, but is becoming more common. Economists Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2019 for their randomized controlled trials, really put this kind of research on the map. “Still, there is much ground to be covered,” says Khadjavi. “The large majority of economic research is being conducted in North-America or Europe, while the African Continent, Latin America and Asia are underrepresented. Too often, researchers study human behavior in Western, high-income countries like the Netherlands and the United States and extrapolate these results to humans around the world, to explain human behavior. But cultural differences and norms that people have in other countries may influence behavior.”
Sipangule also sees that it is difficult for researchers from Zambian universities to get funding to study the questions that they find important. “Researchers are often dependent on international funding opportunities. This means that Zambian researchers compete with European researchers from better-funded universities, which is difficult. More often, Zambian researchers are hired as consultants for international organizations like the UN or as part of international research teams," says Sipangule.
This difficulty for local researchers to get international funding makes it all the more important for teams such as the one of Sipangule and Khadjavi to really include the local community and local researchers. Sipangule: “If you don’t adjust your questions to the local setting, you miss out on a lot. So I really recommend researchers in development economics to engage with stakeholders to make sure that the research questions are really relevant for the country in which you’re doing research.”
“Too often researchers study human behavior in Western, high-income countries like the Netherlands and the United States and extrapolate these results to humans around the world”
New platform with Zambian research participants
Khadjavi and Sipangule recently developed a research platform called Liseli Decision Lab (www.liseli.app) that runs on a smartphone application. It serves as a Zambian participant panel which makes it much easier for researchers to run online and field studies in Zambia in the future. It aims to raise more attention to the voices of non-Western study participants in social and economic behavioral research.
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