Working with the Partnership to Engage, Reform and Learn team, Gareth Williams, TPP Director, has co-authored this case study that analyses improvements to primary education in Kaduna State, focusing on the 2009– 2020 period before the COVID-19 school closures. It considers the broad trajectory of education reforms in Kaduna State, and the specific contribution of the Partnership to Engage, Reform and Learn (PERL) and other UK governance and education programmes. The study finds evidence of important improvements to service delivery, including large increases in primary school enrolment and completion rates, particularly for girls.

Since 2011, UK funded governance programmes have supported reforms to budget processes in Yobe State in North-East Nigeria. Gareth Williams, TPP Director, has co-authored this case study that assesses the contribution and impact of this support. It provides evidence on what reforms to budget processes took place, and how they occurred through a combination of political processes taking place in the state and support from UK programmes. The experience provides lessons on what has worked, what hasn’t and why. The analysis finds evidence of important improvements in budget processes in Yobe, which have taken place in a challenging context of protracted conflict and insecurity.

Since 2019, LEAP, led by ODI, has undertaken research on Partnership to Engage, Research and Learn (PERL) and predecessor UK Government-funded programmes to strengthen the evidence base for governance reform in Nigeria. As part of end of programme activities, ODI in association with TPP are organising a series of public events to share lessons from 20 years of UK governance programmes in Nigeria including a webinar series detailed below;

• 5th October - How does governance reform happen? Lessons from Nigeria
• 12th October - Working politically in practice: lessons from Nigeria
• 19th October - Does better governance lead to improved health and education? Lessons from Nigeria

To register for the webinars please visit the event pages .

For decades the development community has recognized the problem of poor energy governance, but approaches to improving it have been primarily technocratic. Recent work shows the importance of understanding the political economy of the energy sector when designing interventions and adapting our approach to managing energy sector projects. To tackle the climate crisis and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, we need new approaches for improving access to modern, affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy.

In tandem with the release of a white paper and technical brief on this topic, we undertook a webinar on 24th June where leading practitioners explored hurdles to energy reform and put forward a new approach to the design and management of energy sector reform programs.

In Lebanon, the current crisis has exposed the fragility of Electricité de Zahlé (EDZ’s) model, which relies on both discounted power provided by Electricité de Lebanon (EDL) and subsidized diesel fuel imports to run EDZ’s own power plant, which are both now in short supply. In this policy brief, the team has estimated the savings from a medium-sized Solar PV plant of 63 MW in Zahle area, covering 20% of the demand currently supplied by diesel-based power generation. They also tackled the challenges facing the implementation of utility-scale renewables in Lebanon and what the Government should do to enable such investments in renewables and proceed forward.

On 4 February 2021, the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut (AUB), in collaboration with The Policy Practice (TPP) and the SOAS Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) consortium, hosted a webinar entitled ‘Models for tackling Lebanon’s electricity crisis’. 

This briefing paper summarises the views of the key speakers and discussants. It draws together the key threads of the discussion – identifying the commonalities and the points of disagreement – and provides some tentative suggestions about the way forward for the sector.

Last week, we hosted the live launch webinars for our two online Political Economy Analysis in Action courses. One course has been specifically tailored for UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office staff. The other is our Open PEA course with a diverse cohort of participants from civil society, the private sector, bilateral and multilateral agencies.

We have revised our course material to reflect the wider set of objectives and interests in foreign policy as well as development interventions and we’ve updated our online PEA library .

We look forward to interacting with our 140+ course participants over the next four months.

If you or your colleagues are interested in participating in this course or a tailored one in the future, please email training@thepolicypractice.com to join our waiting list, or visit our training page for further details.

We are pleased to share a new publication by the World Resources Institute, authored by Jesse Worker and Niki Palmer (a TPP associate). This new guide takes a political economy lens and applies it to the extremely challenging area of domestic climate change governance. Just out and soon to be trialled in India, it hopes to inspires greater attention to the local constraints and enablers of climate action. 

TPP Director, Neil McCulloch moderated a webinar on “Model for tackling Lebanon’s electricity crisis”.  The webinar featured a range of experts discussing alternative approaches which might be adopted to improve the Lebanon’s highly inefficient and unreliable electricity system.  This included evidence from TPP’s recent paper on “From dysfunctional to functional corruption: the politics of reform in Lebanon’s electricity sector”.  Over 180 people registered for the webinar which was livestreamed on Facebook and is available from the Youtube channel of the American University of Beirut here.