ResearchPro Solutions

28/03/2024

That corruption survey says people pay an average of 6,000/- as a bribe to get KRA pin. Whom are they paying this bribe to? The cyber attendants? Isn’t this a matter of kubonyeza computer and you have a PIN generated in minutes? Quite an interesting survey.

23/02/2024

Meta removed 'polls' from Facebook. It has really messed up my work. These tech honchos should be polling users before they alter some of their offerings.

14/12/2023

A short reflection on CBC.

There are studies that are now showing that countries that have adopted skills-based curriculum are showing a decline in student performance (measured by PISA test scores). Such countries include Finland, Scotland, New Zealand, and Australia.

On the other hand, countries such as England and Estonia that have adopted knowledge-based curriculum are showing improvement in performance mathematics, reading and science.

Kenya has adopted a skills-based curriculum via the CBC. What does future hold for economies like Kenya that adopt such curriculum compared to those that go with the knowledge-based curriculum?

May the day break.

29/09/2023

We either had a bumper harvest thanks to the “subsidized production” hence don’t need to “import” yellow maize or we that subsidy failed thus we have to import. Both versions of the “truth” can’t be true. No.

05/09/2021

We, in collaboration with OneMinute Ltd ~ a Tanzanian-based research firm ~ are conducting an endline survey in Arusha region, Tanzania.

The project, Making Change Together, is funded by Cartier Foundation and the program is being implemented by Hand in Hand East Africa- Tanzania.

The program has a research component that seems to assess the impact of male engagement in women programming.

This research element is led by the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), a US-based think-tank.

In this photo, we are leading a four-day training for enumerators engaged in the survey on the ethics of conducting Human Subject Research (HSR).

11/04/2019

Delocalisation is good.

Assigning civil servants to environments to which they are most socially proximate may actually limit their ability to effectively serve the nation

13/12/2018

Does the bride price hurt women? According to this research, it doesn't. But listening to the methodology used in the study, we may need the full report to be sure. How "being hurt" is measured is a bit problematic.

Just because husbands that paid higher pride prices do not support domestic violence, we cannot assume that bride price then doesn't hurt women. This sounds like an impact study and, therefore, seems to suffer from the problem of counterfactual.

Contrary to common belief, the practice of bride price in DRC does not negatively affect women

13/12/2018

A study in Brazil shows that:

1. Tax revenues improve health and educational infrastructure as well as quality. Non-tax revenues do not have a significant effect on both education and infrastructure.

2. Tax revenues do not have a significant effect on corruption. Non-tax revenues have been shown, elsewhere, to lead to increased corruption.

Conclusion:

Aid meant to improve tax capacity of developing countries help the countries in improving their spending on health and education and leads to less corruption.

In other words, aid should be targeted at helping improve tax capacities of developing countries, not directly to development programs.

In developing countries, new sources of government revenue are often channelled into corrupt hands. Lucie Gadenne, Assistant Professor in the Economics Depar...

28/07/2017

AGGREGATE POLL SCORE FOR KENYA'S PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

There are several methods available for aggregating polls. One can use a simple average of polls to come up with an aggregate share of vote for each candidate or use other more complex methods to achieve the same goal. A simple average is, however, unreliable given the scarcity of data, sample size differences, differences in margins of errors, poll accuracy differences, and pollster biases. We, therefore, adopted a weighted approach employed by Kenneth Bunker and Stefan Bauchowitz in Chile.

The method takes account of each poll’s margin of error, the accuracy of the pollster, and the time at which the poll was fielded. As reported in Table 1, all the four pollsters report both the margins of error and the time the polls were conducted. However, to calculate the accuracy of the pollster, prior information on how accurate a pollster predicted a previous election is important.

We used the 2013 presidential election to come up with the accuracy scores. Among the four firms, only Infotrak and Ipsos conducted polls prior to the 2013 presidential election. The other two firms are, therefore dropped from the aggregation sample for lack of data.

Here are the results in the chart. The table shows how the aggregate score compares with the other pollsters.