As part of Africare’s Benin Indigenous Non-Governmental Organizations Strengthening (BINGOS) project, the Joint Center helped selected Beninese research NGOs improve their capacity to conduct policy research. The two organizations were the Centre Africa Obota (CAO) and Groupe de Recherche et d’Action pour la Promotion de l’Agriculture et du Developpment (GRAPAD ), Over a two-and-a-half year period, the Joint Center provided skills training in the areas of finance and administration; use of computers and statistics in policy research, polling techniques, and data analysis.

Staff assisted in the completion of each group’s research project, which were focused on governmental change and reform. The CAO study was on the role of grass-roots non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the decentralization process and GRAPAD conducted a study of voter turn-out for Benin’s 1996 presidential election. The GRAPAD study consisted of two-parts: 1) an analysis of the first day of voting and 2) an analysis of the election results compared against official census data collected in 1992. The first part of the study was presented at a 1997 conference in Benin and has been translated into English.

Publication

Research Report, Observation Mission on the First Round of Presidential Elections Held in Benin on March 3, 1996, joint with GRAPAD.