The goal of the fellowship program was to build up a new generation of researchers working on PopPov topics. At times, this has been expressed specifically as building the field of economic demography, though not all fellows worked on topics at the intersection of economics and demography. A subgoal of the fellowship program was to increase research capacity in SSA. However, as noted in Section IV.A.1, the fellowship program has found it difficult to get good applications from people studying in SSA. In addition to problems with quality, many of the proposals received from SSA were on topics unrelated to program goals. Also, the reference let- ters for these applicants are not as useful as those for other applicants; they tended to focus on character rather than on the research. At first, the applications from SSA were reviewed sepa- rately, with the goal of funding some applications from each pool, but that stopped after two 20 It is important to keep in mind that we sent our survey only to people who successfully received funding. For legal rea- sons, the partners were not able to give us information about unsuccessful applicants, so we are not presenting their opinions about the proposal and review process.
years because of quality issues. IIE has tried to improve outreach through its office in Addis Ababa and by having a webinar and website on how to write an application. This did increase the number and quality of applications. Nonetheless, in 2010 and 2013, no doctoral students studying in SSA were selected for funding. Several senior-researcher key informants from SSA who have reviewed fellowship proposals reported feeling that PopPov needs to be more proac- tive in looking for good African students (and researchers), particularly economists.
Originally, there was a plan to provide formal mentoring for the fellows. Rachel Nugent (who was coordinator for PopPov in its early stages, while she was at PRB and CGD) said,
PRB planned that senior PopPov researchers would mentor the fellows through a simple match-making process based on common areas of research and willingness. It happened with about 2–3 of the fellows. It was something fellows always said they would like but, as with anything where there aren’t natural incentives, it didn’t happen easily. We offered senior researchers a small stipend to do it, I believe.
Some of the fellows naturally receive mentoring because they are at universities that have PopPov research grants and work on them, collaborating closely with the research-grant PIs. But many fellows are not at universities that have PopPov research grants.
At some of the earliest conferences, the Hewlett/PRB fellows met the day before the offi- cial conference began to share their research ideas with one another, and some senior research- ers attended and gave feedback as well. However, this session was discontinued when IIE took over the training component (and, in fact, the Hewlett/PRB fellows were not automatically invited to the annual conferences again until 2013). The Hewlett/PRB fellows with whom we spoke in key-informant interviews all found those sessions to be very worthwhile and were sorry to see that they are no longer held. Some survey respondents made similar comments. Those sessions appear to have accomplished the mentoring and feedback function without the complications of setting up formal mentoring pairings, but a big drawback of the approach was that such mentoring took place only once a year.
One former Hewlett/PRB fellow commented that it would have been useful to partici- pate in the PRB Policy Communication Fellows Program to learn more about how to com- municate with policymakers. Several IIE fellows who are also PRB Policy Communication Fellows also thought that this would be useful for other IIE fellows.21
As mentioned in Section IV.A.1, in our online survey and in our key-informant inter- views, the vast majority of respondents perceived the fellowship program as being a big contrib- utor to PopPov’s success, and several respondents to our survey had positive comments about it (“Fellowship program has been useful . . . it has attracted high quality researchers” [econo- mist PI]; “The stipend helped me to focus on research rather than be a [teaching assistant], which tangibly helped me by focusing more on my work” [economist fellow]; “Providing two solid years of full funding was extremely helpful. It let me set an ambitious research agenda and put all my efforts into making it succeed. It’s far more effective than small pots of fund- 21 One of these added,
I should put in the caveat that a two-week policy program seemed a bit of on over-kill to me. Many of the PRB fellows also felt the same way. I think compared to that, a couple of days or a week-long program may suit students lot better. Similarly, a Hewlett fellow was telling me that he saw the call for applications for the PRB fellowship, but he did not want to spend two weeks in DC right before the year he is looking for a job, and hence did not apply. Therefore, a shortened version may be appreciated more by everyone.
ing” [economist fellow]). However, several problems were also noted. One fellow commented in the survey, “I had additional funding to help with the collection of my qualitative data. It would have been very difficult to collect original data and support all of my expenses with the PopPov fellowship funding alone”), though another respondent explicitly said, “I believe fund- ing is sufficient.” Lack of focused research orientation was also mentioned (“It is not clear what outcomes are desired”). Some respondents also felt that they were not clear about the organiza- tion of their fellowship program and that this had negative impacts on their ability to form a cohesive research network of fellows (“I had a hard time finding a way to connect with the rest of my cohort”; “I feel like the group is not as cohesive as it could be”; “I am not exactly sure how PopPov, Hewlett and IIE even fit together and how they are related to the fellowship”). In general, it seems that, although IIE appears to be doing an efficient job administering the fellowship program, the program is no longer as tightly linked to the rest of PopPov as it was when the fellowship program was administered by PRB. There were also comments about the way fellows were selected:
The selection process is not clear and it also does not involve past fellows, who should be on the selection committee. The inclusion of African researchers should not be the goal as there are other fellowships directly targeting African researchers.
Along the same lines, one fellow commented, “While I understand the preference for African researchers, it might be more productive for PopPov to focus on researchers from low-income countries to have a more global perspective.”