The following guidelines provide some simple advice on writing a proposal.

Choosing A Research Topic

You should have an interesting research question that is within economics and addresses an important African policy issue.

Sketching the Proposal

There are requirements as to what the proposal should contain. These include:

  1. The policy context of the proposed research.
  2. Research Issue. A detailed statement of the issue to be researched, including reference to other work and perceived gaps in knowledge
  3. Objective(s). A brief statement of the specific objectives of the research.
  4. A statement detailing how the research objectives are to be achieved, i.e., hypotheses, methods, data collection, data analysis, etc.
  5. Anticipated results and how they might contribute to knowledge, future research and especially public policy.
  6. Expected output from the project, e.g., paper(s), article(s) and other forms of dissemination to interested researchers and policy makers.
  7. Estimated expenditure by major line item, e.g., research assistants, travel, computer time, etc.
  8. Timetable and duration. The length and time needed for each portion of the project and an estimated completion date.
  9. The proposal should also identify a “team leader” who acts as the “reporting centre” for the team, and the individual or institutional recipient of the grant.

 

Pro Tip: You should first work on a sketch. This involves writing brief notes indicating what you intend to say under each of the headings and how much space you want allocated to each section of the proposal.

The sketch provides you with a skeleton, and writing the proposal then amounts to putting flesh on this skeleton. Working on the skeleton first will greatly improve the structure and coherence of your paper. Once you start writing you will know at each stage what points you need to make and how they relate to what will be discussed in other sections of the proposal. If you use this method you will be in good company as many experienced researchers use it, for both writing research proposals and drafting articles.

Writing the Proposal

In every proposal, your format must present all the essential information in an order that makes sense.  Consider this flow:

  1. Title Page
    This will list the title, date, your name(s) and contact details (postal address, e-mail address, phone). Try to choose a short, catchy, informative title. It is also a good idea to include an Abstract in which you give a short summary of the proposal, say in about 100 to 115 words.
  2. Introduction
    This section includes a non-technical problem statement and a clear motivation for investigating the particular problem and indicating why it is important. You want to make sure that at the end of the section readers know that you are going to investigate determinants of private investment and that they understand why resolving this research issue is important for policy. Typically the length of this section is one or two pages.
  3. Research Issue
    In this section you set out the research question(s) in detail, sketch how you intend to address them and, most importantly, position yourself in the literature. This section would include what in many proposals is covered in separate sections under the headings of “Literature Review” and “Justification of the Study”.It is a good idea to formulate the research questions as testable hypotheses, something like “The main determinant of a firm’s private investment is access to formal bank credit”.You should make sure that the proposed work indeed offers value added and that you explain this in a convincing way
  4. Objectives
    This is a very short section – usually only a single paragraph in which you summarize the preceding two sections, indicating what questions will be answered and how policies might change as a result of these answers.
  5. Methodology
    In this section you describe your proposal in detail. When drafting this section you should keep in mind that this is the most important part of your proposal because you will be judged to a large extent on the basis of what you write here.From this section the readers should learn exactly what you intend to do and they should be able to see whether the proposed work will indeed answer the research questions.Often the proposed work will involve econometrics. In this case you should begin by presenting your model, indicating its position in the literature, discussing the various assumptions and showing how the estimating equation is derived from the model (make sure at this stage that you define all the symbols.) This means that you need to think carefully about specification issues and you have to be quite precise at this stage.You should then discuss your estimation strategy, indicating how you intend to deal with various econometric concerns such as endogeneity or measurement error and justifying your chosen method. Finally, you should indicate how you will test your hypotheses (“under this hypothesis the sum of these three coefficients has to be positive”).For non-econometric work basically the same guidelines apply. Indicate clearly what you are going to do, how it is linked to theory and how your methodology will lead to answers to the research questions. If the last step is omitted, it would be known what you intend to do, but how you would use the results to answer the original questions would not be apparent. The methodology section will cover at least five pages.
  6. Data Sources
    If you are going to do a survey, you should include a draft questionnaire. This is an important requirement. Survey-based research obviously depends very much on the quality of the survey instrument and your proposal will be judged in part by people asking whether the survey will generate data suitable for testing your hypotheses.In addition you should discuss the sample (sample size, sample frame, stratification, etc.) and the organization of the survey (enumerators, data entry, logistics).If you use existing data then you should discuss their availability carefully. For example, time series econometrics may quickly run into degrees of freedom constraints. You, therefore, need to establish that data series of sufficient length exist. You should be very specific here. Proposals with vague statements to the effect that (unspecified) secondary data will be used and that these are available at the Bureau of Statistics or at a World Bank website are not acceptable. You should be precise in your description of the data and establish whether they are indeed available. You should also reflect on their quality by, for example, posing questions like, are these data to be trusted?
  7. Results and Dissemination
    This could be a single section. Here you should indicate how you want to disseminate the results, for example, are you planning to write a journal article? Will you present the results to policy makers? If yes, in what form? The section should also indicate what impact you expect the research results to have. Avoid grandiose claims (“the study . . . will be of immense benefit to the . . .authorities as well as their staff”) and try to be specific.
  8. References
    These should include all the publications you refer to in the text. Do spend some time reviewing the references to ensure that they are complete and accurate – names of all the authors, correct date, full and accurate title, complete publishing information (city of publication, publishing company for books, full journal title, volume and number and pages for journal articles).
  9. Budget
    This should list the amounts required for major line items, such as travel, research assistance, photocopying or the honorarium of the principal researcher.  You should include explanatory notes justifying major items. Do not forget that the cost of literature acquisition such as a subscription to the Journal of African Economies is a legitimate budget item.
  10. Work Program
    Here you should indicate when the various components of the project (e.g., literature review, training of enumerators, pilot survey, survey, data cleaning and preliminary analysis, and econometric analysis) would be completed. This should make clear how far you expect to be after six months (e.g., at the work in progress stage if your proposal is approved) and when the project will be completed.

 

What Happens Next

  • It is a good idea to give your proposal to some researchers who are experts in the field and ask for their comments.
  • You should also give the draft proposal to some colleagues with AERC experience who can tell you what is likely to be acceptable or not. You should, therefore, revise your proposal more than once before submitting it.
  • When a proposal arrives at the Secretariat there is a brief internal review first.
  • When a proposal arrives at the Secretariat there is a brief internal review first. The Secretariat will check whether the proposal contains the basic information needed and whether it addresses an issue that fits the AERC research programme.
  • The next step is to determine whether the proposal can be presented at an AERC workshop.

A large number of proposals are held back at this stage, especially when the researchers make one or more of the following common mistakes:

  • They have never looked at an AERC proposal so they have no clue as to what to include and what not to include.
  • The proposal is clear on the research question, but very vague on the methodology.
  • Similar work has already been done and the author is unaware of it or unable to explain the value added of the proposed research.

The Secretariat may then ask you to withdraw the proposal or to revise it before you are invited to a workshop. In the case of revision the proposal may be sent out once more for review, but this is rare.

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