The fourth training event on UGAMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for Uganda, will be organized as a five-day research retreat, intended to empower participants to use UGAMOD to answer their own policy questions.
The retreat is composed of two parts: a refresher on the use of the model (1.5 days) and a retreat portion (3.5 days), where participants break out in groups, use UGAMOD to address their own policy questions, and examine and interpret the results. This year, the idea is to bring on several participants from the 2022 retreat to continue and expand the research that they initiated last year.
The 2023 UGAMOD retreat will welcome up to 8 participants from organizations such as the Ugandan Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS), the Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC), and the Southern and Eastern Africa Trade Information and Negotiations Institute (SEATINI-Uganda).
The retreat will be organized at the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) in Kampala, Uganda and delivered by the UGAMOD national team at URA, Dr Michael Noble from Southern African Social Policy Research Insights (SASPRI), and UNU-WIDER Research Associate Jesse Lastunen. A key feature of the retreat is that the national team takes the lead in organizing and delivering the retreat.
The retreat is geared towards writing SOUTHMOD Policy notes and other outputs that are expected to be developed further after the retreat, and eventually disseminated to policymakers and other interested audiences. In addition to informing local policymakers at large, the policy notes serve to answer questions that are critical for the work of the participants themselves.
Similar to the first UGAMOD retreat in 2022, the event will serve as a forum to help build a community of UGAMOD users in Uganda, generate ownership of the model beyond the national team at URA, and expand the model user base and expertise at relevant local institutions, including those that administer the policies modelled in UGAMOD.
About the project
This initiative is part of UNU-WIDER's SOUTHMOD – simulating tax and benefit policies for development project. SOUTHMOD is part of UNU-WIDER's research and capacity development programme on domestic revenue mobilization (DRM), funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Co-operation (Norad).