Statistical Cultures: Population registration, modelling, and the making of welfare in Africa

Launch event organized by the “ModelFutures” ERC project

Contemporary African welfare systems deploy a wide range of interventions covering health, unemployment protection, pensions and disability insurance, family and childcare allowances, and programs relating to education or housing. From budgeting to targeting and welfare delivery, these measures increasingly rely on metrics, and in turn require population registers, computational models and devices, and not least expert labor of quantifying welfare (e.g. through means testing and social accounting matrices).

In this launch event of the ModelFutures ERC project, we look at the statistical and data practices that inform evidence-based welfare policy in Africa. The event is organized around three axes of statistical cultures shaping African welfare systems. Foregrounding Genealogies, we explore how legacy systems and conventions of enumeration are carried forth in contemporary statistical and welfare practices? Detailing Infrastructures, we discuss what models, apparatuses, and expert work turn data into policy? Finally, attuning to Lived Realities, we unpack how metrics assigned to beneficiaries shape their encounters with these emerging welfare systems?

For further enquiries about the event or accessibility requests please email ath@teol.ku.dk. 

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Programme