Learning Days 18: EGAP West Africa Regional Hub Learning Days Workshop 2026

Adikath ABIOLA (PhD) is an agricultural economist, passionate about research for development and behavioral and experimental economics. She is working as Agricultural Professional Organization Officer at the Directorate of Rural Legislation, Support to Professional Organizations and Agricultural Entrepreneurship / Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries (DLROPEA/MAEP). She is also a Global Research and Consulting Centre (GR2C) consultant working on agricultural value chains, agri-entrepreneurship, and gender inclusion in agricultural projects. Her research interests are in risk management with a focus on reward-risk trade-off production systems, agricultural professional organizations and agricultural businesses.

Kevin (Vin) Arceneaux is Director of the CEVIPOF and Professor of Political Science. He studies how people form beliefs and attitudes about politics and, ultimately, make political decisions. His research focuses on how social psychological factors influence and shape people’s motives to consume (or not consume) particular forms of news media, defend (or fail to defend) particular beliefs and attitudes as well as behave in particular ways.

Arsene Brice Bado is Professor of Political Science and Research Director at CERAP, at the Universite Jesuite in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. He is the EGAP West Africa Regional Hub lead on activities related to democracy and conflict in West Africa as well as methods training for Francophone West African researchers. His research focuses on democracy, ethnic pluralism, electoral processes in conflict-torn societies, and foreign aid in Africa.

Vincent Bio Bediako is a PhD candidate in Demography at the Graduate Group in Demography, University of Pennsylvania, concurrently pursuing an MA in Statistics and Data Science, and is affiliated with the International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health, and Data Science. His dissertation investigates the causal effects of climate stressors on maternal and child health outcomes in Ghana, drawing on advanced methods including Bayesian spatiotemporal modeling, causal inference techniques, and the linkage of satellite-derived climate data with nationally representative demographic surveys. More broadly, Vincent’s research addresses health inequities and social determinants of population health across sub-Saharan Africa. Before entering academia, he accumulated seven years of professional experience with the Ghana Health Service and Ghana Statistical Service, grounding his scholarly work in a deep understanding of public health data systems and policy contexts in the region.

Alyssa Heinze is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development. Her research sits at the intersection of the political economy of development, gender and politics, and environmental and climate politics, with a regional focus on India.

Macartan Humphreys works on the political economy of development, with research on post-conflict recovery, ethnic politics, political authority, leadership, and democratic development, often employing field experiments in post-conflict and developing regions. He is the author or coauthor of books on ethnic politics, natural resource management, game theory and politics, and research design. He holds a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MPhil in economics from Oxford University, and a BA in history and political science from Trinity College Dublin. A former Trudeau Fellow, Harvard Academy Scholar, and Executive Director of the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) network, Macartan is Secretary of the European Political Science Society and an Associate Editor of the American Political Science Review. He directs the Institutions and Political Inequality group at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and holds honorary professorships in political science, economics, and social sciences at Humboldt University and Trinity College Dublin.

Yannick Brice Kouogueng Y. is a Senior Economist working for the Ministry of Economy and Planning. He has been serving in that institution since 2014 after he graduated in Economics in 2010 and then in Demography in 2014. He has been working especially on the elaboration and the evaluation of economic development policies. His major accomplishments involve a major contribution in the evaluation of the Growth and Employment Strategy of Cameroon in 2018 and a key role in the elaboration of the National Development Strategy for Cameroon in 2019 and 2020. Yannick’s daily tasks include the analysis of macro and microeconomic data in order to assess the gaps between the objectives and the achievements in different sectors (governance, infrastructure, industry, education, etc). Since his recent graduation in Master in Policy Economics at the Center for Development Economics at Williams College in Massachusetts in 2023, Yannick is an active member of the Laboratory of Econometrics and Applied Economics of the University of Yaounde II in Cameroon, in addition to his position at the Minister of Economy. He is involved in several research projects carried on by that laboratory. His role in these projects mainly focuses on the design of methodology and the estimation of econometric models. On top of that, his main responsibility in the lab is to pin down actionable economic policy recommendations from the results of research, and to improve the fitness of research issues to development policy needs.