Modelling African Futures: A comparative technography of evidence-based welfare policy in Ghana, Senegal, Kenya and Botswana

ongoing

Welfare systems rely on extensive knowledge about the population to plan, finance, and expend limited resources in a targeted manner. In view of their often-fragmented national identification and statistical systems, Africa’s emerging welfare states are thus facing significant challenges in their capacity to establish categories of welfare entitlement and to target groups for intervention. Led by the PI, ModelFutures’ team will carry out ground-breaking, comparative ethnographic research at the statistics-welfare nexus of four African country cases – Ghana, Senegal, Kenya and Botswana – to understand: How do states generate truths about future welfare in contexts of uncertain knowledge about the population and its wellbeing? The project’s threefold objectives aim to (1) trace statistical modelling practices in the context of multi-facetted uncertainties about the population and its environs; (2) analyse the impact of adaptations and creative data practices on quantitative truth claims; and (3) connect statistical future-making and anticipatory welfare politics in sites of statistical innovation. ModelFutures’ ambition significantly extends beyond the state of the art of our understanding of statistical world-making by developing a novel concept of vernacular prediction that attunes to experts’ skilful adaptations of globally circulating computational models and standards, while attending to their modelling practices’ co-constitution with symbolic commitments and situated infrastructural arrangements. Combining expertise from anthropology, science and technology studies, and population statistics, ModelFutures generates novel theory on the production of evidence-based welfare policies in contexts of contested claims to the validity of data, methods, and the anticipatory politics that play out between short-term mitigation efforts and the pursuit of long-term dividends.