Dear Internet friends,

Welcome to the revamped website of the Institute of Empirical Research in Political Economy (IERPE or IREEP in French).

IERPE is the fruit of a dream of mine, which is to offer to Benin, opportunities for a stellar education in statistics and economics that is on par with renowned institutions in Europe and North America.

This might come as a surprise to you but like all ambitious projects, IERPE and its masters program were created almost accidentally.

Since I have started teaching at New York University as Full Professor, I was alarmed by low number of students and professors of African origin in American universities. NYU agreed with my observation and attempted to rectify this by enabling me, in 2001, to recruit each year, for a period of 4 years, an African student who would be a doctoral candidate in economics. The first African student who enrolled in the program was admitted in 2002 without a scholarship, which is very rare in doctoral programs in the United States. I was thus forced to use all the funds allocated for the three other students to finance the admitted student for the entire duration of his program. It was a difficult decision because by allocating all funds to this one student, I denied the opportunity to other Africans who could have enrolled at the school in the following years. Nevertheless, it was a sacrifice that enabled at least one African student to attend a good university.

I have also been inspired by the increasing number of African students aspiring to pursue higher studies in big universities. I recognized the opportunity to create the MEPSA program, which main objective is to offer an education comparable to the one received in schools like NYU but here in Benin. And it worked!

We have thus been successful on two fronts. First, thanks to MEPSA, our students today are trained according to American standards. Second, that student who used up all the funds allocated to the program for African students at NYU has obtained his doctorate degree and has obtained a position in a major american university.

Besides its training programme, the IERPE is committed to promoting and generalizing the use statistics and data analysis in the design and the implementation of public policies and development projects. We aim at creating a culture thereby government agencies, civil society organizations, journalists and researchers push for their agenda by relying mostly on empirical evidence, not solely on intuition or conventional wisdom.

This website would help to know the IERPE a bit a better, particularly its staff, its faculty, students as well as domestic and international partners.

Thanks for your interest.

Léonard Wantchékon