UGAMOD retreat

The third training event on UGAMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for Uganda, is 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 brief refresher on the use of the model and a longer retreat portion. In the latter section, participants break out in groups, develop their own policy questions, model them using UGAMOD, and examine and interpret the results.

This work is geared towards writing policy notes that are expected to be developed further after the retreat, with support from UNU-WIDER, Southern African Social Policy Research Insight (SASPRI) and the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA), 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.

The retreat serves as a capacity development initiative where attendees will not only get acquainted with the UGAMOD model but also learn to use it to address pertinent policy questions. The participants will complete the retreat with an appreciation of the opportunities to leverage UGAMOD to evaluate proposed or hypothetical policy reforms and to provide quantitative evidence on their effectiveness.

The retreat will also serve as a forum to build a community of UGAMOD users in Uganda, generate ownership of the model beyond the national team, and expand the model userbase and expertise at relevant local institutions, including those that administer the policies modelled in UGAMOD.

The UGAMOD research retreat 2022 welcomes up to 8 participants from government and academia. Most of the chosen participants have attended at least one of the previous UGAMOD training events. A key feature of the retreat is that the national team will take the lead in organizing and delivering the retreat.

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).