08.09.2025 |
News
Building a Public Economics Curriculum for Africa: New Initiative Launched in Nairobi
FIT is involved in strengthening public economics education in Africa. A new public economics curriculum provides African universities with locally grounded teaching materials and open-access resources. The initiative by VATT, HAUS, TaxDev, UNU-WIDER in collaboration with the University of Nairobi and eight other African universities will deliver a full set of materials designed to make public economics teaching more relevant to African policy and research contexts.
Courses in public economics often rely on examples from developed countries. This leaves students with few opportunities to study taxation and public spending in the context of their own countries. At the same time, digitization and the growing use of administrative data have fueled a boom in public economics research across Africa creating momentum to update curricula.
A complete course package to renew how public economics is taught in Africa
To seize this opportunity, the VATT Institute for Economic Research, in collaboration with the African-Finnish Partnership on Taxation Capacity in Africa (HAUS) and UNU-WIDER, convened in a curriculum development workshop on 18–19 August in Nairobi, Kenya. The workshop brought together representatives from nine African universities to take stock of existing curricula and jointly design a comprehensive teaching package tailored for African contexts. The course under development is designed as a short programme of 10–12 lectures that can be integrated into existing courses or taught as a stand-alone module. Its primary focus is taxation, complemented by selected topics on public spending. Emphasis is placed on applied, empirically grounded material with a strong policy orientation. Content will draw heavily on recent research and institutional experiences from Sub-Saharan Africa, ensuring accessibility for both bachelor-level students and practitioners.
The curriculum package will include:
- A syllabus and lecture slides,
- Video lectures explaining difficult concepts,
- Testimonials from practitioners,
- Open-access reading material,
- Exercises, formative questions, and a test bank.
The teaching material will be openly available through the African Capacity Building Foundation starting by the end of 2025.
The UNU-WIDER team provides material for two lectures on social protection and tax enforcement.
The initiative is led by Professor Jukka Pirttilä (Finnish Centre of Excellence in Tax Systems Research, VATT Institute for Economic Research, University of Helsinki) together with colleagues from selected Sub-Saharan African universities. Development involved a series of Zoom meetings and culminated in the workshop in Nairobi, held just before the annual congress of the International Institute of Public Finance (IIPF). – Despite the unusually cold Nairobi weather, the atmosphere in the meeting was warm: there was enthusiasm in the project and thanks to the hard work by the team, great progress in developing the material was made, reports Jukka Pirttilä.
By rooting public economics teaching in African experiences, the project aims to strengthen both academic training and policy capacity, equipping the next generation of students, researchers, and practitioners with tools to address the continent’s fiscal and social policy challenges.
Additional information
Jukka Pirttilä, tel. +358 294 128 728 / +358 295 519 426, jukka.pirttila@helsinki.fi
