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

For a number of African countries the window of opportunity for harnessing the developmental potential of the demographic transition is beginning to close, triggering intensified attention for policy interventions that are statistically projected to maximise future socio-economic returns. Yet, despite the central role of calculative devices in contemporary African future-making, our understanding of the knowledge bases and quantitative practices informing such interventions remains rudimentary. ModelFutures focuses on the quantitative production of future models and their impact on anticipatory policy-making. It develops a novel approach to the study of evidence-based welfare policy in Africa, tying together the anthropological study of political organisations with approaches from STS and the sociology of quantification. Through its uniquely tailored combination of the ethnographic observation of statistical practices and their situatedness in variously assembled population data ecosystems, ModelFutures provides a thick, comparative technography of four interrelated moments in statistical future-making, namely the quantification of populations, sensing welfare needs, predicting future welfare, and targeting interventions for future welfare gains. Building on its novel methodology and original empirical insights into contemporary statistical practices in Africa, ModelFutures expands the theoretical horizon of contemporary welfare studies and of the social study of quantification alike by theorising statistical experts’ engagement with material and immaterial infrastructures of future-making, including their capacities for harnessing the multiple and layered indeterminacies related to the limited coverage of population data, the local adaptation of globally circulating statistical models, and the intergenerational observation of projected policy outcomes.