ITU researcher awarded prestigious EU grant
Marie Curie Fellow at IT University of Copenhagen, Alena Thiel, has secured the ERC Starting Grant for the project, ModelFutures. The project focuses on the use of statistics and digital quantification in four African welfare systems.
Alena ThielgrantsResearch
Alena Thiel, Marie Curie Fellow at IT University of Copenhagen, is among 494 researchers across Europe who have received the prestigious ERC Starting Grant in 2024. She has been awarded close to € 1,5 million for the five-year project, ModelFutures, which investigates how African states invest in future welfare in contexts of uncertain knowledge about the population and its wellbeing. More specifically, Alena Thiel explains that the project focuses on innovations and creative problem-solving in African official statistical practice:
"African statistical systems face significant challenges in relation to the coverage and timeliness of their population data. One of the main problems is that population registers are often incomplete. They don't always cover the entire population. These data gaps represent a grand challenge for welfare systems, which rely on complex statistical modelling at the population level to inform evidence-based policy decisions," she says.
Statistics and decision making
ModelFutures investigates how four African states –Ghana, Senegal, Kenya, and Botswana – which differ in relation to their digital infrastructure, demographic profile and welfare policy focus – adapt their statistical modelling practices to plan and target welfare interventions and ensure that scarce resources generate the best possible policy outcomes.
"Statistics play a central role in the construction of our world. They guide our attention to critical areas of intervention, justify the mobilization and disbursement of limited resources, and through their logic of benchmarking, structure and define decision-making processes. Turning our gaze to processes of innovation and creativity in statistical production will help us understand how policy directions are shaped in moments of lingering uncertainty around contested welfare futures," says Alena Thiel who is excited to get the project started:
"Receiving this five-year ERC Starting Grant is a great honor. The project offers me the unique opportunity to assemble an interdisciplinary team that bridges so far disconnected approaches from anthropology and population statistics. By developing this interdisciplinary lens, I will be able to generate new insights into African statistical production in practice, especially regarding experts’ innovations and creative problem-solving strategies."
About the ERC Starting Grant
The European Research Council, ERC, was established by the European Union in 2007, and is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. In 2024, ERC received 3474 proposals for the ERC Starting Grant.