REPOA trains researchers in order to increase the number of researchers capable of undertaking policy relevant quality research on poverty and pro-poor growth issues and other related contemporary topics. Some of the courses offered are:
 

Training on Data Exploration: Using R

This workshop providespractical guidance to beginning researchers on how to use data description as a tool for discovery, i.e. getting ideas from the data (hypothesis searching).
 

Course Content includes:

• Principles and methods of exploratory data analysis – univariate, bivariate and multivariate
• Tools to visualize quantitative data from a perspective of hypothesis searching
• Introduction to Open source software R – a powerful statistical software package

Designing Research: Practical Skills for Researchers

This course, which is run in two stages, provides practical guidance to beginning and intermediate researchers on how to overcome the hurdle of conceptualising and designing feasible research projects.

Participatory Research Methods

The objective of this course is to equip researchers with a range of participatory research methods and tools, and to provide practical guidance in testing and evaluating these methods in a field setting.

The course content includes:
 

• Understanding Participation
• Approaches to Methods of Participatory Research Methodologies
• Practicing Participatory Research

Research Report Writing Skills

The objective of this course is to provide practical guidance to beginning and intermediate researchers on how to write good quality research reports with potential for publication. Topics covered include:
 

• Why writing is not about “getting it right the first time"
• How to structure reports and articles more effectively
• How introductions can be structured to call attention to the problem being addressed in the research
• How to focus a text so that readers will understand the message
• Using sources: What works and what doesn’t