Policy choices in taxation, trade, health, education, energy and agriculture all rest on assumptions about how people and firms respond. When those assumptions go unexamined, programmes underdeliver, subsidies leak and regulations create costs nobody planned for. Practitioners who apply economic tools with discipline add credibility to every proposal that crosses a decision maker's desk.

The course moves from first principles to applied judgement. Early sessions revisit microeconomic foundations through a policy lens, including market failure, elasticities, welfare effects and the incidence of interventions. Middle sessions cover appraisal methods such as cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis, discounting, risk and sensitivity testing, and macro linkages that shape the policy environment. Later sessions introduce data handling, descriptive statistics, correlation versus causation, and regression, with attention to what the output does and does not prove.

Teaching combines short lectures, spreadsheet workshops and group policy clinics. Participants practise on datasets drawn from typical public-sector situations and finish by preparing a brief that sets out options, evidence, risks and a recommendation, so the learning is immediately usable in committee papers and cabinet memos.

After completing the programme, participants will be able to:

• Frame a policy problem and identify where markets fail to deliver good outcomes.
• Estimate and interpret price, income and cross elasticities for policy use.
• Analyse who gains and who bears the cost of taxes, subsidies and regulation.
• Conduct cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis with appropriate discounting.
• Run sensitivity and scenario tests to show how robust a recommendation is.
• Interpret basic regression results and avoid common causal misreadings.
• Write a concise policy brief and present it persuasively to decision makers.

The programme is designed for people who produce or rely on economic analysis in their work, such as:

• Economists and policy analysts in ministries and agencies
• Planning and budget officers in national and county governments
• Research officers in think tanks and universities
• Programme managers and advisers in NGOs and donor organisations
• Regulatory affairs and competition officers
• Monitoring and evaluation specialists seeking economic grounding
• Central bank and treasury staff in junior to mid-career roles
• Consultants preparing economic appraisals for clients

Each participant takes away:

• A spreadsheet model for cost-benefit analysis with discounting and sensitivity tabs.
• A reusable method for estimating elasticities from sample price and quantity data.
• A decision matrix for comparing policy options against agreed criteria.
• A completed two-page policy brief on a case chosen during the programme.
• A checklist for reviewing other people's economic evidence and spotting weak claims.

The sessions treat economics as a working tool rather than a lecture subject. Participants experience:

• Concise explanations followed straight away by spreadsheet exercises
• Policy clinics in which groups defend competing options
• Datasets modelled on typical household, trade, fiscal and sector records
• Peer review of draft briefs against a quality checklist
• A simulated committee hearing for the closing presentations

Participants who attend the full programme and complete the exercises receive a CPD-accredited Certificate of Completion from Vision Reach Global Consultancy.

The certificate reflects practical competence in economic appraisal and policy analysis demonstrated through the brief prepared on the last day.