Month: March 2022

The Gendered Impacts of the Climate Crisis: Building a Sustainable Tomorrow

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The theme for International Women’s Day in 2022 “gender equality today for a sustainable tomorrow” captures the need of the hour, following the dire pronouncements in the 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It reminds us that climate justice needs to be prioritized and that gender equality needs to be at the heart of it. Climate impacts play out over familiar fault lines, exacerbating systemic gender inequalities. Women tend to depend more on, but have less access to, natural resources. In the face of disasters and climate change, decision-making power, ability to take actions, mobilizing resources, and utilizing social networks all contribute to the issue.

The issue of climate justice has been an ongoing conversation in Bangladesh. Although it has one of the lowest per capita emissions, it is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change. This year’s theme recalls our country’s familiarity with the gendered impacts of natural disasters. An overwhelming majority of those who died from the 02B cyclone in 1991 were women. This was partly due to the cyclone warnings not reaching many women who were in their homes. Since then, we have improved reaching households with disaster warnings, though gendered impacts persist.

Joygum Begum is a graduate of BRAC Special Targeting Ultra Poor program

Our analysis of the baseline survey for BRAC’s Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA), conducted by BIGD in 2017 (BRAC RED, 2017), showed that 33% of the 33,554 women who were asked about climate change, among other issues, sought help from their spouse or other family members to respond. This was the only topic they turned to others for help, indicating the fact that women, particularly marginalized women, get left behind from conversations around climate change.

Our work also points to the path forward. Ongoing research with BRAC’s Ultra-Poor Graduation Program (UPG) shows that women from ultra-poor households in the southwest are disproportionately impacted by climate change. They are putting an increasing amount of time and effort to access potable water as the salinity of soil and water bodies increases. Programs such as the UPG targets the socio-economic wellbeing of women, removing some of the barriers for them to take action and mobilize their resources, as well as raising awareness around various issues such as climate change. The program’s recent layering of its graduation model with climate interventions shows that our path towards climate justice lies in addressing the structural issues that contribute to social inequalities.

Let us not forget that the International Women’s Day had its origins in the labour movement, with women factory workers demanding fairer work conditions. Therefore, it is only in the spirit of justice that we can hope to reduce the worst impacts of climate change. For the most impacted, the compounding issues contributing to the marginalization need to be considered together with socioeconomic, gender, and environmental issues.

Dr Rohini Kamal is a Research Fellow at BIGD. She leads the research on Environment and Climate Change. 

Photo by Conor Ashleigh, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Opinion: Bangabandhu’s 100th and National Children’s Day

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March 17 is an important day for Bangladesh, especially this year. It’s the birth centenary of the Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, as well as the National Children’s Day which is celebrated every year since 2009.

Question: If Bangabandhu lived to be a hundred-year old today, how different would Bangladesh be in terms of children’s rights? Would Bangladesh still be 4th in the prevalence of child marriage in the world?

The United Nations declared the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. But 15 years before the international treaty, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman enacted the Child Rights Act in 1974 to protect children and ensure their rights, just a year before he was assassinated. Bangabandhu deeply cared about children and their rights, and made it a priority to ensure a future for them. A nation thrives when the rights of all citizens, especially of children, are ensured. Bangabandhu always knew that children are more than just our future, and we have a big responsibility to protect them from societal malpractices.

Photo: Smiling face of a Bangladeshi child

Fast forward to this day, we know that the government and NGOs took strong, concerted measures to reduce child marriages in the country. Laws and policies were revised and put into action. Legally, the minimum age of marriage is 18 for girls and 21 for boys. However, many socioeconomic and cultural forces perpetuate early or forced marriage, resulting in a breach of the existing laws, even when the adults are involved in the process. Furthermore, the Child Marriage Restraint Act 2017 is stringed with a Special Provision (No. 19) which may allow anyone to get away with administrating child marriage under “special circumstances”, which deemed to be a controversial topic in Bangladesh.

Child marriage is often the consequence of poverty, natural disasters, lack of access to education, social pressure, harassment and dowry. According to a UNICEF report in 2020, more than fifty percent of girls in Bangladesh are married before their 18th birthday, out of which 32% are married before the age of 15. Nearly half of the child brides gave birth before age 18. Married adolescent girls are four times more likely to drop out of school, face intimate partner violence as well as other forms of inequality and discrimination.

Girls who get married before the age of 18 suffer from risky childbearing and poor maternal health, low autonomy in their household and in society, and also psychological torment. A child’s brain is most malleable during its formative years, and continues to develop the most till adolescence. Numerous studies have shown that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)—or traumatic events that occur in a child’s life before the age of 18—can interfere with their health, opportunities, and stability in the long-term. Consequences to such trauma can extend to adulthood, making damages that are more permanent. Marriage and childbearing before turning 18 can be very traumatic for a girl, and she may suffer from  long-term social and health-related consequences.

The Situation Analysis Report of Children in Bangladesh (2020) also shows that the majority of children are still not safe in Bangladesh in terms of their well-being, social and human development. The COVID-19 pandemic made the situation worse, putting 10 million additional girls at risk of child marriage, with a rise in domestic violence where women, girls and children are significantly affected. The reported prevalence of child marriage has increased by at least 13% due to pandemic-enforced long-term school closure throughout the country.

What happens to young girls when they are prematurely thrown into adulthood? How do they deal with motherhood, and possibly the stunted growth of their children? How is their quality of life as a child bride? Are they able to properly function in society? Do they really have a voice?

These questions are often left out of conversations.

Child brides are considered neither as children or as adults, and they slowly become invisible. They are deprived of their dreams of education and other basic rights. The father of the nation surely did not envision a country where younglings are still coerced into marriage,  exposing them to high risks of unpaid care work, child labour, and enormous health hazards, all of which have long-term negative consequences for their life. Even after 50 years of freedom and development, there is still a long way to go. If we want to reach our national targets and SDGs by 2030, we need to scale up our current child marriage prevention interventions 17 times faster (suggested by UNICEF).

It’s about time we stop all of these “untimely” marriages—the consequences of which young girls face throughout their lives. In most cases, the trauma lingers on to the next generations, affecting children of child brides. For many of the survivors, the trauma of getting married off as a child is like a slow death, even when it may seem like everything is going well from the outside. Women and girls are left with no choice but to internalize their pain and accept their lives as it is. This is not how we should destine our girls and children. The future generations are supposed to look up to us, rely on us. We need to support them by giving them voice and agency, ensuring their rights to health and education. With our collective strength, awareness and innovative programs, we can make child marriage a thing of the past.

On this year’s National Children’s Day, let’s pledge to fully eradicate harmful practices like child marriage and make Bangabandhu proud! If we can not ensure a good future for our children, the hope for a better world will remain to be a dream.

Mohammed Wadudul Islam is the Communications Manager at the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD).

Photo by Masum-al-Hasan Rocky, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0. 

A Group of Unexpectedly Optimistic, Ebullient, and Smart Young Women

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Girls in the classroom of the BRAC branch office
Photo: Afsana Adiba

BRAC Branch Office, Dhaka Dokkhin, Sylhet, Bangladesh

For the last two days, I have been meeting underprivileged youths who received, or are receiving, BRAC’s skills training of various sorts. I’ve been amazed by the stories of these people, their life’s struggles, and most of all, their pragmatism, courage, and resilience.

Today is the last day of my trip, and I met a group of girls receiving trade-specific skills training and basic numeracy and literacy skills, including digital literacy*. My main motivation was to find how their digital literacy training was going. I was more curious because, in the specific BRAC branch that we were visiting, the participants were also given smartphones. I was not disappointed; the time spent with them was full of surprises.

When we arrived, they were having their Bengali class. The class, as expected, mostly consisted of girls wearing burkas, many covering their faces with niqabs and the rest with masks. I was observing the class from outside.

Their teacher, a woman in her twenties, was engaging, no doubt. But I was struck by the energy of these girls, mostly school dropouts, eager to come to the front to demonstrate their freshly acquired spelling skills. I don’t remember ever being so excited in my 18 years of educational life. It felt like they were so parched for knowledge that they were now soaking in every bit of what they got.

The next class was on digital literacy, and everyone took out their phones. The same teacher was teaching them how to go live on Facebook. Now they were even more eager to show off their skills. We got in and started quizzing them about their digital skills. I was impressed by what they learned and claimed they could demonstrate—going live, deleting videos, creating strong passwords, changing privacy settings, setting up and sending emails, and searching on Google. They told me clearly about how to identify fake IDs and why they should keep away from social media users using one. They Googled Bill Gates, read his short bio in Bangla, and told me that he was a super-rich businessman. I was enthralled!

You may think, what’s so special about this? Every 14-year-old today knows way more. We need to remember that these girls come from some of the most marginalized communities in a socially and religiously conservative region. All of them had dropped out of school years ago at various stages between classes 3 and 9, and everyone did so because of poverty. Some had feature phones at home, belonging exclusively to the male members of the house, and others had none. For everyone, the phone they received from BRAC was their first true encounter with technology. Thus, the grace and ease with which they embraced the digital world were truly inspiring.

The author with a group of girls who received BRAC’s skills training.
Photo: Asma Tabassum

After they became somewhat easy with us, they proposed some singing and dancing. First, they wanted to perform a chorus song in karaoke. One of them had it loaded on their phone and wanted to connect it with the class’s music system. When they were having trouble connecting, we suggested performing without music or playing from the phone. But they said the phone did not produce good sound and declined to perform without high-quality music. Such obsession with perfection! Finally, they managed to connect it. All of them sang at the height of their voice and without inhibition, even though most of them were completely off-note. I loved their fearless performance. Then came dancing, one after another, in solos and duets, in perfect synchrony with the music and with each other, with perfect movements of their feet, torsos, and hands, with expressive eyes dancing with the music through the slit between their headscarves and masks (or niqabs). I was dumbfounded. In a conservative rural area like Dhaka Dokkhin, this is revolutionary. I also noticed that some of their burkas had fitted patterns—a colourful flared bottom and a fitted top, like that of an A-line dress. These girls are pushing the boundary for sure, but in a measured way, so as not to rock the boat too much.

Then I interviewed some of the girls in private. I talked about their dreams and aspirations and tried to gauge their confidence. They were all very clear about why they wanted to earn—dignity, freedom, and security. All of them said they will continue to work for the rest of their lives.

When I asked them about their prospects of working after their marriage, all of them giggled at the talk of their own marriage. But when they settled down, some said that they were confident that their in-laws would have no objection. Others were not so sure.

One of the major challenges these types of skill-development programs face is retaining trained women in the labour market after marriage, especially after having children. Responsibilities of managing the house and child, but most of all, the societal expectations from married women in conservative societies frequently throw women out of the labour market into the confine of their homes.

I want to believe these girls—education and the World Wide Web opening up their world—would be different. The way they transformed their burka into fashionable long dresses, I want to believe that they will use the same ingenuity to push the social boundary for financial freedom and dignity. The progress might be slow, but slow progress is progress, nevertheless.

*As a part of the program called Alternative Learning Programme for Out of School Adolescents, which is a combination of BRAC’s original STAR program and training modules on literacy and numeracy, along with digital literacy

Nusrat Jahan is the Head of Communications and Knowledge Management at BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), BRAC University. 

Mixed-method Research: Mixed Bag or Magic Bullet?

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Photo: Crowd of people (abstract)

In the quest for maximum scientific precision, economics as a discipline has embraced quantitative methods as its modus operandi, claims Vijayendra Rao in his World Bank working paper, Can Economics Become More Reflexive?

A philosophical divide runs across the social science landscape, along the familiar fault line between methods, or rather, the choices of method. Economists are expected to use quantitative methods. Cultural anthropologists are supposed to be ethnographers, relying on qualitative methods such as participant observation.

Economics’ fixation with quantitative analysis and outcomes is a fairly recent, 20th-century phenomenon. [1] And the strides made in empirical economics over the last three decades, fondly referred to as the “credibility revolution”, have only accelerated and fortified this trend. [2] Econometrics, the lifeblood of applied economics, does two things remarkably well: (1) tease out causal relationships based on hypotheses, and (2) understand and overcome the challenges of making robust inferences about large populations from smaller samples.

What is missing in this detached, scientific method—although crucial for collecting and analyzing data at scale—is a true connection between researcher and researched, thereby “accentuating the pre-existing social and cultural distance” between the two. The researcher observes from a distance without coming in close contact with the research subject and investigates from the perspective of their own lived reality rather than that of the people being studied.

The polar opposite of this approach is ethnographic research. The researcher immerses themself in one or a few communities, actively participating in and observing the daily lives and habits of the community for an extended period. [3] By focusing on processes (hard to quantify) rather than outcomes (eminently quantifiable) and prioritizing authentic description over accurate measurement, this approach attempts to bridge the gap between researcher and researched via “deep empathetic understanding, rather than maintaining what anthropologists see as a fictive analytic distance.”

The caveats associated with the second approach should be apparent to the reader by now (hint: they are the exact strengths of empirical economics). Methods like participant observation, due to their focus on a limited number of communities, lack representative data, making it difficult to draw generalizable conclusions from data analysis.

Sociologist Michael Burawoy takes this dichotomy a step further in his 1998 paper The Extended Case-Study Method and argues there are essentially two models of social science: positivist and reflexive. In the positivist approach, embodied by economists, the researcher limits their immersion in the world they study, insulating themself from the subjects, observing from the outside, and investigating through intermediaries (enumerators, for example). In sharp contrast, the reflexive approach, characterized by ethnography, “embraces engagement not detachment as the road to knowledge.”

The question is, can we have the best of both worlds in economic research?

Photo: A farmer cuts grass at a paddy field in Shariatpur, Dhaka

Rao in his 2022 paper suggests that we can, and he puts forward four interconnected principles that could help us achieve an idyllic union of research methods:

First is the notion of cognitive empathy. Sociologist Mario Small (2018), who coined the term, describes it as “the ability to understand a person’s predicament as they [themselves] understand it.” Walk a mile in their shoes, in other words. And to achieve this greater cognitive empathy, it is imperative to reduce the distance between the scholar and the subjects of the study, who are most likely to have very different socioeconomic backgrounds. This can be achieved only through qualitative enquiry. Cognitive empathy can help researchers form sound hypotheses and analytical frameworks for their quantitative studies and can better explain the findings, bringing nuance to the results.

This reorientation of research approach is not novel to the field of economics. T. Scarlett Epstein’s influential work in rural South India (1962) is a great example of the use of an eclectic mix of qualitative and quantitative data (field observations, interviews, and survey data) to study patterns of employment, agrarian relations, migration, caste, and social class. Revealing instances of economists successfully mixing methods can be found sprinkled throughout the decades. [4] Still, economics tends to view insights from qualitative work as anecdotal rather than “hard” data. This is deeply constraining in the ways all available information can be used and the kinds of questions that can be asked in research.

Second is the idea of narrative data. As the term suggests, information can take other forms, different from the statistical/numerical form generally used in applied economics. Information and insights can be gleaned from interviews, documents, texts, images, videos, and even other narrative forms. In fact, the survey method, where respondents are directed to pick precise responses from a set of predetermined options, is an “unnatural interaction that can lead to misinterpretation of what [the respondents] are trying to communicate.”

Narrative data is the bread and butter of sociologists. Michele Lamont, in her book The Dignity of Working Men (2000), unpacked the “inner logic of racism” by examining the language and grammar of lower-middle-class, white and black men in the United States and immigrants in France. The data was collected through two hours of open-ended interviews with each individual. Similar textual analyses of village deliberative meetings have been carried out in recent decades, where narrative data was judiciously recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. [5] However, all of these research projects had relatively small samples, indicative of the time-intensive nature of narrative data collection.

This is where natural language processing (NLP), which is the use of machine learning to analyze textual data, comes into play. Recent advancements in the field have allowed researchers, including economists, to study a larger variety of questions. [6] Since NLP can be used to statistically analyze a greater volume of narrative data with relative ease, it has expanded researchers’ ability to “make sense of high-dimensional textual data”, opening new vistas of research opportunity in social science. Mixed-method research, in particular, can gain a lot from utilizing such tools.

The use of NLP, however, does not automatically make economic analysis more reflexive. For example, a systemic review of 104 studies across disciplines investigating “hate speech, and racial and gender bias in social media” by Matamoros-Fernandez and Farkas (2021) finds an “absence of researchers’ reflexive dialogue with their object of study.” The verdict is clear: the onus is on the researcher to truthfully immerse themself in the study environment and the research participants’ lives.

Third, a step back from the seemingly singular focus on outcomes in empirical economics will require increased attention to studying processes. Here again, there are examples of recent work which showcase the benefits of sensibly mixing methods. [7]

To illustrate this point, Rao cites his own work on testing an intervention to improve citizen engagement quality in rural India (Rao, Ananthpur, and Malik, 2017). They surveyed a hundred randomly picked villages, households, and key informants before and after the intervention. A 10% sub-sample was selected as a qualitative sample (half in treatment, half in control). Five trained ethnographers lived in the villages and conducted monthly participant interviews over two years. The qualitative data informed the development of the quantitative survey instruments. Interestingly, despite a lack of difference in outcomes between treatment and control groups, the ethnography helped the researchers understand why the intervention failed (variations in the quality of facilitation, lack of top-down support, and difficulties in confronting persistent inequality).

The fourth and final piece of the puzzle is the participation of respondent as analyst. All of the above points extol the benefits of reducing the distance between researcher and researched. The idea of considering the research subject as an active participant or co-producer of the research takes the concept of cognitive empathy to its logical conclusion: the researcher and researched are now on an equal footing, equal partners working together seamlessly to investigate and uncover the truth. However, the direct participation of respondents in research is an approach yet to be fully explored.

If the successful marriage of methods is an end we can strive towards (and Rao believes we can and should), the dichotomy between positive and reflexive social sciences is but a false one. In that case, an attempt to find a middle ground would be a worthwhile exercise for economists.

 

Endnotes

[1] Charles Booth’s seminal multi-volume work Life and Labour of the People in London (1892–97) triangulated data from household surveys, participant observation, and open-ended interviews to create detailed “poverty maps” of the four million residents of London, drawing from both quantitative and qualitative data collected by Booth and his team.

[2] The credibility revolution was the movement towards improved reliability in empirical economics through a focus on the quality of research design and the use of more experimental and quasi-experimental methods. Developing in the 1990s and early 2000s, this movement was aided by advances in theoretical econometric understanding, but it was especially driven by research studies that focused on the use of clean and credible research designs.

[3] Anthropologist Bhrigupathi Singh, in his ethnography, Poverty and the Quest for Life (2015), describes the ethnographic method as “a two-phase process…In the first phase, one is a hunter-gatherer, pursuing targets, collecting impressions. The next stage of labour is of a more settled cultivator, as we move from impressions to expressions…When impressions are organized and attached to concepts, they turn into thoughts and expression.”

[4] Economic theorists Christopher Bliss and Nicholas Stern (1982), inspired by Epstein, spent eight months in a North Indian village studying land tenure arrangements, labour and credit markets, and risk and uncertainty. Their conversations, experiences, and observations informed the development of new theoretical models as well as the nature of the survey data they collected. Christopher Udry, another development economist heavily influenced by anthropology and ethnography, describes his method as “iterative field research” (Udry, 2003). During their fieldwork in Ghana, Udry and Markus Goldstein realized that plots (otherwise similar) owned by women were less productive because women were not able to “invest” in the land by keeping it fallow: they had to keep the plots constantly cultivated to not have it taken away from them. This qualitative finding proved to be crucial in their attempt to demonstrate that institutional factors affect economic efficiency (2008).

[5] Village deliberative meetings are spaces where citizens can speak freely about public issues and work with the village council to make decisions on public goods and resources. Sanyal and Rao (2019) recorded 300 village meetings in South India. Their textual analysis showed that the meetings varied from state to state even though they belonged to the same linguistic community, because of differences in state government policy. Collins, Morduch, Rutherford, and Ruthven (2009) studied the money management of people living on less than two dollars a day, by conducting open-ended, narrative interviews of 250 households, instead of a conventional survey collecting data on credit, savings, and assets. The authors reconstructed balance sheets and cash-flow statements from the interviews to find patterns previously not understood with conventional surveys.

[6] Parthasarathy et al. (2019) used NLP methods to analyze 100 transcripts of village meetings, an endeavour that took six months instead of ten years because of the use of machine learning. Gentzkow et al. (2019) studied transcripts of speeches in the US Congress to develop an estimator that measured the degree of partisanship between 1873 and 2016.

[7] In his ethnography Streetwise, Elijah Anderson (1990) distils fourteen years of fieldwork between 1975 and 1989 to study interactions between whites and blacks in the Philadelphia neighbourhood he lived in and a neighbouring, largely black, area. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s work on stigma (1960) and strategic interaction (1969), he drew a picture of how Reagan-era cuts to public spending, and the decline of the city’s industrial base, led to shifts in the way the neighbourhoods interacted.

 

Eradul Kabir is a Communications and Knowledge Management Officer at the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD). 

Photo 1 from Max Pixel, used under CC0 1.0 Universal. 

Photo 2 by Syed Rifat Hossain, used under the Unsplash licence. 

Announcing WEE-DiFine’s Advisory Board

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The WEE-DiFine team is pleased to introduce the six members that compose our advisory board! Our advisory board provides strategic advice to the WEE-DiFine team and makes funding recommendations for the Initiative. Each member of the board brings broad experience and expertise from the fields of digital financial services and women’s economic empowerment. Read more about the background and interests of each of our members below!

WEE-DiFine Advisory Board

Dr S Anukriti, Development Research Group, The World Bank

Dr S Anukriti is an Economist in the Development Research Group (Human Development Team) of the World Bank. She is an applied micro-economist, with interests in the fields of development economics, economics of gender and the family, and political economy. Her research examines the underlying causes of gender inequalities in developing societies, and explores mechanisms that can bring about gender equity. More broadly, she is interested in the role of social norms, formal and informal institutions, and public policy in affecting social change. Dr Anukriti received her PhD in Economics from Columbia University, MA in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, and BA (Honors) from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. Prior to joining the World Bank in July 2020, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Boston College. She is also a Research Affiliate at the Institute for Labor Economics (IZA) and a Fellow of the Center for Development Economics and Policy at Columbia University. 

Dr Stefan Dercon, Department of Economics, Oxford University

Dr Stefan Dercon is a Professor of Economic Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and the Economics Department, and a Fellow of Jesus College. He is also Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. His research interests concern what keeps some people and countries poor: the failures of markets, governments and politics, mainly in Africa, and how to change this. He has worked extensively as a policy advisor, providing strategic economic and development advice, and promoting the use of evidence in decision making. He has worked extensively as a policy advisor, providing strategic economic and development advice, and promoting the use of evidence in decision making, including as the Chief Economist of the UK Department of International Development (2011-2017). 

Dr Seth Garz, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Dr Seth Garz manages the Research and Measurement portfolios for the Financial Services for the Poor strategy at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  Prior to joining the Foundation, Seth was a Post-doctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Center for Effective Global Action where he was the lead researcher for a large-scale randomized control trial in the Dominican Republic, evaluating innovations to the country’s conditional cash transfer program.  Seth has previously worked for Goldman Sachs and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and has conducted a variety of policy consulting work for organizations such as the World Bank Gender Innovation Lab and the City of San Francisco Office of Financial Empowerment.  Seth remains actively engaged in research at the intersection of G2P programs, financial inclusion, and gender. 

Dr Rachel Heath, Department of Economics, University of Washington

Dr Rachel Heath is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Washington. Her research interests are in development and labour economics. In particular, much of her research focuses on increased labour market opportunities for women in developing countries (such as the garment industry in Bangladesh). She studies how these new job opportunities are changing women’s lives, the factors that influence women’s decisions to join the labour force, and how firms make hiring decisions.

Dr Leora Klapper, Development Research Group, The World Bank

Dr Leora Klapper is a Lead Economist in the Finance and Private Sector Research Team of the Development Research Group at the World Bank. Her publications focus on corporate and household finance, banking, entrepreneurship, and risk management. Her current research studies the impact of digital financial services, especially for women. She is a founder of the Global Findex database, which measures how adults around the world save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk. Previously, she worked at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and Salomon Smith Barney. She holds a PhD in Financial Economics from the New York University Stern School of Business.

Dr Munshi Sulaiman, BRAC International and the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development

Dr Munshi Sulaiman leads BRAC International’s Africa Research, and is a Research Advisor at BIGD, BRAC University. Dr Sulaiman started his research career at BRAC’s Research and Evaluation Division in 2004. Previously he worked as the Director for Research, Monitoring and Learning (REALM) at Save the Children and as a Research Director at Innovation for Poverty Action (IPA). He has a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and had been a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University. He has published on poverty, financial inclusion and labour markets issues in peer-reviewed journals including top journals in Economics.