Policy and Communications
Recent Blogs, Press and Interviews
Interview on VoxEU: Young Lives, Interrupted (Covid-19 and young people) March 2021
Lancaster University Public Lecture Panel “Talking about resilience in life and work” April 2021
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/events/public-lectures/
Peru Skills policy briefs and notes: https://www.younglives.org.uk/content/acquiring-decent-work-peru-education-and-skills-tackle-youth-inequality
Online Conference about Longitudinal Research: https://www.younglives.org.uk/content/learning-longitudinal-studies-lmic-countries-pre-post-covid
Ethiopia Education Policy brief: https://www.younglives.org.uk/node/9062
The Conversation: Covid-19 lockdown impacts on young people in developing countries (August 2020)
Conversation Africa: “Raising children in tough conditions” (October 2019) https://theconversation.com/parenting-in-ethiopia-lessons-on-raising-children-under-tough-conditions-124642
Female Role Models in Economics
VoxEU Women in Economics (edited by Shelly Lundberg) “Female Role Models inspire women to major in male dominated fields.”
https://voxeu.org/content/women-economics
Young Lives Covid-19 Phone Survey 2020
This work is ongoing to monitor the effect of the pandemic on the lives of young people in developing countries.
https://www.younglives.org.uk/content/listening-young-lives-work-vietnam
https://www.younglives.org.uk/content/listening-young-lives-work-ethiopia
https://www.younglives.org.uk/content/listening-young-lives-work-telangana-and-andhra-pradesh
Other country reports:
Young Lives Covid Survey Country reports: https://www.younglives.org.uk/content/young-lives-work-ylaw?tab=3
Earlier Policy Work
I have worked for DFID and with the World Bank in Senegal on Vulnerability assessment, as well as in Ethiopia on Drought Risk. I was the international consultant for the Ethiopia Poverty Assessment in 2012 and in 2019/20 undertook some data assessments for the Productive Safety Net Program in Ethiopia with OPM.
Here are some of my earlier policy papers:
CAT Risk Models and Economic Vulnerability- World Bank Policy Research Working Paper with Emily White. This paper investigates the potential to combine Catastrophe Risk Models [to predict future rainfall] with econometric models [that estimate the relationship between rainfall and consumption]. We consider the external validity of a regression model, and use Statistical Learning with training and testing data. We conclude that it should be possible - hoping that at some point it will happen!
World Bank Ethiopia Poverty Assessment 2014 Chapter on Vulnerability, with Ruth Vargas Hill.
Nutrition in Early Childhood- lessons from ruralEthiopia. UNICEF Child Poverty Insights briefing, 2013.
The implications of conditionality in social assistance programmes with Paul Dornan of Young Lives. Published in Surender and Walker (Eds) Social Policy in a Developing World, 2013. We investigate the effect of conditions, including a work requirement, on child outcomes using the Young Lives survey data.
Financing Basic Social Services with Julia Harrington and Sanjay Reddy. From 2001, a UNDP publication examining the share of budgets in developing countries that were spent on basic social services.