Professional experience

I work on several projects in the South Asia and Africa, on themes ranging from health and nutrition to social protection and agriculture. Gender is a strong cross-cutting component across all my work. 

Current projects:

I. Women's Voice and Agency in the MGNREGA: Experimental evidence from Odisha, India

We study ways to improve women's voice and agency in the selection of assets to be constructed under the national workfare program, the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), using a field experiment in the state of Odisha in eastern India. Our experiment has three arms. In the placebo arm, participants are given an information leaflet outlining formal processes for applying for work, and watch a video unrelated to the MGNREGA. In treatment arm 1, participants get the information leaflet and watch a video featuring women role models from their communities who were successful in securing assets under the program. In treatment arm 2, participants receive the same interventions as treatment arm 1, and in addition are provided training on mapping needs, setting goals and articulating demands. Each set of interventions is delivered in a self-defined organic group setting of 3-5 women, two of whom will be followed at endline to track changes in outcomes of interest. 

Status: Baseline survey, qualitative study and intervention are complete; endline will be conducted in early 2024. Read our project brief, watch our project video and access our public speaking training in English and Odia. A paper on claim-making using our baseline data is here.

II. Evaluation of agricultural technology platform services in Maharashtra, India

We study the impact of introducing an ag-tech platform on smallholder soybean farmer outcomes in the southern state of Maharashtra. The platform has a midstream ag-extension worker focused component, to allow for improved monitoring and service delivery, and a farmer-focused component to enable access to better weather and crop-related information and to allow the farmer to raise crop- and plot-specific queries. Our evaluation is designed as a cluster-randomized controlled trial. 

Status: ongoing.

III. Strengthening Food Systems to Promote Increased Value Chain Employment Opportunities for Youth in Africa

Supported by the MasterCard Foundation as part of its 'Young Africa' program and in collaboration with the UN World Food Programme, IFPRI is conducting research into the barriers and opportunities youth in Africa, especially young women, face in engaging with agricultural value chains. I lead the gender pillar within this work, and will be leading both qualitative and quantitative research in Rwanda, Nigeria and Kenya.

Status: ongoing. 

IV. Changing Access to Nutritious Diets in Africa and South Asia (CANDASA) and Food Prices for Nutrition

A secondary data-based collaborative project with researchers from several organizations,  led by researchers at Tufts University, World Bank ICP and IFPRI. I am working on several papers on India, using secondary data on market prices to assess the affordability of nutritious diets for both rural and urban populations and to characterize the behavior of food prices over the COVID-19 pandemic. More information on these projects can be found on the project websites here and here.

Status:  Ongoing. The first India paper is available here.

Completed projects:

V. Applying New Evidence for Empowering Women (ANEW) 

ANEW is a portfolio project that will develop and validate measures of women’s empowerment for use by projects engaged in marketing agricultural products using collective-based organizations. The new set of metrics will expand the project-level WEAI for Market Inclusion (pro-WEAI+MI) in two ways, first, to sharpen the focus on marketable agricultural products, and second, to develop measures of collective empowerment, including at the group level. In addition, we will also develop and validate a short M&E tool for implementing organizations.

The ANEW portfolio consists of four projects supported by the Walmart Foundation, based in India, Mexico and Guatemala. These projects represent a diverse range of agricultural products, farmer-producer collectives, and innovative program designs. Two of these—PRADAN in India and TechnoServe in Guatemala—will partner with IFPRI to conduct rigorous impact evaluations. The other two—Root Capital in Mexico and Grameen Foundation in India—join the portfolio with an existing research partner.

Status: Completed. The project website is here. We hosted learning labs at the ANH Academy Week 2023 and at the CG Gender conference 2023. The final endline workshop was held in Mexico City in December 2023. 

VI. Women Improving Nutrition through Group-based Strategies (WINGS)

A quasi-experimental evaluation of the nutrition-intensification work being conducted by PRADAN and the Public Health Resource Network (PHRN) in five states in India – West Bengal, Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. We use three rounds of panel data to study changes over time in women’s BMI and child dietary diversity as a result of the standalone nutrition interventions, as well as the addition of a nutrition focus to PRADAN’s programming around agriculture and livelihoods, gender, and rights and entitlements. More information on the project can be found here.

Status: Completed. Publications arising from this project are here, here, here, here, here and here (more to come). 

Coethnicity and contribution: The effect of identity on willingness to pay for a public good

Within the context of the larger WINGS evaluation, we conducted a randomized controlled field experiment in Purulia, West Bengal examining the role of shared caste identities between the frontline worker and the self-help group in determining the group's willingness to contribute to a group-owned club good. 

Status: Completed. The manuscript is here.

VII. The JEEViKA-Multisectoral Convergence Pilot (JEEViKA-MC)

A randomized controlled trial in Saharsa, Bihar, evaluating the impact of a multi-sectoral convergence pilot on maternal and child nutrition. The pilot was jointly implemented by the World Bank and JEEViKA, under the Bihar Rural Livelihoods Promotion Society (BRLPS), and consisted of two components, one that promoted behavior change, and the other that promoted the use of health and nutrition-related services by increasing convergence and coordination efforts. We use two rounds of panel data on households and communities to assess the impacts of the pilot on health and nutrition knowledge, practices and outcomes among mothers and children in the study area.

Status: Completed. The impact paper is here. The full endline report can be found here.

VIII. An evaluation of the Food Friendly Program (FFP) in Bangladesh

IFPRI conducted a survey in 2018 to evaluate the performance of a large in-kind transfer program - the Food Friendly Program (FFP) - aimed at poor rural households in Bangladesh, and found that the program was performing very well, with low inclusion and exclusion errors and low leakage. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, an additional month of food transfer was added onto this program, and the assistance it provided was crucial to households who had lost sources of livelihood due to the lockdown.  In August 2020, we conducted a phone survey following up on the households we had interviewed in 2018. The aim of the survey was to assess the resilience of the FFP and to estimate inclusion and exclusion errors, amounts received and price paid in the event of a large unanticipated shock. 

Status:  Survey complete, results have been presented to stakeholders in Bangladesh. The IFPRI policy brief is available here; here is a book chapter. The main manuscript is here.