Learning Policy in Practice: Insights from Growth Lab Interns in Albania, Saudi Arabia, & Sri Lanka
October 17, 2019 | 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Moderator: Daniela Muhaj, Research Fellow, Growth Lab
Featuring HKS Students: Damian Galinsky (MPA/ID; Albania), Uriel Kejsefman (MPA/ID; Albania), Shivani Mishra (MPA/ID; Albania), Sarah Mousa (MPP; Saudi Arabia), David Franklin (MPA/ID; Sri Lanka)
About the Discussion: This is the third and final panel discussion of the Growth Lab’s Learning Policy in Practice series, featuring students who completed their 2019 summer internship in coordination with Growth Lab applied research projects. This event will feature stories from the field, examples of engagements with government stakeholders, as well as policy analysis and highlights from their analytical work from interns who worked in Albania, Saudi Arabia and Sri Lanka. This is an opportunity to ask the students questions about working alongside policymakers in different contexts, to understand current issues affecting economic growth in the countries’ where they worked, and to learn about each intern’s unique internship experience through the Growth Lab. First-year students can expect to get a sense of summer internship opportunities, and second year students will have a chance to share perspectives of their different experiences in international development.
Pizza and refreshments will be provided!
Female Labor in Jordan: A Systematic Approach to the Exclusion Puzzle
October 18, 2019 | 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Speaker: Semiray Kasoolu, Research Fellow, Growth Lab
About the Talk: Women in Jordan are excluded from labor market opportunities at among the highest rates in the world. Previous efforts to explain this outcome have focused on specific, isolated aspects of the problem and have not explained its persistence. After a careful review of the available literature and key stakeholder interviews in Jordan, we develop a comprehensive framework to analyze the causes of low female employment rates and systematically test their validity. We find that the nature of low female inclusion in Jordan’s labor market varies significantly with educational attainment, and identify evidence for different factors affecting different educational groups. Among women with high school education or less, we report extremely low participation levels and find the strongest evidence for this phenomena tracing to traditional social norms and poor public transportation. Among university graduates and above, we find that the problem is not one of participation but rather unemployment, which we trace to a problem of a small and undiversified private sector that is unable to accommodate women’s needs for work and family balance.
About the Speaker: Semiray Kasoolu has been a Research Fellow at the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab since 2017. Her research areas include labor markets and gender and growth diagnostics. She works in projects in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Prior to joining CID, she worked with the World SME Forum in the Republic of Georgia to diagnose constraints to the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises and as an analyst at Goldman Sachs. Semiray holds a Master in Public Administration in International Development (MPA/ID, 2017) from the Harvard Kennedy School.
Learning Policy in Practice: Insights from Growth Lab Interns in Jordan
October 10, 2019 | 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Moderator: Miguel Santos, Director, Applied Research, Growth Lab; Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, HKS
Featuring MPA/ID Students: Mustafa Serbest, Chatra Kamseng, Abdulhamid Haidar
About the Event: Join the 2019 Growth Lab Interns to learn about their summer experiences in Jordan. This panel discussion will feature stories from the field, examples of engagements with government stakeholders, as well as policy analysis and highlights from their analytical work. This is an opportunity to ask the interns specific questions about their summer, to understand current issues affecting economic growth in Jordan, and to learn about each intern’s unique internship experience through the Growth Lab. First year students can expect to get a sense of summer internship opportunities, and second year students will have a chance to share perspectives of their different experiences in international development.
Learning Policy in Practice: Insights from Growth Lab Interns in Ethiopia
October 3, 2019 | 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Moderator: Nikita Taniparti, Research Fellow, Growth Lab
Panel Speakers: Jason Keene; Apratim Gautam; Vishal Potluri
About the Event: Join the 2019 Growth Lab Interns to learn about their summer experiences in Ethiopia. This panel discussion will feature stories from the field, examples of engagements with government stakeholders, as well as policy analysis and highlights from their analytical work. This is an opportunity to ask the interns specific questions about their summer, to understand current issues affecting economic growth in Ethiopia, and to learn about each intern’s unique internship experience through the Growth Lab. First year students can expect to get a sense of summer internship opportunities, and second year students will have a chance to share perspectives of their different experiences in international development.
Atlas of Economic Complexity: Country Profiles Launch & Livestream
Speakers: Ricardo Hausmann, Rafiki Hariri Professor of the Practice of International Political Economy; Director, Growth Lab
Annie White, Senior Product Manager, Growth Lab
Tim Cheston, Senior Manager, Applied Research, Growth Lab
About the Event: Join us for the launch of an exciting new tool to our Atlas of Economic Complexity: Country Profiles.
The Country Profiles are a new, interactive journey through a country’s economic structure and growth patterns, which reveals the strategy necessary to achieve greater prosperity. This first-of-its-kind platform revolutionizes how to think about economic strategy, policy, and investment opportunities for more than 130 countries.
Each Country Profile offers a step-by-step explanation of a country’s economic complexity – past, present, and future. Across 10 unique data visualizations, this story-telling tool is both descriptive and predictive, with analysis and insights that are entirely data-driven.
The event will feature the research and technology behind the tool, as well as an exclusive demonstration from our Atlas team.
Livestream the event on Twitter @HarvardGrwthLab!
2019 Latin American Conference
About the Conference: The 2019 Latin American Conference at the Harvard Kennedy School will be the 6th edition of this student-organized conference. This conference aims at generating a space to analyze the region’s main challenges through a debate featuring political actors, social leaders, policy experts and practitioners with a leadership position in Latin America. This is a platform to foster discussion and learning by encouraging the participation of students and faculty of Harvard and other institutions.
For tickets and more information, please visit https://www.latamconference.org/
IDEV PIC Event: Women’s Empowerment in Official Development Cooperation
February 28, 2019 | 12:45 pm – 2:00 pm
About the Talk: The IDEV PIC invites you for a conversation on empowering women in international development with Wade Channell, gender equality expert at USAID. We will debate the most pressing challenges facing women and girls globally, discuss the role of bilateral aid agencies (such as USAID) in promoting gender equality, and explore how different frames of gender equality shape this work – should women’s empowerment be centered around women’s rights, or is it primarily “smart economics”?
About the Speaker: Wade Channell is a specialist in women’s economic empowerment and business enabling environments. He has worked for more than 25 years on issues that constrain growth and private sector development, at USAID, Booz Allen Hamilton, the Emerging Markets Group, Chemonics, and others. His 13 years at USAID include more than five years working exclusively on issues of women’s economic empowerment and equality, which is still his focus today. Prior to focusing on development, he spent 8 years as a commercial lawyer. Mr. Channell has also served as as an adjunct professor at the George Washington University, and has worked in over 60 countries on six continents.
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America.
April 26, 2019 | 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
About the talk: The Other Slavery examines the system of bondage that targeted Native Americans, a system that was every bit as terrible, degrading, and vast as African slavery. Anywhere between 2.5 and 5 million Native Americans may have been enslaved throughout the hemisphere in the centuries between the arrival of Columbus and the beginning of the 20th century. And, interestingly, in contrast to African slavery which targeted mostly adult males, the majority of these Indian slaves were women and children.
About the Speaker: Andrés Reséndez is a professor of history and author. His specialties are early European exploration and colonization of the Americas, the U.S-Mexico border region, and the early history of the Pacific Ocean. His latest book, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award and winner of the 2017 California Book Awards in nonfiction and the 2017 Bancroft Prize from Columbia University. He teaches courses on food and history, Latin America, and Mexico. He is currently working on a new book provisionally titled Conquering the Pacific: The Story of How a Mulatto Pilot and a Friar-Mariner Learned to Navigate the Largest Ocean and Launched our Global World.
Empowering Women in South Asia’s Slums: The Challenges of Environmental Degradation
April 19, 2019 | 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Speakers: Amit Patel, Assistant Professor, McCormack Graduate School for Policy and Global Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston
Ammar Malik, Director, EPoD Research
About the Talk: Environmental degradation reduces the environmental capacity to meet social and ecological needs of societies, which is exacerbated by natural hazards and extreme climate events, and often intensify existing vulnerabilities. Marginalized groups in cities, particularly women and poor, are disproportionately at risk to face negative consequences of such environmental stressors. To better understand relationship between women empowerment and environmental degradation in cities, we surveyed 1,199 households in 12 informal settlements of New Delhi (India), Dhaka (Bangladesh), and Islamabad and Lahore (Pakistan). Using this data, we created the Empowerment in Informal Settlements Index (EISI) and the Women’s Empowerment in Informal Settlements Index (WEISI) that systematically measure men’s and women’s empowerment. We found that women were significantly less empowered than their male counterparts in all three countries, with widest gaps in Pakistan. We tested several linkages between empowerment and measures of environmental degradation using regression analyses and found many significant associations.
About the Speakers:
Amit Patel, PhD: Amit Patel is Assistant Professor at University of Massachusetts Boston’s McCormack Graduate School for Policy and Global Studies. Amit’s research focuses on bottom-up approaches to improve socio-economic outcomes for urban poor. His main research projects funded by the National Science Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Urban Institute, and the World Bank focus on housing and health disparities concerning urban poor living in slums in the Global South. He regularly teaches courses on public policy theories, urban politics and policies, and advanced quantitative methods. Amit has a PhD in public policy from George Mason University and prior training in management, urban and regional planning, and architecture. When he is not in the field or in front of the computer, you will find him behind the camera.
Ammar Malik: Ammar A. Malik is the Director of EPoD Research. He leads research-policy engagements that derive actionable policy insights from rigorous research. He oversees EPoD’s labor market and education research portfolios in the Middle East, identifying and supporting opportunities for data and economic analysis to inform local policies that empower underrepresented groups and support social and economic development.
Hard Data: Adventures in Evidence Collection
April 12, 2019 | 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Speakers: Charity Moore, India Research Director
Sonya Suter, Senior Program Manager
About the Speakers:
Charity Moore: Charity Troyer Moore is the India Research Director for Evidence for Policy Design at the Harvard Kennedy School. She leads research-policy engagements with a variety of entities in India to ensure that research is attuned to the problems facing policymakers and integrated into policy design and program implementation. Charity’s research examines how to use technology to improve public service delivery and governance; the drivers and potential solutions to India’s low female labor force participation; land rights; and social protection programs. She holds an M.A. in Economics and Ph.D. in Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics.
Sonya Suter: Sonya Suter is a Senior Program Manager at Evidence for Policy Design where she oversees the management of Rohini Pande’s research portfolio in India, including a range of projects on environment, gender, governance, and financial inclusion. Prior to joining EPoD, Sonya was the Special Assistant to the Managing Director at the World Resources Institute, where she supported the organization’s management team, expansion through international offices, and engagement on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals among other projects. Sonya also worked as a Research Assistant at ICF International on land use and transportation policy and has worked on research projects in Rwanda and Tanzania. Sonya holds an MPA from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and a BA in environmental policy from the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
About the Talk: Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD) is a policy research initiative based at Harvard Kennedy School and working around the globe to improve lives by designing and enabling better policy. In India, we collaborate on research-policy engagements focused on governance, environmental and energy issues, financial inclusion, and gender equality – using theory, economic frameworks, and evidence to identify effective policies, and help build capacity to implement them. However, whether studying barriers to women’s economic empowerment, implementation of social welfare programs, or uptake of clean cookstoves, often the real thing we want to measure (social norms, time use, or even real-time air quality) is elusive –because measurement itself is complex, institutions are not set up for research collaborations, or both. In this seminar, Charity and Sonya will share experiences, lessons, and innovations in data collection from EPoD’s work in India.