Visiting lecturers
Through our university teaching partnerships, we work with institutions in Africa and South Asia to strengthen the core of development economics training and build long-term research capacity.
About
We support universities to design and deliver modular courses embedded within existing degree programmes. These courses cover applied econometrics, research design, data collection and policy writing, alongside thematic areas such as urban or environmental economics. The emphasis is practical: students learn how to frame research questions, work with data, and communicate findings in ways that inform policy.
By integrating rigorous empirical training into formal curricula, the programme reaches entire cohorts rather than a few individuals. It strengthens supervision, raises teaching standards, and equips students and junior faculty with the tools required for high-quality empirical work. Courses also create clear pathways into mentorship, research assistant roles, and competitive grant funding—linking classroom training to active research and policy engagement.
What visiting lecturers do
The model is led by one of our ten partner universities, which retains ownership of the course and its delivery. IGC Visiting Lecturers spend two to four weeks embedded within the department - teaching an intensive course, engaging with graduate students, and working closely with junior faculty. Beyond the classroom, they may contribute to workshops, advise on research design, and participate in research-policy roundtables convened with government counterparts and local stakeholders.
Visiting lecturers work with the host university and IGC country team to ensure that course content reflects national policy priorities and active research debates. The visit also creates space to develop new research ideas, build collaborations with local scholars, and gain a deeper understanding of institutional contexts and data environments. For many academics, the programme serves both as a focused teaching engagement and as a foundation for longer-term research partnerships in the region.
Pedro Naso is a Researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences specialising in environmental economics, with a focus on environmental regulation and natural resource use. During a two-week fellowship at the University of Rwanda, he delivered a PhD seminar on development economics and applied research methods and contributed to a policy roundtable at the Development Bank of Rwanda on using regression discontinuity designs for impact evaluation, attended by multiple government agencies.
Habtamu Beshir is a Research Fellow at University College London specialising in applied econometrics. Returning to his alma mater, Addis Ababa University, he will spend three weeks teaching applied microeconomics to graduate students, using case studies on price shocks and food insecurity to examine impacts on human capital. He will also lead research workshops with the Ethiopian Economics Association and the Development Bank of Ethiopia.
Jeanne Sorin is an Assistant Professor at the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy, where she works on urban, environmental, and spatial economics. During her fellowship, she will spend two weeks at the University of Rwanda teaching an integrated course on environmental and infrastructure challenges in Sub-Saharan African cities, including technical training in quantitative spatial models. She will also meet with policymakers to share evidence from her work on road improvements conducted with Kampala Capital City Authority.
Luis Felipe Saenz is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of South Carolina with research interests in macroeconomics and economic history. Partnering with Dhaka University and the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, he will deliver three weeks of lectures on macroeconomics and structural transformation and run a PhD preparation course for students and junior researchers.
This programme is done in partnership with Structural Transformation and Economic Growth (STEG).