Maha Rehman

Maha, a researcher, has extensive experience in designing and executing evidence-based programs, products and policies to improve service delivery and impact.

Over the past two years, she actively engaged in multi-pronged analytical response to COVID in Pakistan tracking the disease incidence and economic indicators, predicting disease outbreak using SEIR Modelling, assessing impact on income, unemployment and remittances and evaluating the efficacy of various policies. She is affiliated with NORMS Mask intervention, as a researcher and Pakistan lead, co-designing and evaluating urban variant of the mask NORM model. More importantly, she has led, designed and evaluated interventions to address vaccine hesitancy in Lahore, Pakistan and co-led intervention in Bihar, India. The vaccine intervention in Lahore inspired the intervention design in Bihar, India.

Prior to that she setup the Analytics Wing at CERP that is focused on embedding data in the decisions and operations of private and public sector companies to increase efficiency, impact and profit. She has also led research experiments at CERP and at World Bank in the fields of education, public finance and governance. She combines her coursework in economics with her interest in entrepreneurship and is also a Pakistan Acumen Fellow, 2016. She frequently writes for DAWN and other daily publications and blogs. Currently, she is the Director Policy at Mahbub-ul-Haq Research Centre at LUMS and a faculty member in the LUMS Economics Department.

She has completed her graduate studies in Economics from Duke University, USA and has an undergraduate degree in Economics and Mathematics from LUMS. She has designed curriculum and taught policymakers, bureaucrats and data practitioners at various programs in USA and Pakistan.

Besides using data analytics for policy and program reform, her current research interests include public health, energy, environment and implementation within bureaucracies.