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Project
Knowledge is power: A scoping study on women’s safety
Bihar is ranked 3rd highest in terms of the percentage of women (nearly 43.2%) who experienced physical, sexual or emotional spousal violence (NFHS-4, 2017). Moreover, evidence suggests that the actual, as well as the perceived threat of women being attacked outside the home often deter them from working outside (Sudarshan, 2009; Chakraborty et. al, 2018). These alarming...
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Project
Addressing financial inclusion in rural India: the role of information and peer pressure
Financial inclusion is considered to be an important aspect of the promotion of economic growth. Despite a significant increase in formal financial account ownership in recent years, a vast majority of adults in developing countries, and in particular women, still do not use them regularly. The aim of this project is to understand the factors that influence the usage of...
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Project
She Wins- Electing women in ethnically divided societies: The case of Bihar
Prior research on gender and politics in India focuses on efforts to increase the number of women holding office. Few researchers, however, have addressed why, in ethnically diverse democracies like India, some women candidates are successful while others are not. Existing research does little to differentiate women candidates by constituency characteristics, much less by...
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Project
Scoping paper and support for REB teacher recruitment process
The Rwanda Education Board will be managing the recruitment and deployment of teachers nationwide, as previously these decisions were managed by local (district) governments. This provides an opportunity to address key sources of inefficiency that are typical of human resource challenges in civil services around the developing world including high levels of churn, low...
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Project
Support for RSSB strategy and data infrastructure
The Rwanda Social Security Board (RSSB) is deeply embedded into the Rwandan economy, providing substantial financial buoyancy to the banking and construction sector, and its programmes are critical to protecting the welfare of citizens and providing citizens protections as they transition out of low productivity agriculture to higher productivity employment. However, the...
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Project
The cost of congestion in Kampala, Uganda
Traffic congestion is a major issue in cities around the world, particularly in developing countries, with potentially negative effects on outcomes ranging from economic activity to health. This project aims to estimate the cost of traffic congestion, i.e. commuter time lost, in Kampala, Uganda, in time and monetary terms. The study is based on a direct request from the...
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Project
The value of electricity reliability in India
In many low- and middle-income countries, frequent and prolonged power outages constrain energy access for large segments of the population connected to the electricity grid. For policymakers in these countries, the value of electricity reliability to customers is a central policy parametre for understanding the benefits of expanding energy access by reforming tariff design...
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Project
Emissions rating programme: Environmental impacts and firm behaviour
Several countries have used emissions rating programmes to incentivise industrial plants to comply with emissions standards and maintain low levels of pollution. Such programmes function by using regularly monitored emissions data from major industrial plants to rate firms from the least compliant to the most compliant. Besides making environmental performance more...
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Project
Teacher rotation and student outcomes: Experimental evidence from Uganda
On a given day, 27% of Ugandan teachers do not attend class (Chaudhury et al, 2006). Even when teachers in Uganda and other developing countries come to school, they do not necessarily teach, and students do not necessarily learn. Only three out of ten students can read and comprehend a simple story by grade three, and only eight out of ten can do so by grade seven...
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Project
Experimental impacts of Tanzania’s conditional cash transfer on household investment choices (follow-up)
Tanzania’s Productive Social Safety Net (PSSN) programme is the second-largest government-run conditional cash transfer (CCT) programme in Africa. Funded mainly by the Government of Tanzania and the World Bank - and implemented by the Tanzania Social Action Fund (TASAF) - the aim of the PSSN is to increase income and consumption and to help vulnerable populations cope...
Project
Female politicians and economic growth: Evidence from state elections in India
The project studies close elections between men and women for election to India's state legislative assemblies. It finds significantly higher growth in economic activity in constituencies that elect women. Given average GDP growth in India of about 7% per year (during the study period), the researchers estimate the growth premium for constituencies from having a...