I study poverty, food security, and nutrition in low-income countries, with a particular focus on measuring them well and testing what actually works.
I’m a development economist and a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), in its Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion unit and based in Washington, DC. I co-edit Food Policy.
I work mostly with large-scale household surveys and randomized controlled trials, testing which policies — from social protection to better-functioning food markets — actually improve these outcomes. I’ve spent much of my career close to the data itself: I lived and worked in Ethiopia and Tanzania, and have helped run major survey rounds in both, including Tanzania’s long-running Kagera panel.
Survey data collection I’m currently running or closely involved in.
One of the longest-running longitudinal surveys in Africa. Since the early 1990s it has tracked individuals from the Kagera region of north-western Tanzania — wherever they have since moved — and, increasingly, their children, making it possible to trace how poverty, health, and opportunity pass from one generation to the next. I first joined as a field-based survey expert on the 2010 round; wave 7 is in the field now.
A set of evaluations of efforts to lift smallholder coffee yields and incomes — from a multi-arm trial of bundled extension, credit, and women’s-group interventions to a focused study of whether tree rejuvenation pays for farmers. In the field through 2028.
For the full archive of IFPRI briefs, reports, and working papers, see CGSpace →
Convert monetary values across PPP, USD, and LCU using World Development Indicators deflators.
ssc install wdi_deflateopen ↗Convert dates from the Ethiopian calendar to the Gregorian calendar.
ssc install eth2grecalopen ↗Data and documentation for the Kagera Health and Development Survey — the 30-year Tanzania panel.
open ↗Strengthen PSNP Institutions and Resilience Phase II — full household datasets from the baseline, midline, and endline survey rounds.