Women’s Economic Empowerment and Human Development: A Meta-Analysis
Independent academic research — University of Göttingen · 2024
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This systematic review and meta-analysis assessed studies published between 1990 and 2018 to evaluate the impact of policy interventions promoting women’s economic empowerment on household-level human development indicators. The study applied a conceptual framework centred on interventions targeting women’s economic conditions through financial inclusion, entrepreneurship, care work, and agricultural labour, and examined how these interventions translate into measurable improvements in household well-being.
Key Skills and Expertise: Systematic review methodology, meta-analysis and quantitative evidence synthesis, and technical expertise in gender mainstreaming.
Connections Matter: How Quality Governance and Institutions May Be the Booster Shot We Need to Reduce Poverty and Inequality
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oslo Governance Centre · 2022–2023
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This policy report examined the interlinkages between SDG 16 (peace, justice and strong institutions), SDG 1 (no poverty) and SDG 10 (reduced inequalities), assessing how different governance modalities shape poverty and inequality outcomes across low- and middle-income countries. My contribution involved developing the initial conceptual framework for the systematic review, with a specific focus on how governance structures and institutions can mainstream social protection, social policy, and social reproduction (unpaid care work) as core components of institutional design.
Key Skills and Expertise: Systematic literature review, conceptual framework design, and governance-sensitive policy analysis linking institutional design to social protection and social reproduction outcomes.
Health Financing in Times of Multiple Crises: Analysis and Recommendations
German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), for the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) · 2024
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This policy brief addresses health financing gaps affecting countries in the Global South during periods of overlapping crisis. My specific contribution examined financing mechanisms for healthcare workers and caregivers, who frequently constitute the sole point of healthcare access in under-resourced settings, despite being systematically undervalued in terms of remuneration, social protection, and employment security. The analysis traced the social, economic, and political constraints healthcare workers navigate to sustain basic preventative and curative care delivery.
Key Skills and Expertise: Health financing and social protection policy analysis, evidence synthesis for policy recommendations, and technical writing on the recognition and reward of paid and unpaid care work, framed around the 5R Framework used in current care economy programming.
Promoting Women’s Economic Empowerment: What Works
Centre for Global Development (CGD), as part of the GROW Project, University of Göttingen · 2017
As a consultant engaged through the GROW project, I conducted a systematic review and evidence-mapping exercise, compiling the operational data subsequently used in Buvinic’s influential report on women’s economic empowerment. The project consolidated evidence on a wide range of policy interventions designed to enhance and improve women’s economic empowerment, translating academic research into an operational, policy-ready resource for practitioners and policymakers.
Key Skills and Expertise: Systematic review and evidence mapping, operational data compilation, and translation of academic evidence into practice-oriented policy resources.
Subjective Returns to Education: Rational Expectations of Disadvantaged Groups
Independent published study with UNU-WIDER · 2020
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Drawing on primary survey data and extensive fieldwork across public schools in Mumbai, this study examined how students from marginalised or disadvantaged backgrounds form expectations about their future earnings in a labour market characterised by discrimination. The analysis disaggregated subjective beliefs across three social dimensions — gender, religion, and caste — and found that although real labour market data show that lower-caste groups (Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes) face measurably lower financial returns, students’ own expectations of future earnings did not differ significantly from those of their more advantaged peers.
Key Skills and Expertise: Distributional regression analysis, behavioural impact evaluation techniques, and innovative primary survey design.
Retailer Concentration and Agricultural Value Chains: Europe and the Rest of the World
Research collaboration with the BioKraftkeller Collective · 2026 (Forthcoming)
This report examines market concentration among the four dominant retailers controlling Germany’s grocery and food-supply sector. Across four chapters, the study analyses the absence of competitive market structures in German food retail; the labour exploitation sustained across Global South exporting countries that enables artificially low and stable consumer food prices in Germany; the structural inequality embedded in agricultural value chains, whereby value addition and profit accrue disproportionately to downstream retailers rather than producing farmers; and the role of financialization and financial deregulation in driving market consolidation, commodity speculation, and price volatility that has decoupled food prices from production costs and intensified food insecurity during periods of crisis.
Key Skills and Expertise: Global value chain and trade analysis, macroeconomic and market-concentration analysis, and applied research on labour standards in Global South–Global North agricultural trade.
The Bretton Woods Institutions, Austerity, and Social Protection
IBON International, “Towards a People’s History of the IMF-World Bank” collection (Chapter 8) · 2024
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This chapter examines the role of the World Bank and IMF in shaping social protection outcomes across the Global South since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights first articulated a right to social security. Drawing on the gap between normative commitments and actual coverage — only 29 percent of the population in low- and middle-income countries were covered by comprehensive social benefits prior to the pandemic — this chapter argues that IMF and World Bank loan conditionalities have systematically enforced austerity and constrained countries’ capacity to build long-term, rights-based social protection systems. It analyses the comparative failure of narrowly targeted programmes (including proxy means-testing) relative to universal social protection models, and traces how austerity-driven privatisation and financialization have pushed the delivery of social protection toward private fintech and microfinance actors, with disproportionate consequences for women, informal workers, children and the elderly.
Key Skills and Expertise: Political economy analysis of international financial institutions and the development finance agenda, debt and austerity policy analysis, comparative evaluation of targeted versus universal social protection models, and policy writing for civil-society and social-movement audiences.