Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak wants to find out what makes antipoverty programs effective
No one likes failure. That’s especially true when failure leads to terrible consequences: a family not being fed, constant power outages, widespread death from a pandemic.
The financial and human consequences of failure are even bigger for decisions at the level of a region or whole country. Growing up in Bangladesh, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, an economics professor at Yale, witnessed how the actions of the government and NGOs could impact lives for better or worse. Untangling how to make these programs work for as many people as possible is what Mobarak has done every day for the last 20 years.
Mobarak has worked in areas from air pollution to sanitation, but perhaps the most famous example from his research, illustrating the importance of scaling up such work, is seasonal migration. In widely cited experiments, Mobarak’s team found that giving low-income people in Bangladesh some money to temporarily move to the city to work during the “lean season” increased their family incomes.
This experiment was part of an effort to make the international development field more evidence-based. Through randomized controlled trials (RCTs), researchers can test the effectiveness of programs — in this case, giving people money to temporarily migrate to find a job — with some randomly selected people, and comparing the outcomes of the people who got the program with those who didn’t.