Seeking Scalable Solutions to Poverty

Mushfiq Mobarak, Director of  the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE) and Professor of Economics, describes the arc of his research on scalable, evidence-based policy responses to the deprivations of poverty. This year, Mobarak and his team repurposed their existing research infrastructure to respond to the COVID crisis—building ties in Bangladesh that could be valuable long after the pandemic passes.

Q: How do you describe the long-term focus of your work?

I’m a development economist. I work to understand why some countries are poor and others are rich, and what we can do about the deprivation that comes with poverty. I focus particularly on the challenge of encouraging adoption of technically effective solutions—insurance to manage risk, cleaner stoves to address respiratory illness, toilets to address diarrheal diseases. 

When we try to market these solutions, often people are unwilling to adopt something new and different. As social scientists, we’re trying to understand why is it so difficult to change people’s behavior even for things that are apparently beneficial and sensible. If we better understand what constraints people are under, we’re able to design policies to address those constraints. 

Q: What led you to launch the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE)?

It was a natural progression. Once we design a solution that works in a randomized control trial, we want to implement it at scale to have a positive effect on more people’s lives. But it turns out that something that works for 2,000 people in a pilot study doesn’t necessarily scale up to work for 200,000. Complexities appear. New problems arise. 

I realized scaling itself needed to be a subject of rigorous research. That led to Y-RISE. We’re addressing a gap in the research and hopefully charting a constructive path forward that makes best use of the existing research methods and combines it with some novel techniques in order to navigate the complexities that arise at scale.

Q: How did you come to this work?

I can trace a great deal of my research back to things I encountered growing up in Bangladesh. Obviously, at the time I didn’t have the skills to conduct research, but exposure to the problems shaped my thinking.

For example, the country didn’t produce enough electricity. We would lose power for a few hours a day, especially during peak demand periods. Around eighth grade, I spent a summer in Chittagong, a city in the southeast. It was extremely hot—100 degrees Fahrenheit and 100% humidity. The number and frequency of outages that summer was just crazy. We couldn’t afford air conditioners anyway, but no electricity also meant no fans. I just stayed in swimming trunks because the only way to cool off was to go under the shower periodically. 

That led me to question why the electricity situation was so bad in that city. I learned it is the only part of the country that is hilly enough to have hydropower. To generate hydropower, you need slope and you need water flow. Because of a drought, the hydropower generation was very low that year, which is why the problem was so extreme.

Many years later, I returned to questions about electrification and the basic mechanics of hydropower to design a study in Brazil. I’m working on another project on electrification in Sierra Leone.

I also remember reading newspaper articles about seasonal hunger among agricultural workers, and this became a subject of a body of research I have been working on, 20 years later. And I did a 10th-grade social studies project on the downstream impacts of damming a river that crosses jurisdictional boundaries from Nepal to India to Bangladesh. I returned to those problems too, once I had the training to work on them systematically.

Q: When did you decide economics was the discipline that interested you?

When I was 13 years old, I went to a boarding school in India. It was life changing. I took my first economics class there. Early on, I was attracted to the sciences because I really liked the rigorous structure and mathematics-based approach to solving problems. But the questions you answer in a lab are too abstract for me. When I was introduced to economics, I realized that economics applies similar structures to social problems that I found more interesting to think about. 

Attending that school was important for two additional reasons. First, in Bangladesh, all of the subjects were taught in Bengali. I had very limited exposure to English. In India, the medium of instruction was English. That allowed me to learn a language in high school which turned to be very important for effective communication in my chosen field. 

Second, I think there is some deficiency in the education system in Bangladesh. The country is rich in terms of human talent, but the curriculum is focused on rote learning and memorization. It isn’t conducive to thinking, analyzing, and questioning. One outcome of that: I’m one of the only Bangladeshi professors at Yale, whereas there are Indian professors across all departments at Yale. 

Q: You’ve been working with the government in Bangladesh during the pandemic. What lessons have you learned?

I’ve learned there’s an immense reservoir of talent in Bangladesh—people working in public health, engineering, IT, and many other disciplines. They have come together to solve problems emerging from this crisis. We weren’t taking advantage of that talent because those connections hadn’t formed, but they have now.