This summer, I will be embarking on an exciting summer internship at the World Bank’s Mind, Behavior, and Development Unit (eMBeD). This is the behavioral sciences team in the Poverty and Equity Global Practice which works closely with World Bank project teams, governments, and other partners to diagnose, design, and evaluate behaviorally informed interventions. eMBeD provides answers to important economic and social questions to eliminate poverty and increase equity using randomized control trials (RCTs) and behavioral insights approaches.
As a summer intern, I will be conducting research on topics across climate and energy, gender, health, and education. I will be preparing instruments and diagnostic tools for data collection for fieldwork, and will be supporting the design implementation and data analysis of randomized control trials (RCTs). I will be conducting statistical analysis to gather insights and results from RCTs to uncover how behavioral insights can support the successful implementation of development programs.
My tentative internship project is around the role of behavioral science in driving clean cooking adoption in Africa. Clean cooking is highly linked with gender. Women are the primary cooks in households across developing countries and are thus most affected by the severe health consequences of unclean cookstoves. Women also largely bear the physical drudgery of carrying firewood to fuel unclean cookstoves. Moreover, while women are the most affected by toxic fumes from cookstoves, research shows that they are not always the primary decision-makers when it comes to purchasing and usage decisions for clean cookstoves.
It is imperative to study the behavioral aspects of what drives decisions to purchase and use clean cookstoves in order to design effective programs that drive adoption. Increased adoption of clean cookstoves has a direct consequence on the health and well-being of women.
My goal during this project would be to dig deeper into the interplay of gender dynamics within households to locate the barriers these might pose to clean cooking adoption. I believe that causal and robust research can be transformative for improving interventions that seek to increase adoption.
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