Visiting a women’s livelihood center in Morocco
Describe your experiences with the Institute and its immersive education.
One of the first things I did at Tufts as a freshman was join the Institute for Global Leadership. In fact, IGL was one of the main reasons I chose to attend Tufts in the first place. Exposure to the Oslo Scholars program during my senior year of high school convinced me that Tufts had the international focus and opportunities that I was interested in. I joined EPIIC Global Health and Security as a freshman, and over my 6 years at Tufts (4 as an undergraduate and 2 at Fletcher) I was involved in EMPOWER, Oslo Scholars, NIMEP, FieldEx, and others. I also co-founded the Tufts Latin America Committee that became part of the IGL in 2015.
IGL shaped my experience as a student at Tufts in two ways. First, it offered a challenging and insightful environment in the classroom where, by being exposed to a variety of perspectives and tough questions, my learning experience was enhanced. Second, IGL provided the unique opportunity to have international hands-on experiences that were essential to shaping my career. For instance, it was through the IGL that I was able to do a summer internship at the World Bank. This positive experience contributed to my decision to return to the World Bank after completing my master’s. Throughout my involvement with IGL, Sherman’s mentorship and guidance was and continues to be invaluable to me.
How have these many activities at the Institute opened up opportunities and provided you with mentors?
While at Tufts, the opportunity to do research and internships abroad was invaluable. For instance, my experience with NIMEP in Jordan, Junaid at the World Bank and BRAC in Sierra Leone gave me a lot of exposure and helped me understand the international development sector fairly well. This is why I think I was excited to start my master's right after undergrad. They also opened the doors to a lot of opportunities I wouldn't have had access to otherwise. My experience with Junaid at the World Bank in particular was amazing because not only did he offer mentorship, but he also encouraged me to make the most for my experience at the World Bank. During my time in DC I spent a lot of time speaking to people who were happy to mentor me and it was in great part through these conversations that I identified my interest in the intersection of development and humanitarian emergencies. Most recently, the Convisero community has continued to be a source of mentorship for me. For example, Dan offered amazing career advise and access to his networks in the region that have been invaluable for me.
How will you engage with the Convisero community?
I definitely want to remain very actively engaged with the Convisero community, by continuing to exchange ideas with its members. In particular, I look forward to mentoring younger students or recent graduates who are interested in international development, in the same way that so many mentors helped me.
What are your intellectual passions?
I am working on expanding the work I did on my master’s thesis on coping mechanisms to drought and hopefully publishing a paper about it in the near future. Though my work right now focuses on specific projects, my core passion has always been broader policy and understanding how everything is connected. For example, given that I am currently working in an area that is affected by severe drought and previously worked in a conflict zone, understanding the nexus between humanitarian response and sustainable, long term development policy is something I have focused on a lot. I was recently surprised to find a UN document from the 1970’s that talked about this nexus, given that the discourse today continues to treat it as something that is new and upcoming. The fact that the humanitarian and development sectors remain separate and that synergies between them are yet to be fully understood or developed is concerning. On a more personal note, writing fiction has always been a passion that I am not trying to pursue more seriously as well.
Your aspirations?
In the short-term, I would like to continue to learn from mentors and friends to gain more experience and a nuanced understanding of key issues in development. In the medium to long term, I wish to work on broader international development and humanitarian policy. I am particularly interested in resilience and system-building and response.
What are your thoughts and critiques of aid assistance, and your reaction to the Jameel Poverty Action Lab winning the Nobel Prize in Economics?
I believe that the development sector still has many flaws but also important strengths. For instance, power dynamics in the aid sector are extremely pronounced and often shape relationships between donors and recipients in negative and unsustainable ways.
I was delighted when Kremer, Duflo and Banerjee won the Nobel as I believe that it is a big win for development economics and will give a lot more visibility to the benefits of this type of work. Randomized Controlled Trials and other impact evaluation methods can help assess the effectiveness of interventions and provide information on how to best use scarce resources. They are the basis of evidence-based decision-making in development which I think is crucial. That being said, there are certainly limitations to RCTs and I find that using them as panaceas is very dangerous. Experimental work can also be easily manipulated to yield particular results in a specific case that then compromises how generalizable they are and their policy relevance. I believe that the more investments in RCTs focus their policy relevance, the more the aid sector will benefit.
You are to me essentially a "cosmopolitan" - a world citizen. How does rising global ethno-nationalism impact your thinking?
It is definitely concerning to watch the rise of ethno-nationalism around the globe. I am very interested in humanitarian response, and issues of migration and forced displacement are extremely relevant to my work. In the past year I have had a lot of conversations with mentors at the World Bank and other organizations about refugee policy. Something that strikes me is that policy-makers seem to be increasingly clueless about how to address negative reactions within host communities to the presence of migrants and refugees. Evidence suggests that refugees and migrants bring more benefits than drawbacks to a society, and there is little relationship between numbers and the popular discourse, which means that negative reactions are entirely political in nature. It really saddens me to see how this and other issues have been exploited by the ethno-nationalist discourse to serve political gains at the expense of logical and evidence-based policy.