BBK Magazine 41

200th Anniversary Edition

On a Mission to Improve Lives

Dr Rachel Glennerster CMG (PhD Economics, 2004)

Dr Rachel Glennerster CMG is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, having previously served as Chief Economist at the Foreign Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) in the UK. Throughout her career, Rachel has sought to reduce poverty worldwide by ensuring policy is informed by rigorous scientific evidence.

I can’t understand the argument of fixing poverty in our own country first. People are worse off in other countries so that’s where we should spend our energy!”

Improving the lives of people in developing countries has been the focus of Rachel’s life work. “There is nothing more important,” Rachel affirms. “Everything else pales into insignificance when you spend time in low- and middle-income countries and see the challenges people are facing.”

In Egypt, aged 18, she was “fascinated by how different and yet how similar people’s lives were. People had similar motivations, such as caring for children, having enough to eat and being in good health, but were operating under very different constraints.”

After studying PPE at Oxford, Rachel completed a Master’s in Economics at Birkbeck and then returned to pursue a PhD. “While working as a policy economist in the Treasury and International Monetary Fund (IMF), I was an intermediary between the policy world and the academic world. I had to develop my skill set in both disciplines and Birkbeck enabled me to do that, while juggling a career and being a mother.”

From 2004 to 2017, Rachel played a crucial role in developing the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), an economics research centre at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She pioneered the use of randomised trials to test and compare the outcomes of new economic policies and cites it as one of her proudest career achievements.

In 2018, Rachel returned to the UK Civil Service as a Chief Economist. “I loved mentoring economists and working in an environment focused on evidence-based decision-making.” Rachel provided advice to ministers and senior officials on the most effective ways to address international development challenges, and advised on Covid-19 vaccine policy, drawing on economic analysis of the best ways to spur vaccine innovation and scale up production.

Now, having moved fully into academia as an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, Rachel is looking into women’s empowerment initiatives. She is studying the long-term impact of a programme in Bangladesh that sent money to families with adolescent daughters to offset the financial pressures on families to marry their daughters while they are still children. “I’ve morphed into an academic over time as I started to do my own research”, Rachel says. “My time at Birkbeck persuaded me that I could make that switch and enjoy it.”

When asked what motivates her, Rachel states, “I believe we have a responsibility to people everywhere in the world. Richer countries are not even close to doing enough. I can never understand the argument of fixing poverty in our own country first. People are worse off in other countries so that’s where we should spend our energy!”