Institutions
Mango Tree Educational Enterprises
Ichuli Institute
Senior Technical Consultant
Victoria Brown, M.S. is an Education, Monitoring and Evaluation and Development Consultant at Ichuli Consulting. She has eleven years of professional experience in education and development, including communication and educational tool design, curriculum development and manual writing, training and capacity building, strategic analysis, assessment, monitoring and evaluation. Special emphasis on local language and English literacy education, literacy and numeracy assessments using EGRA, EGMA and EGWA, life skills and behavior change communication, needs assessments, large impact evaluations and RCTs for education and health programming, and results dissemination through interactive seminars.
Principal Investigators
Rebecca Thornton, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on health, education, and the status of women in developing countries. Across these topics, her work addresses core issues within Economics, including the role of subjective beliefs in decision-making and how social networks influence behavior and beliefs. Dr. Thornton has been the principal or co-investigator on studies in India, Jordan, Malawi, Nicaragua, Nepal, and Uganda.
Jason Kerwin, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at the University of Minesota, specializing in the use of randomized field experiments to understand health and labor markets in sub-Saharan Africa. His research topics fall into two broad areas. The first is studying how people form subjective expectations and how those beliefs affect their decision-making processes. The second is labor markets in rural Africa, broadly defined – from choices people make about their effort at work and how to spend their wages to their decisions about their own and their childrens’ education.
Jeff Smith, Ph.D. is a Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin. His research centers on methods for the evaluation of social programs such as job training for the disadvantaged. He has also written papers examining the labor market effects of university quality and the use of statistical treatment rules to assign persons to government programs.
Julie Buhl-Wiggers, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at the Copenhagen Business School, Department of Economics. Her research focuses on education and specifically understanding how to improve the quality of education, through the use of randomized evaluations. Her research topics centers around teachers and teaching methods such as including technology into teaching practices.