Presentation by MIT GOV/LAB practitioner-in-residence, Anisha Singh from Busara. This event is in-person on the MIT campus. Free and open to the general public. Lunch will be served between 12:00-12:30 PM, and the presentation will begin promptly after that. RSVP by September 16. Read our full report of the event here.
Description
A lot of behavioral science research has taken place in WEIRD contexts (western, educated, industrialized, rich, developed), so what are sometimes thought of as universal behavioral norms might not exist everywhere in the world. In conducting research in the Global South, Busara works with local partners to ensure they’re gathering solid evidence for how people behave in under-studied areas.
Anisha Singh, Director for Research and Innovation at Busara, is MIT GOV/LAB’s current practitioner-in-residence, a program that provides partners with resources to develop new projects and space to reflect on and share their experiences in the field. During her residency, Anisha will be creating a microsite of behavioral science resources to help civil society organizations, researchers, academics, and policy makers to apply behavioral science insights to better address research questions, and improve their programs and policies, especially in the Global South.
In the presentation, Anisha will speak about using behavioral lab experiments for governance related questions, and share an example of previous work. Furthermore, she will be speaking about her work at MIT GOV/LAB, and contextual learnings applying behavioral science in the Global South.
Anisha Singh
Anisha Singh is the Director for Research and Innovation at Busara, and leads a portfolio of academic collaborations and experiments that focus on creating new knowledge around behavioral mechanisms and behavioral interventions in the Global South. She is also a Practitioner-in-Residence at MIT GOV/LAB collating stories and learnings on running behavioral lab experiments for policy-making from around the world. Additionally, she teaches Behavioral Experiments for International Development at the University of Chicago.
Busara Center for Behavioral Economics, based in Nairobi, Kenya, is an organization that works with researchers and organizations to advance and apply behavioral science in pursuit of poverty alleviation.
MIT Governance Lab is a research group and innovation incubator that aims to change practice around government accountability and citizen voice. mitgovlab.org.
MIT GOV/LAB’s practitioner-in-residence program provides resources for practitioner partners to share lessons learned and explore new research ideas. In 2021, we hosted Luke Jordan, Founder and Executive Director of Grassroot in South Africa. At MIT, Luke published ‘Don’t Build It’, a practitioner guide on how to start a new civic technology project titled, and conducted exploratory research on predicting the outcomes of development aid projects using machine learning.
Header Image: Marianne Bos, Unsplash.