An advance market commitment (AMC) is a promise to buy or subsidise a product if it is successfully developed. AMCs are typically offered by governments or private foundations to encourage the development of vaccines or treatments. In exchange, pharmaceutical companies commit to providing doses at a fixed price. This funding mechanism is used when the cost of research and development is too high to be worthwhile for the private sector without a guarantee of a certain quantity of purchases.
Busia is a county in the former Western Province of Kenya. It is located directly east of the border town of Busia, Uganda, and borders Lake Victoria to the southwest, Siaya County to the southeast, and Bungoma County and Kakamega County to the east. The county is composed of six sub-counties, and had a population of 893,681 as of the most recent census in 2019.
Michael Robert Kremer is an American development economist currently serving as University Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago and Director of the Development Innovation Lab at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. Kremer formerly served as the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at Harvard University, a role he held from 2003 to 2020. In 2019, Kremer was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."
Economics of corruption deals with the misuse of public power for private benefit and its economic impact on society. This discipline aims to study the causes and consequences of corruption and how it affects the economic functioning of the state.
Esther Duflo, FBA is a French-American economist currently serving as the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2019, she was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences alongside Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is an Indian-born American economist who is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), an MIT based global research center promoting the use of scientific evidence to inform poverty alleviation strategies. In 2019, Banerjee shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." He and Esther Duflo are married, and became the sixth married couple to jointly win a Nobel or Nobel Memorial Prize.
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a global research center based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology aimed to reducing poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by rigorous, scientific evidence. J-PAL funds, provides technical support to, and disseminates the results of randomized controlled trials evaluating the efficacy of social interventions in health, education, agriculture, and a range of other fields. As of 2020, the J-PAL network consisted of 500 researchers and 400 staff, and the organization's programs had impacted over 400 million people globally. The organization has regional offices in seven countries around the world, and is headquartered near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Marachi are one of sixteen tribes of the Luhya people of Kenya, making up approximately one percent of the Luyha. They are one of the three Luhya groups occupying Busia County, along with the Bakhayo and the Samia.
The Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), earlier known as the Center of Evaluation for Global Action, is a research network based at the University of California that advances global health and development through impact evaluation and economic analysis. The Center's researchers use randomized controlled trials and other rigorous forms of evaluation to promote sustainable social and economic development around the world.
Rachel Glennerster is a British economist. She is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. She has been announced as the new president for the Center for Global Development, starting in September 2024.
Robin Burgess is a British economist who is Professor of Economics, Co-founder and Director of the International Growth Centre, as well as Co-Founder and Director of the Economics of Energy and the Environment (EEE) program at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Mass deworming, is one of the preventive chemotherapy tools, used to treat large numbers of people, particularly children, for worm infections notably soil-transmitted helminthiasis, and schistosomiasis in areas with a high prevalence of these conditions. It involves treating everyone – often all children who attend schools, using existing infrastructure to save money – rather than testing first and then only treating selectively. Serious side effects have not been reported when administering the medication to those without worms, and testing for the infection is many times more expensive than treating it. Therefore, for the same amount of money, mass deworming can treat more people more cost-effectively than selective deworming. Mass deworming is one example of mass drug administration.
Pascaline Dupas is a French economist whose research focuses on development economics and applied microeconomics, with a particular interest in health, education, and savings. She is a professor in economics and public affairs at Princeton University and is a co-chair of the Poverty Action Lab's health sector. She received the Best Young French Economist Prize in 2015.
Paul William Glewwe is an economist and Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota. His research interests include economic development and growth, the economics of the public sector, and poverty and welfare. He formerly was the Director of the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy and served as co-chair of the education programme of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).
Kenya is a lower middle income economy, with Kenya's GDP hitting $150 billion as of 2024. This is due to increasing technology innovation services. Although Kenya's economy is the largest and most developed in eastern and Central Africa, 63% (2023/2024) of its population lives below the international poverty line. This severe poverty is caused by economic inequality, government corruption and health problems. In turn, poverty also worsens these factors. The Kenyan government's efforts to address poverty have received help from international institutions as well. The incident rate of poverty has steadily decreased, as shown by a recent MPI index.
The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences, abbreviated BITSS, is an academic initiative dedicated to advancing transparency, reproducibility, and openness in social science research. It was established in 2012 by the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Effective Global Action. It has worked with the Center for Open Science to define and promote a set of best practices for social scientists to maximize transparency in their research. BITSS has also worked to promote registered reports, supporting journals like the Journal of Development Economics in taking up the review track.
Catherine D. Wolfram is an American micro-economist, academic, and researcher who is the William Barton Rogers Professor in Energy and a Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Previously, she served as a Cora Jane Flood Professor of Business Administration and associate dean for academic affairs at the Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley where she also served as a faculty director of The E2e Project and as scientific director for energy and the environment at Center for Effective Global Action. She also directed the National Bureau of Economic Research's Environment and Energy Economics Program.
The 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded jointly to the economist couple Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo-Banerjee and their colleague Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty". Banerjee and Duflo are the sixth married couple to jointly win a Nobel Prize. The press release of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted:
"The research conducted by this year's Laureates has considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty. In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research. They have laid the foundations of the best way to design measures that reduce global poverty"
The Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) is a professional association founded in 2002 to encourage research and scholarship in development economics. The association organizes conferences and seminars, disseminates a working paper series, and maintains a network of fellows and affiliates. The current presidents are Pascaline Dupas and Imran Rasul.
Evidence Action is an American non-profit organization founded in 2013 that scales cost-effective development interventions with rigorous evidence supporting their efficacy. The organization operates four main programs: the Deworm the World Initiative, Safe Water Now, Equal Vitamin Access, and Syphilis-Free Start. It also operates an Accelerator program, whereby new development interventions are screened and scaled according to efficacy. Vox Media has described Evidence Action as taking a "VC approach to development work".
