Samantha Carter, J-PAL ‘20, on bringing innovative ideas to life
The Alumni Spotlight series highlights J-PAL alumni who are making an impact across industries and around the world. To nominate a J-PAL alum to be featured in a future Alumni Spotlight, please fill out this form.
Samantha Carter is a former senior policy associate at J-PAL Global, where she played a leading role in managing J-PAL’s government scale-up initiative and the finance sector within the policy team. Now a research and operations manager at Precision Development (PxD), she works to take innovative ideas out of research proposals and into practice. She reflects on her path to building a meaningful career and the complex processes of fundraising for scale-ups and managing field research.
What drew you to the field of development? Tell us a bit about your background and what you were looking for in a career.
I've always known that I wanted to do something that would make a difference in the world. And I used a lot of my classes in both undergraduate and graduate school and my internships to figure out what exactly that would look like—did it mean working in government, at a think tank, did it mean focusing domestically or internationally? And throughout, I've always really liked quantitative reasoning and analytical thinking, which made development economics a good choice.
Now that I think of it, most of my career decisions have been driven by reading a book. I took a class on behavioral economics in which we read Nudge and Thinking, Fast and Slow. Those books, the papers cited in them, and the human behavior modeling skills we learned showed me that you can use economics not just for finance or consulting, but also to understand people and to make a difference in the world.
In grad school, I wanted to continue along the path of using applied microeconomics and statistics to measure program impact. I lucked into reading Poor Economics, which is where I first came across J-PAL and the randomized evaluation movement. I decided that I wanted to work as a research assistant at either J-PAL or Innovations for Poverty Action, so I spent the rest of my grad school experience and internships building toward that goal.
You came to J-PAL after having interned at an impressive array of policy organizations—think tanks, USAID, the US State Department, and the World Bank. How did these shape your path to J-PAL?
A colleague of mine at PxD says that one of the most important things that you can do for your own professional development is understand your strengths and your weaknesses, and think about how you balance them—both figuring out how you can add value naturally, or through your past experience, and also recognizing where you have room for improvement. I used my internships to understand those things about myself.
Through my work at the World Bank and think tanks I gained hard skills like data analysis and working with Excel and Salesforce, but the experiences also helped me become familiar with the process of learning new systems and figuring out when to ask questions. Through these internships I was fortunate to have met a lot of great mentors who helped me understand what my goals were, and what things I should look for in future jobs, and then connected me to the right people to learn more about those jobs.
These experiences also contributed to my knowing that I wanted to work at a place where there was a strong sense of community and a strong shared sense of mission. The people were one of the big reasons that I ended up deciding to work on J-PAL’s Global policy team, because I couldn't imagine not working with the people that I met through the interviews.
You were instrumental in managing J-PAL’s Innovation in Government Initiative (IGI), one of our primary formal means of working with governments to test and scale innovations. Could you give us a behind-the-scenes look at the process of working on a research and scaling initiative, and what some of your main learnings were from that experience?
I had the opportunity to work with Claire Walsh, the Associate Director of Policy at J-PAL Global, to shape IGI. Based on stories of policy change coming out of government/academic partnerships through J-PAL’s regional offices and the Government Partnership Initiative (GPI), IGI’s predecessor that supported a number of research-focused collaborations between academics and governments, we wanted to shift our focus to the scale-up aspect of these partnerships.
To do that pivot, we did an extensive review of what we and partner organizations had done in the past to scale policies, and the successes and failures within that. In addition to a lot of desk research, this involved qualitative interviews with about twenty of J-PAL’s current and former government partners, many based in Latin America.
This review helped us think through how to build a vehicle that will facilitate scale-ups that are likely to succeed, and what criteria we should look for in a proposal. Some specific things we learned to look for, for example, are the quality of the relationship between the researchers and the implementing institution, and whether there was an evidence champion within the government.
And then, of course, we had to fundraise so that we had the resources to support those promising proposals. This meant finding funders who wanted to support the scale-up of evidence-informed policies, which was a challenge for several reasons. At the time, there was a pretty small number of funders who were interested in getting a program from small-scale NGO implementation to large-scale government implementation. The process can be really messy in the middle, which means that funders have a hard time understanding all the steps they’d actually be supporting.
So we had to do quite a lot of work to do to make a case that was compelling to different types of funders. In addition to the fundraising aspect, we also needed to think about selecting a board of academics for IGI, which meant finding a group of researchers who had both the bandwidth to be careful proposal reviewers and experience working with governments to evaluate and scale policies. We also needed to think about which types of innovations had a sufficient evidence base that we would feel comfortable supporting their scale-up.
You’ve since taken your talents to a close partner of J-PAL’s, Precision Development (PxD), formerly known as Precision Agriculture for Development. Could you tell us about your new role?
I’m now a global research and operations manager at Precision Development (PxD), which is both an implementing and a research organization. Our work aims to harness technology, data science, and research to empower people living in poverty and improve their lives. Generally speaking, we work with partners including governments, multilaterals, and other NGOs, to deliver information on their behalf or as a supplement to their existing programming.
Our primary work so far has been in the space of digital agricultural extension services. We send farmers information via their mobile phones in the way that is most appropriate for the context. So in India, we send voice calls, while in Kenya, we send SMS messages in the local language. We're sending them advice that is customized to their particular circumstances, in order to enable them to improve their productivity, therefore improve their yields, and then ultimately increase their profits.
I manage our research in the state of Gujarat in India, where we own and operate our own digital agricultural advisory service called Krishi Tarang (which means “agricultural wave” in Gujarati). Because we operate our own service, without representing a partner organization, we think of our work here as a sandbox for developing new ideas that have the potential to improve our work worldwide, and that of our partner organizations. For example, some of the work that we're doing there is focused on actually not just disseminating information, but collecting information from within farmers’ communities that we can then use to improve either the timeliness or the customization or just the relevance of our advice.
As a research manager, I figure out what the researchers are interested in testing and work with a team including agronomists, tech and product development staff, and research associates to do prototyping and piloting to understand how things can actually work on the ground. Recently, I've spent a bunch of time reading through things like the regulations on how to send mass WhatsApp messages.
On the other end, once we've done the research or collected insights, my job is also to figure out how to apply those insights to the programs in Gujarat and to make the information accessible so that others can think about how to apply it to their own context.
How does it feel to be working in research implementation now, after a policy job at J-PAL?
It's both surprisingly similar and surprisingly different. I think the similarities are that I still think all the time about what the existing evidence says, and how we can apply it to a particular context. I reference J-PAL’s generalizability framework multiple times a week, if not more. I'm now closer to the local context than I am to the global body of evidence, but it's still the same question: How do you link up those two things?
The differences are that I spend a lot more time thinking about very granular implementation questions that wouldn't come up even in the most detailed reading of an academic paper. Anytime I read a paper now in which the authors discuss distributing financial incentives, my first thought is, what were the regulations that they had to go through to make sure they could distribute money to that many participants? How did they actually operationalize it? How did they know that people would be able to receive money in that way, and how did they make sure that the right people received the right amounts?
Precision Development’s work is evolving since rebranding just a couple months ago. Could you tell us more about PxD’s new vision?
When there's an opportunity for information that has the potential to improve lives to be delivered in this really low-cost way (via mobile phones), we don't want to limit ourselves to focusing only on agriculture just because that is where we got our start. The rebranding was more of expansion. It's more an acknowledgement of the fact that our technology, and our approach to doing things, has implications well beyond agriculture. We want to make sure that we can take advantage of those opportunities when they present themselves.
Authored By
Samantha Carter
As a former research manager at J-PAL Europe, Juliette Seban managed several randomized evaluations while pursuing a PhD in development economics. Juliette is now the executive director of France’s new Fund for Innovation in Development (FID). She reflects on her PhD experience, her work at J-PAL and FID, and the importance of keeping fun at the heart of career decisions.
The Alumni Spotlight series highlights J-PAL alumni who are making an impact across industries and around the world. To nominate a J-PAL alum to be featured in a future Alumni Spotlight, please fill out this form.
Juliette Seban is a former research manager at J-PAL Europe, where she managed several randomized evaluations while pursuing a PhD in development economics. Juliette is now the executive director of France’s new Fund for Innovation in Development (FID), which supports innovators and researchers efforts to test, accelerate, and scale the deployment of impactful solutions to reduce poverty and inequalities. She reflects on her PhD experience, her work at J-PAL and FID, and the importance of keeping fun at the heart of career decisions.
What drew you to this type of work?
I don't remember exactly when I chose to do development economics, but what I remember is that I’ve always wanted to do something useful. I decided to study economics in university because I thought it would be about real-world problems. But my early economics classes were very theoretical—I was not exactly passionate about it at first. It wasn’t until I realized that the tools we were learning could actually be applied to improve people's lives. That was a turning point for me.
After finishing my master’s in development economics at the Sorbonne University, I interned at the World Health Organization in Dominican Republic and then at the Center for Global Development (CGD) in Washington, DC. This is where I realized research could actually influence policy and decided to pursue a PhD.
Just before returning to Paris, a colleague at CGD told me that J-PAL was opening up a Europe office and that I should go check it out. As soon as I got back, I met with the team at J-PAL Europe and applied for a job as a part-time research assistant. This was early 2008, just shortly after the office had opened in late 2007—so I was privileged to be part of the very beginning of J-PAL in Europe.
You started as a research assistant at J-PAL, then were promoted to research manager. What was one of the most interesting things about your role, and what did you learn?
I can imagine many sharing the same experience when they’re asked this question: You’re doing one million different things, and that’s how you learn. You do research management, staff management, surveys, data analysis, planning and engaging with all kinds of stakeholders—there's a lot of different things that need to get done to conduct a successful impact evaluation. I really liked this diversity in tasks. The job was certainly never boring!
What I liked the most is that despite my rather young age, I was given a lot of responsibility. J-PAL Europe was a new and small office. So we all had to pitch in across the board to realize all these new projects. Researchers who were part of the team were also super engaged and committed to making it work. While it meant a lot of pressure for me at the time, it was also an incredible opportunity that allowed me to learn a lot and hone my research and management skills.
You started your PhD while working at J-PAL. What was that like?
I had seen researchers at CGD doing amazing research that had an impact on the world, and I decided to get a PhD so I could work in that space. I applied for a part-time research assistant job at J-PAL to give me something interesting and concrete to do while thinking about my PhD. And then I never left! Instead, I got a full time job with J-PAL.
I would never have finished my PhD if I had not simultaneously been working at J-PAL. My work experience at J-PAL very much informed my PhD research. And it gave me a fun, motivating, friendly environment to work in—I definitely needed that to do a PhD. I do not think I could have done a PhD solely in a university environment; it felt too constraining.
How has having a PhD helped your career?
I knew I did not want an academic career, but I knew that I wanted to work at the intersection of research and policy. I wouldn’t recommend a PhD for everyone, but I think having this degree allowed me to pro-actively and constructively engage with other researchers and work closely with them on numerous projects—it helps knowing how to ‘speak their language.’ To be clear: I don’t think it requires a PhD to do so, but in my case, I believe it helped me.
Let’s pivot a bit to your current role as executive director of France’s new Fund for Innovation in Development, or FID. What does FID do, and what in your view makes FID different from other innovation funds?
FID was inspired by other innovation funds, like USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures and the Global Innovation Fund, and so it has a lot in common with them. But there are two important distinctions.
The first one is that FID adds two stages to the typical “pilot, test, and scale” model. We have launched the first “Prepare Grant” in global innovation funding: a small amount (up to 50,000€) to support newer or more marginalized applicants who have not previously had access to funds like ours while they prepare a FID application. Prepare Grants can help answer key questions or build organizational capacity in the “idea stage” of an upcoming proposal. This step was missing in many other funds, so this is a signature of FID.
Another signature effort is our “Transforming Public Policy” grants. These can help governments institutionalize specific innovations or build their capacity to design, test and deploy rigorously evaluated innovations. In many cases, a relatively small but catalytic grant can support government/researcher partnerships working to institutionalize an evidence-supported innovation. We hope this will interest J-PAL affiliates who are already working with government partners to institutionalize evidence in policy, and we are working to spread the word of this opportunity!
These two additional types of grants should help in our mission of finding new actors who did not have access to these types of funds previously and in creating stronger partnerships with governments to transform public policies.
The second distinction is that FID is embedded within the French development agency, Agence Française de Développement (AFD). This means that we can “hit the ground running” with the ability to leverage AFD networks and grantmaking tools. We also have the opportunity to work closely with AFD priority countries and priority sectors. While we are open to applications for work in all LMICs and in all sectors, we believe these priorities and networks will help us reach countries that have less access to existing global innovation funding due to language barriers or other constraints.
What’s one of the most exciting or promising things about your work at FID?
I find starting something from scratch very exciting. It is very intense and challenging, and—like back in my early J-PAL time—I get to be involved in so many different things. This phase of creation offers so many opportunities. Now, I get to excite and motivate an entire team to proactively be part of the creation process. This is a new challenge for me but one that I am very glad to embark on.
What skills from your time at J-PAL have you found useful in your earlier roles and in your work at FID?
I think project management skills and communications skills have been and continue to be critical in my roles. At J-PAL and, later, at the International Rescue Committee, I took on a lot of project management responsibilities and interacted with different stakeholders. I had to learn how to be comfortable meeting with or presenting to high-level officials and much more experienced researchers than I was at the time. The stakeholders I was working with had very different backgrounds. Some understood quantitative research; some did not at all. This diversity has helped me learn how to navigate between those stakeholders and adjust my way of communicating to make sure we were all on the same page.
More generally, I’ve always worked at the intersection of research and policy. Being able to understand both languages and navigate between those two worlds has been extremely interesting and drives my focus to improve those connections with FID.
What I liked a lot about J-PAL was the level of rigor and the logic with which we approached impact evaluation—being very deliberate in considering questions like, “What are we looking at?” “What are we trying to change?” “What are the mechanisms, and what is the logic behind them?” It is a way of thinking about programs, policies, and challenges that’s very useful for my career to date.
What types of skills and background do you think are most valuable in people who are successful in these types of roles?
I think it’s useful to have a lot of different experiences, to change jobs. Try to gain experience navigating in different spheres—research, innovation, with the public as well as the private sector. Most of the people I hire on my team have multiple experiences in different sectors and roles, understand their logic and speak their languages. This is not quite a “hard skill,” but having experience with different work environments is a big asset.
What was the best advice you received early in your career?
The best advice I received, and the best advice I can give, is to choose something you enjoy. I think a J-PAL affiliate told me that. Early in my career, I had to choose between working at IRC in New York or working at a respected job in a French ministry, and the professor told me to go choose the exciting option—and he was so right. It’s easy to get caught up in having a career “strategy,” but if you’re bored in your job, it’s not worth it. So that would be my advice: Have fun!
Rachna Nag Chowdhuri ‘13 (former research manager at J-PAL South Asia) discusses her work at the Global Innovation Fund to reimagine how funders measure and value impact on gender equality outcomes.
The Alumni Voices series is a platform for J-PAL alumni to share their work in their own words.
In this post, Rachna Nag Chowdhuri ‘13 (former research manager at J-PAL South Asia) discusses her work at the Global Innovation Fund to reimagine how funders measure and value impact on gender equality outcomes.
My experience at J-PAL has been the backbone of my career. Starting off as a research associate based in Bihar and Rajasthan, India, I transitioned to a Delhi-based manager role before becoming the country director of IPA Zambia. The foundational understanding about evidence that I developed at J-PAL has been pivotal in all my roles—especially in my understanding of the nuanced interplay between evidence, policy, and funding. After my work at J-PAL and IPA, I transitioned to work on the “donor” side, first with the World Bank and now currently at the Global Innovation Fund (GIF).
In my current role as senior director of analytics at GIF, I support my team in making decisions on which innovations make the most impact in people’s lives. GIF works across different locations, sectors, and uses different funding mechanisms (grants, debt, equity, or hybrid) to fund impactful innovations.
To do this, we face two critical questions; first, which impact outcomes do we value? And second, how much do we value them? Making our values explicit is also a way to recognise that grant-makers are in a position of power, which makes explicit valuation imperative when faced with real trade-offs.
Shining a spotlight on gender impacts
At GIF, we confront these two fundamental challenges in order to fund transformative innovations, including improving gender equality. This is a sector I have worked on since my J-PAL days and continue to be passionate about. Gender impacts are highly complex and range from changes in social norms and decision-making power, to reduction in violence against women and girls. Standard well-being outcomes do not capture the depth of impact in women’s lives brought about due to innovations.
To explore which gender impact outcomes we value to create the largest change in women’s lives, we turn to evidence. Evidence is at the core of GIF’s mission. Here, my experience at J-PAL and my intimate understanding of good quality data and what constitutes evidence has been a key strength. This is also a growing space where researchers (including a number of J-PAL affiliates) are leading the path to understand gender impact outcomes and measurement better. To tackle this, I have worked on a framework to incorporate gender into GIF’s internal impact forecast model, which you can read more about in this paper and this recent blog.
To explore how much to value gender equality outcomes (say compared to income or education), we reflect deeply in order to elevate innovations that have impact on women’s agency and structural shifts in gender equality. These are outcomes that have been historically undervalued by innovation funds and donors. At GIF, we think that funders implicitly place a value on women’s agency when they choose to implement programs that ignore these outcomes—and that implicit value is often zero. Another recent blog of mine describes a case study example on valuing women’s agency using a J-PAL South Asia evaluation example.
“Reimagining how donors can measure and value gender impacts has been a fascinating challenge."
Particularly because within the world of research and measurement, we often see siloed “camps,” where the “utilitarian” view that us economists tend to have is seen as opposed to the “rights-based” framework. I’ve always believed that there is a way to marry these two world views, and our work at GIF is testament to this.
On a personal note, the J-PAL network has also been a source of continued support, friendship, and inspiration. I look back at my time at J-PAL and IPA, not just to draw inspiration from the cutting-edge research produced, but also to appreciate the opportunity I got as a young economist to live and work in rural India. This helped me understand the nuances of conducting research from the ground up, and the tireless work of field staff that goes in, day in and out. This experience has taught me resilience and to value the staff and the countless respondents behind the data, who often remain faceless. I try to carry these values forward in every aspect of my professional and personal life.
Tanya joined J-PAL South Asia’s policy team after receiving a master’s degree in public policy from the Paris School of Economics. At J-PAL South Asia, she played a key role in an early partnership with the Government of Tamil Nadu and helped lay the conceptual groundwork for important program scale-ups. Now a senior policy analyst at AidData, she reflects on her path to international development, the challenges associated with bridging the gap between evidence and policy, and the dynamic nature of policy research.
The Alumni Spotlight series highlights J-PAL alumni who are making an impact across industries and around the world. To nominate a J-PAL alum to be featured in a future Alumni Spotlight, please fill out this form.
In the next installment of our Alumni Spotlight series, we speak with Tanya Sethi, a former senior policy associate at J-PAL South Asia. Tanya joined J-PAL South Asia’s policy team after receiving a master’s degree in public policy from the Paris School of Economics. At J-PAL South Asia, she played a key role in an early partnership with the Government of Tamil Nadu and helped lay the conceptual groundwork for important program scale-ups. Now a senior policy analyst at AidData, she reflects on her path to international development, the challenges associated with bridging the gap between evidence and policy, and the dynamic nature of policy research at AidData.
Tell us a bit about your background. What drew you to the field of development?
While I was interested in development issues throughout my higher education, it was my first job as an assistant editor for the Economic and Political Weekly, an Indian social sciences journal, that exposed me to a wide range of development policy issues. Some of the most exciting debates that were happening in India at that point in time—from how to measure poverty to assessing the impact of flagship government programs—were happening on the pages of this particular journal. So even though my academic training was in economics, through this journal I also had the opportunity to look at issues from historical, sociological, and political perspectives. The possibility of seeing issues from these multiple perspectives and arriving at solutions further advanced my interest in the field of development.
That was one of the reasons I decided to pursue a second master's degree in public policy. I wanted to go broader than economics and look at development issues through a multi-disciplinary lens. My master’s program strengthened my quantitative skills, specifically in the area of impact evaluation, and got me excited about the applied side of economics. While my program was about developing a rigorous approach to impact evaluation, it also made me aware that not every question or context lends itself to the same kind of rigor.
How did you first come across J-PAL, and what were some of your main responsibilities on the policy team?
I first read about J-PAL when I was working at the Economic and Political Weekly in Mumbai, but it was only during my master's program that I developed a good understanding of the organization and its methods. It’s one thing to read about impact evaluations in various settings and contexts, and another to see how these play out in reality when you're working with an implementing partner, such as an NGO or a government who you're hoping will take action based on the results of these evaluations. I wanted to witness first-hand how evaluations enter the realm of policy, which is what drew me to apply to J-PAL.
At the time that I joined, the policy team at J-PAL South Asia was focused on documenting some of the programs that had shown impact in the region, including Targeting the Ultra-Poor and Teaching at the Right Level. These approaches had been tested in different contexts with slight tweaks in implementation to fit the contextual realities—my job was, in part, to document what these tweaks looked like in the hope of creating a more generalizable approach that could then be scaled up in different contexts.
At that time, J-PAL had also just launched a five-year partnership with the state of Tamil Nadu. The policy team was quite nascent then, and this partnership was geared towards generating demand for impact evaluations across multiple government departments. The unique aspect was that we used the most pressing challenges of various line ministries as the starting point to jointly develop solutions in collaboration with J-PAL researchers.
I led the partnership with Tamil Nadu’s health department, which involved serving as a bridge between government officials and J-PAL affiliates who were interested in partnering with governments to test interventions to health problems. This was challenging because the incentive structures on both sides could be quite different. Government officials tend to care most about cost effectiveness and the potential to scale up an intervention, while academics are often driven by testing innovative approaches, the results of which have a higher likelihood of being published in prestigious journals. In those cases, it was important to listen and to appreciate the constraints and political realities that government officials faced. I enjoyed playing that liaising role and bringing the two sides together to flesh out interventions that would be mutually agreeable and testable.
I also learned that it’s important to engage at different levels of government, whether the state, local, or district level, because their understanding of bottlenecks for certain issues may be very different, and it is very important—though often challenging—to reconcile these perspectives.
You moved on to AidData, a research lab at the College of William and Mary, after J-PAL. Tell us a little bit about what you’re working on now.
I have been with AidData for a little over four years now, where I work as a Senior Policy Analyst within the policy team. In this capacity, I’ve consulted organizations such as the US Department of State, USAID, the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Hewlett and Gates Foundation on issues of aid effectiveness, foreign policy, development finance, and evidence use. I serve the dual role of leading the research and translating insights from this research into policy recommendations that can inform their organizational strategies.
I am currently leading the design of a survey to capture perceptions of policymakers and practitioners in 140 low- and middle-income countries regarding donor performance. In an upcoming study in collaboration with the German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval), we look at whether donor adherence to internationally recognized aid effectiveness principles (such as not tying aid, or aligning aid with recipient country budgets) makes donors seem more helpful in the eyes of their domestic counterparts.
What advice would you give to those who are interested in exploring a career at the intersection of research and policy?
I've realized over time is that we often have a simple linear model of how research influences policy: I'm going to produce amazing research, and then I'm going to present it to a government official or to a certain organization, they're going to understand it and use it to introduce or change policies. In my view, credible research is a necessary (though insufficient) starting point, but the pathway to actually influencing policy can be quite messy. My advice, especially to those who are on the early side of their careers and who are ambitious about creating change, is to have a lot of patience, since there are no quick wins in this space.
Three lessons that I’ve learned in my career thus far: (1) translating research into policy requires a deep understanding of political realities and how to navigate them, (2) listening to the other side and being flexible in changing your approach can go a long way in ensuring take-up of results, and (3) whether working with a government or another organization, it pays to build relationships and trust at various levels to ensure continuity of engagement over the long term.