Michael won the big prize!

In the second week of October 2019, the Nobel committee announced that the 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (aka the Nobel Prize in Economics) would be awarded to PAD co-founder and board member, Michael Kremer together with his long-standing colleagues and collaborators, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. We are tickled pink!

The award was made by the committee in recognition of the co-laureates’ “experimental approach to alleviating global poverty [which] has considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty [and in] just two decades… has transformed development economics”.

It is to the 2019 Laureates eternal credit that a vast network of colleagues, populating a multitude of institutions, revelled so openly in affirming and celebrating their achievement. It speaks not only to the rigor of their theoretical and practical work in the service of poverty reduction, but to their commitment to working beyond the ramparts of the ivory tower, in the field and among the people whom their work intends to empower and benefit. As an organization PAD is now one of a constellation of initiatives and institutions located in governments, civil society and the private sector, that work to scale the application of research pioneered by Abhijit, Esther and Michael in the service of poverty reduction.

In his Nobel Lecture, Michael affirmed the importance of field experiments as a tool for isolating causal impact, and went on to articulate four additional “key features” of this work. Field experiments, he asserted:

• “First… experiments provide economists with a richer sense of context… The experimental method requires researchers to talk to farmers, teachers, students and small business owners where they live and work”;
• “Second, while experiments are designed to shed light on larger conceptual questions, they typically also address very specific, practical problems”;
• “Third, experiments are inherently collaborative, requiring us to work with practitioners in governments and civil society, teams of survey enumerators, and specialists in other fields”; and
• “Fourth, the modern experimental approach in economics is iterative… The way we learn through the experimental approach is not a single breakthrough in one paper but the accumulated wisdom and insight from a series of studies… progress in the field has emerged primarily from a decentralized, self-organizing process in which many different researchers and implementers follow each other’s work, each making their own decisions about the appropriate next steps.”

These key features are characteristics of PAD’s work, and our research and learning agenda in particular. Michael’s 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences reminds us not only of the ideas that are at the core of PAD’s mission, affirms the values that are critical for realizing these objectives and advancing the field: the importance of understanding the lives of the poor and the need for intellectual modesty; the significance of context, local knowledge and local expertise; the need to break down big challenges into problems that can be solved, and a commitment to evolving the magnitude of impacts through iteration and further experimentation; the importance of being kind; and the objective of making a practical difference in tackling poverty.

In his Nobel presentation, Michael highlighted the potential of digital development to alleviate poverty at scale, and his excitement about PAD’s trajectory:

“The spread of mobile phones, the availability of large data sets and the development of machine learning are opening up tremendous opportunities for digital development in areas from education to agriculture… Precision Agriculture for Development, an NGO which I helped co-found, is now working with governments and private firms in multiple countries to provide digital agricultural extension to millions of farmers. This is just the beginning. We need to encourage a variety of new approaches to take advantage of new opportunities, test new approaches, refine them and scale up the most effective solutions.”

Michael closed out 2019 by co-authoring with Raissa Fabregas and Frank Schillbach a groundbreaking paper “Realizing the potential of digital development: The case of agricultural advice” in the prestigious journal Science. The paper, a meta-analysis of randomized evaluations of mobile phone-based agricultural extension services, is one of the first published studies of the impact of digital agricultural extension and drew extensively on research conducted by, or supported by PAD. Tomoko Harigaya, PAD’s Chief Economist and lead researcher, wrote a synopsis of the paper and reflected on its implications for PAD’s work on our blog.

In concluding the presentation of his Nobel lecture in Stockholm, Michael implored the audience to “work together, push on, and push harder” to address poverty. PAD is proud to work with Michael to advance research, learning and the practice of development. As an organization we are privileged to be guided by the wealth of expertise, knowledge and experience carried so lightly by all of our founders and board members.