Alumna Update: Ritwika Sen
Ritwika Sen was a 2012 Inlaks Scholar who attended the London School of Economics to study Economics. The blog below is from her experience in Uganda where she worked as the Country Economist at the International Growth Centre. She is currently pursuing her Phd at the Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern).
While applying to study at the London School of Economics, my Statement of Purpose somewhat precociously called for a useful economics – one that looked to theory for priors and structured thinking, coupled with close attention to context-specific details that could help to inform policy (aptly described by this year’s Nobel laureate Esther Duflo as the ‘plumbing approach’). Generous support from the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation enabled me to receive the graduate-level training I sought to eventually earn a place at the policy table. Little did I realise that my assignment as an economic advisor to a government body (upon completing my MSc.) would be in a country whose context I was completely alien to at the time.
As part of a fellowship programme run by the Overseas Development Institute (UK) I served as an economist in the Planning Unit of Rwanda’s Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources from 2014-16. My work there ranged from the more mundane (e.g. coordinating with donors/NGOs in the National Agricultural Sector Working Group) to the incredibly surreal. The latter set included being assigned to write a ’10 years of Rwandan Agriculture’ retrospective parliamentary address for the Prime Minister in the local language Kinyarwanda (fortunately my wonderful colleagues came to the rescue!), and working with a dream team of technical experts for 7 days on-end to chalk out how best to utilize a 500 million USD blank check earmarked for the agricultural sector by a Western philanthropist. My most challenging assignment, however, arose during the sector budget negotiations with the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning. The then Minister of Finance asked the Minister of Agriculture two pointed questions: “How much (sector) GDP growth can you deliver next year with the current budget ceiling?” and “How much money do you need in order to attain the sectorial target of 8.5% growth per annum?”. The Minister of Agriculture looked to her Permanent Secretary, who (in turn) looked to his Director General of Planning – and the DG asked his twenty-something old economist to come up with a model in two days! To his credit, my boss also mobilized the entire Ministry, and its associated agencies to provide whatever data I needed to get the job done – something I can only dream of today as a data-hungry PhD student (and I must admit that I still don’t know how to satisfactorily answer the questions posed by the Minister).
My short stint as a government insider and civil servant resuscitated my belief that there is a bridge between what we do in academia and the questions that we grapple with in Ministry board rooms. Fortunately, I obtained first-hand insight into what it takes to build these bridges through my subsequent assignment as a Country Economist for the International Growth Centre (IGC) in Uganda (whose offices are generously hosted by Uganda’s Central Bank). My role in Kampala from 2016-18 was mainly to work with policy makers on issues related to trade, industry and agriculture alongside the IGC’s network of academics to identify opportunities for collaborative research – with the hope that frontier research could help to inform the more pressing policy questions and vice versa. Examples of a few projects I supported at the time include presenting evidence for the reform of the East African Community’s Common External Tariff to government officials and the national association of manufacturers, and a study of the constraints to value addition in Uganda’s coffee sector (the country’s principal export crop). After countless hours spent wandering the corridors of government, I did eventually learn the hard and unglamorous answer to the question I posed in my statement of purpose several years before – for an economist working with government to be present at the right time, with the right tools, and hope to be useful it takes initiative, persistence, and perhaps a certain degree of opportunism. As I now embark on building my own research career in my current role as a PhD student at the Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern), with my old sense of purpose reaffirmed, I hope to develop research projects that draw on economic theory for inspiration and speak to some of the key development challenges (specifically, constraints to firm and farm productivity) that I encountered while in East Africa. One hopes that in a year’s time I’ll have more stories to tell!
Cover Image: At a conference on Trade, FDI and Regional Value Chains in East Africa hosted by the International Growth Centre (Uganda)
