MIT | Graduate student Reshmaan Hussam has always seen economics as more
than a collection of numbers: For her, it also entails history, health,
and human behavior. Now, as a fifth-year PhD student in economics at
MIT, she applies this outlook to understanding sanitation and hygiene
behavior in the developing world, with an eye toward affecting policy
and behavioral changes.
Economics first piqued Hussam’s curiosity in high school, when a
summer course exposed her to the experimental and behavioral aspects of
the field; since then, she’s kept empathy at the forefront of her work
in modeling human economic interactions. And after picking up Max
Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” in college,
she became acutely interested in how religion impacts economic choices.
Growing up with an uncle who managed a microfinance institution in
Bangladesh — where Hussam still has family — gave her early exposure to
this particular population’s financial needs and behaviors; as an
undergraduate at MIT, she soon turned her research toward development
economics. Working with Abhijit Banerjee, the Ford International
Professor of Economics at MIT, and Nava Ashraf at Harvard Business
School, Hussam embarked on a project to understand how religious sense
informs microcredit savings decisions amongst the poor in Bangladesh.
But she quickly found the topic difficult to study: There were many
other factors at play in this type of economic decision-making, not
least of which was gender roles within a household. Hussam found that
while microloans are often marketed to women, their husbands routinely
handle the funds. Studying money-saving behavior was nearly impossible
when it was unclear whose behavior was being studied — the borrower’s,
or her husband’s.
“There is so much valuable work to be done in women’s financial and
social empowerment, but how do we capture the right outcomes?” Hussam
says. “Maybe there are more measurable, tangible, or direct ways to
improve the well-being of these individuals.”
Health takes center stage
Among the many factors that affect economic decision-making is
health. Hussam quickly realized that a key means to self-empowerment is
empowerment in health and hygiene — where women, particularly mothers,
often play a significant role.
“When you’re sick, that becomes your entire focus,” she says.
“Repeated, preventable illnesses — with which the developing world is
too familiar — have huge, long-term physical and cognitive consequences.
Education, labor, and financial security suffer — all of which are
channels to self-determination and empowerment.”
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