Faculty Spotlight: Mushfiq Mobarak
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We are pleased to introduce Mushfiq Mobarak, Assistant Professor of Economics, to SOM and the PSE newsletter community. Prof. Mobarak was drawn to Yale because of the impressive tradition of development economics scholarship here. He is excited by SOM’s level of social responsibility, which is a good match with his own values.
Prior to Yale, Prof. Mobarak taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and before that worked at the IMF and the World Bank. Prof. Mobarak is currently undertaking a number of research projects centered on topics relevant to the lives of the poor in the developing world. One of Prof. Mobarak’s research interests is marital behaviors in developing countries. He is exploring why countries such as Pakistan have a very high rate of marriage between relatives. He feels that studying and understanding the factors that lead to marriage between relatives will enable the creation of appropriate policies to combat the risks associated with this behavior.
In his home country of Bangladesh, Prof. Mobarak works closely with a local non-profit, BRAC, to look at what affects people’s adoption of new technologies such as cook stoves. His research aims to parse out the factors that may increase or limit adoption: price, information levels, gender dynamics, tradition, etc. Another research project looks at migration in northwest Bangladesh where every year in the pre-harvest period there are price shocks: prices increase and labor demand decreases. Surprisingly, this does not cause migration to areas with higher wages. Prof. Mobarak’s study aims to discover the impediments to migration and how they can be attenuated. Prof. Mobarak is excited to continue his research on these topics here at Yale and hopes to be able to take students to Bangladesh where he does his research.
This semester, Prof. Mobarak is teaching an elective course at SOM entitled “Doing Business in the Developing World.†In addition, he helps to organize the Development Workshop, which is a forum at Yale for graduate students, faculty and outside speakers with research-in-progress on the economics of development. He is also leading the international experience trip to South Africa and Namibia with Professor Victor Vroom.
Click here to learn more about Prof. Mobarak’s research interests and teaching.
Nonprofit healthcare managers often feel conflicted about charging a price for their goods or services, especially when clients’ immediate health and welfare are at stake. On one hand, it is often the case that their target client population is poor, and placing an additional financial burden on poor people feels wrong. On the other hand, there is evidence that clients do not use donated products appropriately, resulting in lower impact of nonprofit managers’ time and investments. Here is a case where the right decision may feel completely wrong.
This summer I worked as a Marketing and Strategic Planning Associate at World Vision’s U.S. headquarters near Seattle. World Vision is a Christian humanitarian organization dedicated to working with children, families and their communities worldwide to reach their full potential by tackling the causes of poverty and injustice. In 2006, World Vision served more than 100 million people, worked in 97 nations, and affected more than 3 million children directly through child sponsorship. World Vision employed 23,000 staff members and raised $2.1 billion in cash and goods for its work.
This past summer, I worked as a program intern in the Capital Markets division of Grameen Foundation in Washington DC. Grameen Foundation is an organization focused on empowering the world’s poorest through microfinance. The foundation shares the heritage and the spirit of Grameen Banks started by Dr. Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh. While Grameen Banks are the microfinance institutions (MFIs), Grameen Foundation is a not-for-profit established in 1997 to support MFIs around the world. The areas of support include technology, industry knowledge sharing and access to capital markets.
This Summer I worked at the Sydney Opera House in Sydney, Australia. Sydney Opera House is governed by Sydney Opera House Trust, which is affiliated with the Australian government. I worked for Naomi Grabel, Director of Marketing and Development and a graduate of the Yale School of Drama’s Theater Management program. It was especially interesting to see how SOH is building its development initiative in Australia’s emerging philanthropic environment. I helped to initiate collaboration between several major local arts organizations in order to create a more cohesive and overt Sydney Arts Community. Through this project I helped establish a committee of marketing directors from the various local arts organizations and facilitated the conception and initial production of a Sydney Cultural Guide. It is hoped that the Cultural Guide project will serve as a launch pad for other future collaborative projects within the arts community.
I spent the summer in Bogota, Colombia doing strategic planning for Atlas Service Corps, a startup, international non-profit ($300K annual budget, 4 employees) focused on the training of non-profit leaders in developing countries. They are currently located in Colombia, India and the U.S. and are seeking to expand broadly across Latin America, Asia and Africa. My job was to formulate a global expansion strategy as well as to develop financial models to support strategic planning going forward. It was wonderful to have the opportunity to work for a start up, impacting the organization at such an early stage. And Bogota was a great place to be for the summer.
I interned for One Acre Fund, a startup NGO based in western Kenya. One Acre Fund, founded by Andrew Youn (Yale ‘00), provides targeted microloans to extremely poor farmers in an effort to help them pull themselves out of poverty. My responsibilities for the summer were two-fold: First, I developed a Monitoring and Evaluation system to allow the organization to measure its impact on its participant farmers. This involved researching best practices in program evaluation, developing and field-testing a baseline survey, training our local staff to administer the survey, and building a data entry business that can scale with the organization. The second half of my job was to revise the curriculum for One Acre Fund’s primary cash crop: passion fruit. Among other things, I learned how to build manure compost piles and apply fertilizer to passion fruit fields. The summer was an incredibly valuable personal and professional experience and I was enormously impressed by the organization Andrew has built.
This summer I worked for the Pro Crianca Cardiaca Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on a project to build a pediatric cardiology hospital. My internship goal was to implement the recommendations that our Global Social Enterprise class team had made in May 2007. The new hospital will offer first-rate care to a patient population that will be 60% paying and 40% indigent. This hospital model will be first-of-its-kind in the Rio de Janeiro community.
I worked on the Africa Capital Markets Fund, a fund of funds seeking investments in PE and hedge funds that met certain development criteria: investing in sub-Saharan Africa ex South Africa; providing private capital not otherwise available to SMEs (long-term investments, new investment vehicles (mezzanine, convertible, etc)); and investing in companies with a positive developmental impact.
I worked in the Foreign Investment Advisory Services, which is part of the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank. The group advises developing countries on how to improve their business climate and promote foreign direct investment. The idea is that by increasing “bricks and mortar†investment from multinational companies, we can help developing countries to increase employment, economic growth, and global competitiveness. Over the summer I did analysis for China’s central provinces to help pick target sectors for investment promotion, and for the Western Balkans to help select target multinational companies to approach for investment. I also reviewed and reported on best practices for developing investment promotion strategies. Finally, I researched implementing a system that would allow private companies to pay taxes by mobile phone in post-conflict regions of Africa. The work was interesting, and my colleagues were an intelligent and diverse group of people. SOM has a strong and close knit alumni contingent at the IFC. It was great to get to know them.