Karra Presents at UAPS 8th African Population Conference
Mahesh Karra, Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, recently participated in the Union for African Population Studies (UAPS) 8th African Population Conference in Kampala, Uganda.
Karra gave a presentation on the Malawi Family Planning Study, where he presented results from a randomized controlled trial on the impact of a postpartum family planning intervention on contraceptive use and birth spacing among women from urban Malawi.
Along with Josh Wilde from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, Karra led a workshop for 30 academics, policymakers, and other stakeholders on modeling the Demographic Dividend using the Canning-Karra-Wilde (CKW) macrosimulation model. The workshop was sponsored by the Population Reference Bureau.
Karra also presented a poster on my work in India as part of the Jaunpur Social Networks Study. The poster presented research that examined the extent to which a woman’s mother-in-law inhibits a woman’s access to her social network, which in turn has implications on her mobility and access to services.
Karra, Josh Wilde and Marlene Lee of the Population Reference Bureau presented joint work on the role of savings and the Demographic Dividend and the application of the CKW model of the Demographic Dividend to 5 Sub-Saharan African countries.
Karra’s academic and research interests are broadly in development economics, health economics, quantitative methods, and applied demography. His research utilizes experimental and non-experimental methods to investigate the relationships between population, health, and economic development in low- and middle-income countries.