Karra Awarded BU Seed Grant Award
Mahesh Karra, Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University (BU) and Associate Director of the Human Capital Initiative at the Global Development Policy Center, was awarded the BU Global Programs and BU Foundation-India (BUFI) 2020 Seed Fund. The Seed Fund Program is designed to seed new or support existing collaborative research projects in India conducted by BU faculty and their peers in India.
Karra’s research proposal, titled “Networks and Global Health: Experimental Evidence of Women’s Social Networks, Reproductive Health, and Well‐Being in Rural India,” aims to identify innovative and cost-effective strategies for delivering reproductive health services through social networks in low-income settings in India. The study builds on existing fieldwork from an ongoing randomized control trial that explores the causal impact of a social network-based family planning intervention on women’s contraceptive use, reproductive health, fertility, and well-being in rural Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh, India.
In New Delhi, India, Karra is collaborating with Dr. Praveen Kumar Pathak, Associate Professor at Jamia Millia Islamia (Central University), who is the Indian PI on the study. Within the United States, Karra is collaborating with Professor Catalina Herrera-Almanza, Assistant Professor of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign and Dr. S Anukriti, an Economist in the Development Research Group at the World Bank.
“My colleagues and I are delighted to have received this award and are excited to build on our study over the next year,” said Karra. “With support from BUFI and BU Global Programs, we look forward to fostering new collaborations and to strengthening our existing partnerships in India through this and future projects.”
More information on the seed grant can be found on BU Global Programs’ website.
Mahesh 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. Read more about him here.