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With research staff from more than 60 countries, and offices across the globe, IFPRI provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries.

Ahmed Akhter

researcher spotlight

Akhter Ahmed

Akhter Ahmed is a Senior Research Fellow in the IFPRI’s Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit and Country Representative for IFPRI Bangladesh. He has worked on strategies for agricultural and rural development, social protection, and women’s empowerment to reduce poverty, food insecurity, and undernutrition in developing countries including Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Malawi, the Philippines, and Turkey.

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Since 1975, IFPRI’s research has been informing policies and development programs to improve food security, nutrition, and livelihoods around the world.

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IFPRI currently has more than 600 employees working in over 80 countries with a wide range of local, national, and international partners.

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Development Strategies and Governance

Valerie Mueller

Nonresident Fellow

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Bio

Valerie Mueller is a Nonresident Fellow in the Development Strategies and Governance Unit and an Associate Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. Prior to joining the university, she was a Senior Research Fellow at IFPRI in Washington, DC.

Mueller’s research falls largely into three main themes. The first quantifies rural household vulnerability to climate variability, focusing on migration, nutrition, and health markers in Africa and Asia. The second area uses randomized controlled trials to identify mechanisms to improve the delivery of rural services (legal justice for women, agricultural extension, and the equitable allocation of irrigation water) in East African countries. Her third area of research focuses on the prospects of youth employment in Africa. She has a co-edited volume published at Oxford University Press in 2019, which studies the evolution of youth employment and its role in the structural transformation process in Africa.

Mueller’s research contributions have been featured in Nature Climate Change, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Economic Review, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, and the Journal of Development Economics, and have received significant media coverage in over 15 major media outlets (including Le Monde, Science, and Scientific American). Despite her presence in the research community, she remains involved in the field and aims to provide relevant technical expertise by repeated interaction with donor communities, local policymakers, and government officials.

Mueller’s personal website can be found here.

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Publications

Resource thumbnail

Brief

Social assistance and adaptation to flooding in Bangladesh

2024Ahmed, Akhter; Bakhtiar, M. Mehrab; Hidrobo, Melissa; Hoddinott, John F.; Mueller, Valerie; Quabili, Wahid; Rakshit, Deboleena; Roy, Shalini; Thiede, Brian
Details

Social assistance and adaptation to flooding in Bangladesh

As climate change exacerbates weather shocks, there is growing interest in understanding whether social assistance programs can support coping among poor rural households and whether program effects vary by gender. We assess whether a social assistance program – the Transfer Modality Research Initiative (TMRI) –influenced the effects of prior monsoon flooding on household consumption and adult diets in southern Bangladesh. TMRI provided cash or food transfers, with or without nutrition behavior change communication, from 2012-2014. Within the study sites and years, flooding was substantial but moderate. Our findings suggest that, without TMRI, a one-standard-deviation increase in lagged flooding led to households smoothing consumption by drawing down savings and reducing diet quality among both men and women. In contrast, among TMRI treatment households, lagged flooding did not reduce savings, and both men’s and women’s diet quality improved. Effects on diet quality appeared largely driven by legumes and by fruits and vegetables, and improvements appeared strongest among households receiving both transfers and behavior change communication. Results indicate that social assistance can help households cope with effects of moderate flooding in southern Bangladesh, protecting household savings and improving both men’s and women’s diets.

Year published

2024

Authors

Ahmed, Akhter; Bakhtiar, M. Mehrab; Hidrobo, Melissa; Hoddinott, John F.; Mueller, Valerie; Quabili, Wahid; Rakshit, Deboleena; Roy, Shalini; Thiede, Brian

Citation

Ahmed, Akhter; Bakhtiar, Mehrab; Hidrobo, Melissa; Hoddinott, John; Mueller, Valerie; Quabili, Wahid; Rakshit, Deboleena; Roy, Shalini; and Thiede, Brian. 2024. Social assistance and adaptation to flooding in Bangladesh. Gender Equality Initiative Brief. CGIAR System Organization. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/168418

Country/Region

Bangladesh

Keywords

Southern Asia; Asia; Extreme Weather Events; Climate Change; Rural Areas; Flooding; Cash Transfers; Nutrition

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Source

Source record

Project

Gender Equality

Record type

Brief

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Working Paper

Rainy day funds? How men and women adapt to heavy rainfall shocks and the role of cash transfers in Mali

2024Hidrobo, Melissa; Mueller, Valerie; Roy, Shalini; Fall, Cheikh Modou Noreyni; Lavaysse, Christophe; Belli, Anna
Details

Rainy day funds? How men and women adapt to heavy rainfall shocks and the role of cash transfers in Mali

Weather shocks can affect men and women differently, due in part to differences in their adaptive capacities. We merge weather data with survey data from a randomized control trial of a cash transfer program in Mali to describe how men and women cope with weather shocks and the role of cash transfer programs in supporting adaptive responses. We find that heavy rainfall reduces household’s consumption but that the cash transfer program mitigates these impacts, primarily by allowing households to draw down both men’s and women’s savings, increasing the value of livestock and farming assets held jointly by men and women, and facilitating a reallocation of men’s and women’s labor to livestock production and women’s labor to domestic work.

Year published

2024

Authors

Hidrobo, Melissa; Mueller, Valerie; Roy, Shalini; Fall, Cheikh Modou Noreyni; Lavaysse, Christophe; Belli, Anna

Citation

Hidrobo, Melissa; Mueller, Valerie; Roy, Shalini; Fall, Cheikh Modou Noreyni; Lavaysse, Christophe; and Belli, Anna. 2024. Rainy day funds? How men and women adapt to heavy rainfall shocks and the role of cash transfers in Mali. IFPRI Discussion Paper 2301. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/163076

Country/Region

Mali

Keywords

Africa; Western Africa; Cash Transfers; Gender; Men; Rainfall; Shock; Women; Social Protection

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Source

Source record

Project

Gender Equality

Record type

Working Paper

Resource thumbnail

Journal Article

Leveraging unsupervised machine learning to examine women’s vulnerability to climate change

2024Caruso, German; Mueller, Valerie; Villacis, Alexis
Details

Leveraging unsupervised machine learning to examine women’s vulnerability to climate change

We provide an application of machine learning to identify the distributional consequences of climate change in Malawi. We compare climate impact estimates based on drought indicators established objectively from the k-means algorithm to more traditional measures. Young women affected by drought were 5 percentage points more likely to be married by 18 than those living in nondrought areas. Our approach generates robust results when varying the number of clusters and definition of treatment status. In some cases, we find the design using k-means to define treatment is more likely to satisfy the assumptions underlying the difference-in-differences strategy than when using arbitrary thresholds. Projections from the estimates indicate future drought risk may lead to larger declines in labor productivity due to women’s engagement in early age marriage than other factors affecting their participation rates. Under the extreme representative concentration pathway scenario, drought exposure encourages the exit of 3.3 million women workers by 2100.

Year published

2024

Authors

Caruso, German; Mueller, Valerie; Villacis, Alexis

Citation

Caruso, German; Mueller, Valerie; and Villacis, Alexis. 2024. Leveraging unsupervised machine learning to examine women’s vulnerability to climate change. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 46(4): 1355-1378. https://doi.org/10.1002/aepp.13444

Keywords

Machine Learning; Women; Vulnerability; Climate Change

Language

English

Access/Licence

Limited Access

Links

https://doi.org/10.1002/aepp.13444 Source record

Project

Gender

Record type

Journal Article

Blogs

Examining the gendered impacts of cash transfers on migration in Mali
IFPRI Blog
 | 
September 15, 2021

Examining the gendered impacts of cash transfers on migration in Mali

By Melissa Hidrobo, Valerie Mueller, Shalini Roy, and Michael Wang

Exploring the complex interplay of work, migration, and gender.

Model: Rising seas may not drive population away from Bangladesh’s vulnerable coast
IFPRI Blog
 | 
February 03, 2021

Model: Rising seas may not drive population away from Bangladesh’s vulnerable coast

By Valerie Mueller, Andrew Reid Bell, and Honor Dearlove

Undercutting a standard assumption about climate change-driven migration.

Climate shocks reduce temporary urban out-migration rates in Eastern Africa
IFPRI Blog
 | 
November 18, 2020

Climate shocks reduce temporary urban out-migration rates in Eastern Africa

By Valerie Mueller and Francesca Edralin

Heat waves and heavy rainfall events appear to limit opportunities for urban migrant workers.

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Events

Youth and Jobs in Rural Africa: Beyond Stylized Facts
IFPRI Policy Seminar

 | 

January 21, 2020, 12:15 – 1:15 pm

Youth and Jobs in Rural Africa: Beyond Stylized Facts

The share of working-age young people in Africa south of the Sahara has risen due to past declines in mortality coupled with high fertility. This “youth bulge” has created a sense of urgency among national governments and the international development community as the prospect of widespread youth unemployment in Africa, and the social instability and […]

News

August 20, 2020 | In the News

Sea level rise to force 2 lakh to migrate from Bangladesh coastal areas: Study (UNB)

UNB (United News of Bangladesh) reported on the recent sea level rise. Researchers at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the Ohio State University conducted the study, “Coastal climate change, soil salinity and human migration in Bangladesh.” The study examines, for the first time, the complex relationship between flooding, soil salinity, rural livelihoods and migration; as well […]

December 03, 2019 | In the News

African youth growth an opportunity to generate development – IFPRI (Polity)

Polity (South Africa) reported on Youth and Jobs in Rural Africa: Beyond Stylized Facts, the new book by Valerie Mueller and James Thurlow. Thurlow suggests that rather than focusing on the youth, the best course for African countries is to promote inclusive growth that benefits young and old alike. Africa does not have a youth […]

December 03, 2019 | Press Release

NEW BOOK: Africa’s “youth bulge” presents opportunity to advance rural development

The share of Africa’s young population is growing rapidly, presenting an opportunity to generate inclusive development benefiting African countries, particularly in rural areas.

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Research

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