GDL MA Thesis Prize 2024 has been awarded

It is with great pleasure that we share about our Global Data Lab Master Thesis winner 2024, Zeinab Hassano. Congratulations for this achievement. We very much enjoyed reading your work, Zeinab.

Zeinab won the prize for her MA thesis entitled “Unveiling gendered labour dynamics amidst droughts: The case for African countries”. She employs an event study difference-in-difference design to show that women in rural areas experience a significant increase in agricultural employment due to droughts. In turn, male employment in the agriculture sector declines. Her results are indicative of women in rural areas relying more on agriculture as a fallback during droughts. We consider her research question and analysis not only interesting but also very relevant from a policy point of view.

The prize traveled all the way from Nijmegen School of Management / Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen to the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). Many thanks to our colleagues Pedro Naso and Rob Hart for handing over the prize on our behalf. Pedro is a development and environmental economist and has supervised Zeinab’s thesis. Pedro and I share our alma mater. We both hold a PhD in Economics from the Geneva Graduate Institute. Check out Pedro's website here: https://pedronaso.com/. Rob is professor of economics and focuses on “the development of the global – spaceship – economy in the very long run, and the management of that development through policy instruments.” He was the course coordinator of Zeinab’s MA thesis course and the external examiner of her thesis. Rob made it possible that Zeinab could get the Global Data Lab 2024 MA prize. Thanks very much, Rob, for your efforts and support.

It is small friendly exchanges and welcoming gestures such as the travelling of our prize from Nijmegen to Uppsala and the contact with our colleagues from Sweden that add up and can make the big, positive difference.

We appreciate that the MA students of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) are aware of our Global Data Lab and make use of our resources. We would like to use this opportunity to invite other universities, researchers, and students, as well as policy makers, and development practitioners around the globe to check out our resources and work with our open source data. Kindly let us know about your data needs. We aim to continuously update and improve our resources in line with our mission to turn data into knowledge and contribute to evidence-based decision making around the world.

For the MA thesis prize 2025 we look forward to many interesting submissions making use of our data. For further information, please reach out to contact@globaldatalab.org.