Greetings! I study educational processes that enable populations to be producers, and not passive consumers, of knowledge that leads to social action. Such education has the potential to act as a driver of community development, including in village and rural contexts around the world. As a trained economist, I see the discovery and aggregation of knowledge of increasingly better uses of resources as the core problem of economic development and I seek to understand how community-based research, investigation, and dialogue can enrich the process of discovery. In my recent projects, I study interventions in Uganda and Colombia intentionally designed to do this, sometimes by analyzing their impacts and testing hypotheses through the design of randomized controlled trials or other tools of causal inference.

I will be joining the Harvard Graduate School of Education as an Assistant Professor in the Fall of 2024. If you have any questions, or would like to engage further, feel free to contact me at vnourani@uchicago.edu.

Current Affiliations:

University of Chicago - Senior Research Associate

Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL/MIT) - Invited Researcher

Makerere University - Visiting Lecturer

Select Working Papers:

Learning to Teach by Learning to Learn, with Nava Ashraf and Abhijit Banerjee

Multi-Object Social Learning and Technology Adoption in Ghana

Altruism, Insurance and Costly Solidarity Commitments, with Chris Barrett, Eleonora Patacchini and Tom Walker

Publications:

Village Fairness Norms and Land Rental Markets, with Kwabena Krah, Annemie Maertens, Wezi Mhango, and Hope Michelson. Accepted in World Bank Economic Review, 2023.

Chatting at Church: Information Diffusion through Religious Networks, with David Murphy and David Lee. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2022.

Public Good Provision and Democracy: Evidence from an Experiment with Farmer Groups in Malawi, with Annemie Maertens and Hope Michelson. World Development, 2021.

How do Farmers Learn from Extension Services? Evidence from Malawi, with Annemie Maertens and Hope Michelson. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2021.

Media:

Video describing the teacher training program offered by Kimanya-Ngeyo Foundation and studied in "Learning to Teach by Learning to Learn":