Recipients of PSC Small Grant Awards

Uttam Sharma works on a variety of projects, including the Chitwan Valley Family Study—to apply his economics of education and impact evaluation knowledge and develop additional skills in health science research. Sharma is an expert on the economics of education in developing countries. He has done extensive work on impact evaluations of various development interventions in Bangladesh, Kenya, Mongolia, Nepal, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, particularly as they relate to educational outcomes. He is also a member of the Center for Global Health Equity as an Impact Scholar.

As an economist, Sharma has conducted impact evaluations of diverse development interventions in Bangladesh, Kenya, Mongolia, Nepal, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda.

He was part of teams in Nigeria and Uganda that implemented and evaluated education interventions. They interacted extensively with government officials and university researchers in these countries to assess the impact of tablets provided to students (Nigeria) and school facilities grants (Uganda). In East Africa, He worked on programs examining nutritional outcomes. In Tanzania, he looked at livestock and crop production cycles to improve income security and nutrition for smallholder farmers. And in Kenya, his team helped assess the impact of providing technology-adoption training to banana farmers to increase crop yields.

In Nepal, he has worked closely with central and local governments, and with community schools, to improve teacher training and foundational skills in numeracy and literacy.

A central thread through all these initiatives is enhancing local capacity for research that can assess the value of interventions so communities in resource-limited settings can pivot as needed. “I am convinced that investing in people—in their education and in their health—is far more cost effective than investing in physical capital to achieve specific economic goals, including improving income and reducing poverty. Teaching basic evaluation methods to local leaders, for example, is a sustainable way to augment a community’s ability to understand and maintain its resources.”