Sharing knowledge to address global poverty

By Duyen Nguyen

“Never, never, never assume that the person in front of you is not ultra sharp and ultra smart and cannot understand what you’re telling them,” says Esther Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT. Whether teaching MIT students, or an auditorium of 2,000 people who have never studied economics, or online learners from different parts of the world, Duflo says “anything can be approached.”

Duflo shared how this philosophy has informed both her teaching and research in a recent conversation with Christopher Capozzola, senior associate dean for Open Learning. The talk, “Alleviating poverty and sharing knowledge globally,” is the second in MIT Open Learning’s Open Conversation series, which highlights how access to knowledge can change lives, communities, and the world. Duflo is also the co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a research center with affiliates from universities around the world. In 2019, she received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, commonly known as the Nobel Prize in Economics, for her contributions to an experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.

The metric of success: Changing the world

Duflo’s engagement with Open Learning programs began with MIT OpenCourseWare, which publishes materials from over 2,500 MIT courses. “This is great — this is more people than I will ever teach in person,” she remembers thinking when recordings of her class lectures were first shared on OpenCourseWare.

With the launch of MITx, an initiative at Open Learning that offers free massive open online courses (MOOCs) drawn from the MIT classroom, Duflo saw the opportunity to create a more engaging online learning experience. “I felt I can basically now almost teach the same way,” she says, adding that, while the MITx courses share the same core as the on-campus classes, “the spokes are different in different parts of the world.” Learners can enroll in courses for free or, for a low fee, earn a certificate for each completed course.

Through MITx, learners beyond campus can apply the knowledge they gain to make an impact within their particular contexts. And more than 360,000 people have — in part motivating Duflo to create the MITx MicroMasters program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy (DEDP). Designed to equip learners with both practical skills and theoretical knowledge to tackle U.S. and global challenges like poverty, the program’s core curriculum includes graduate-level courses in essential topics such as microeconomics, probability and statistics, data analysis, and designing and running randomized evaluations to assess the effectiveness of social programs, key to Duflo’s Nobel Prize-winning approach.

Individuals who receive the DEDP MicroMasters credential by earning five course certificates become eligible to apply to MIT’s DEDP master’s program, as well as to several other pathway universities worldwide. This innovative admissions model prioritizes applicants’ performance in the online courses over traditional credentials, such as prior degrees or standardized test scores.

“If we can select people to come to MIT based on what we want them to do once they are at MIT, we could break the mold of admissions,” Duflo says, describing the DEDP MicroMasters’ launch as both a learning experience and a gamble. “We had to shepherd it through the process, get it approved in the faculty committee, and every step, people were like, ‘Are you sure this can work?’”

Today, DEDP MicroMasters and master’s alumni are pursuing careers in government, non-profits, and multilateral organizations around the world, or doctoral degrees at leading institutions including MIT, Harvard University, and the Paris School of Economics. With countless alumni equipped to positively impact the world, the gamble has paid off.

“When they come, we tell them they have to change the world — that’s the metric of success,” Duflo says. “And now they really are busy doing that.”

More powerful together

Sharing knowledge is also a critical part of Duflo’s work as a researcher. “Almost the minute I started teaching at MIT, I was convinced that what we needed to do is to not just run trials, but set up an infrastructure to make it easier for others to do it,” she says. The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), which Duflo co-founded in 2003 with Abhijit Banerjee, the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT and a co-recipient of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, has grown into a network of more than 1,000 researchers around the world working to reduce poverty by rigorously evaluating social programs. Over 850 million people have been reached by programs and policies that have been informed by J-PAL affiliated researchers’ evaluations.

“Together, the research is so much more powerful,” says Duflo.

The Open Conversation talk “Alleviating poverty and sharing knowledge globally” was live-streamed with more than 6,000 people tuning in. In response to a question from several audience members about how open education can effect change, Duflo emphasized the importance of sharing learning and teaching resources in multiplying the impact of any program. “Many more people need to be able to do this work, and many more policymakers need to understand it and understand why they need to do it,” she says. “And for that, we need many more people trained.”

Duflo urges learners to be similarly persistent in their pursuit of knowledge, explaining that when “you manage to go above that step [of overcoming a hurdle] suddenly the perspective really opens.”

To learn from Esther Duflo, see these courses on:

MIT OpenCourseWare

• Foundations of Development Policy
• The Challenge of World Poverty
• Development Economics
• Data Analysis for Social Scientists

MITx

• MicroMasters Program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy
• Courses include: Microeconomics; Designing and Running Randomized Evaluations, Data Analysis for Social Scientists; and electives from: The Challenges of Global Poverty (Intro), Foundations of Development Policy: Advanced Development Economics (Advanced), Political Economy and Economic Development (Advanced), Good Economics for Hard Times (Intro), Microeconomic Theory and Public Policy (Advanced)

MIT Open Learning’s Open Conversation series launched in 2024 with a conversation focused on how open educational resources support professionals by closing knowledge gaps.

Sharing knowledge to address global poverty was originally published in MIT Open Learning on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.