Okay. Can you just start by saying your name and what your current position is?
So my name is Kate O'Kane. I'm an associate professor in public policy at the University of Oxford at the School of Government.
Yeah. And you also have a connection to the Centre for African Studies.
Is that right? The Centre for the Study of African Economies.
Yes. One of the researchers there. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. So first of all, just tell me a little bit about yourself.
How did you find yourself in the in the research area that you are and what were the main kind of career milestones on your way here?
So I work in labour market and social protection policy as an economist,
so I study welfare systems and labour market support systems in poor countries.
So the broad kind of idea is how do you get people in poor countries into gainful employment and into sort of more rewarding,
more productive jobs, better livelihoods? So that area of policy has grown a huge amount in the last sort of 25 or 30 years in general,
but particularly in poor countries because governments have started to expand their welfare system somewhat.
So before there was no provision made for you know,
there was sometimes provision made for if you are a pensioner or if you were a vulnerable child and you didn't have any support,
but there was very little other other support. But as mobile phone provision has expanded,
countries have started rapidly expanding who get some sort of basic pension or unemployment insurance relief.
And so I work I mean, actually very much like medical trials work,
we do big randomised trials with governments or NGOs and we test, you know, how you can improve those, those sorts of policies.
And one of the big things that's been a kind of real revolution is just giving people cash grants without conditions.
So even in wealthy countries, often to get you unemployment insurance, you're required to do certain things.
There's actually a lot of evidence showing that's not particularly effective and it costs quite a bit of money to impose.
So that's been the sort of big backdrop. Backdrop and that was kind of that revolution was all going on as I was was studying.
And so it was a I grew up in South Africa, worked a lot with unemployed young people.
So I started an NGO during my undergrad, which worked a lot with that population,
trying to help young people on the Cape Flats to apply for university.
And so I really had a real sense of, you know,
the growing number of people who were educated in these settings as there's been free primary and secondary education.
But the, you know, huge aspirations for formal employment, but people really struggled to get work.
So that was what got me interested in in that area.
And then I've, I came to Oxford to do my PhD and then, you know, as I started to have more control over my research agenda,
that was that was the kind of direction that I that I went into.
So when did you arrive in Oxford? So 2007 to do my master's originally.
Then I worked in Ethiopia for a year between Masters and Ph.D., did my Ph.D. at Oxford as well.
I was at Cambridge and at Princeton for a bit on fellowships, and then I came back.
So I started at PSG, and in 2018 I was sort of right with, you know, when the pandemic hit, I was still a postdoc.
And then during the pandemic, I actually got a faculty post and moved into the post that I'm in now.
Mm hmm. And so the research you were doing that stepped before 2019?
Well before 2020 at the moment, did it involve a lot of fieldwork?
Where were you going? Back and forth? Yeah. So the mainly was it mainly South Africa that you continue to work in.
So work there. And then also in Kenya. So working in in three big kind of trial sites.
So the ones in Nairobi, the ones in Johannesburg, and then the one is a rural site in in western Kenya.
And so I worked with a team of academics setting up a sort of a place where when, you know, it's often in western Kenya to say to 400 villages.
And we collaborated with an NGO to test a big cash transfer program.
So during my postdoc, that was the main thing I was I was working on the NGOs called GiveDirectly.
And so the idea behind it is to try and strip out as much overhead as possible and to try and just
transfer cash directly from donors who wanted to give it to poor people in developing countries.
And they do it as a quite a big lump sum. So there's a it's about a year's worth of income for a person, an average person in Kenya.
And poor rural households get this as a lump sum and they can use it to start
businesses or to invest in a child's education or to improve their housing.
There's all sorts of things it's given completely, unconditionally.
And so. From 2018 to just before the pandemic.
We were working on an evaluation of this program and tried to understand sort of what its its effects were.
And we find, you know, very similarly to cash programs that have been run a lot in the developing world.
There's this huge narrative that poor people waste the money and they're going to get excited
and they get this grant and then they're going to just blow it on cigarettes and alcohol.
There's absolutely no evidence that is true.
There's meta analyses now of hundreds of studies around the world showing that actually people will spend money primarily on food,
but they invest in assets. They often use the money to search for work or they'll start a stopped or improve economic activities that they're doing,
and particularly when they get a big lump sum as opposed to just a small amount of welfare each month.
That can actually be really life changing in helping people to either get into better jobs or to build up their businesses.
So that was exactly what we saw in Kenya, you know, very similar to the trials that had been done.
And then we were testing, in addition, trying to understand the effects.
So our kind of unique bit was trying to understand what was going on within the households and how was
that changing woman and children's position and their ability to negotiate over the cash transfer.
So that was our new bid.
But we were also finding very similar evidence to what other countries had found when they were doing these these sorts of programs.
And did the NGO also provide advice? And what about banking?
I mean, did you just literally give them a pile of cash or did not say that that's a good.
So there's there's a mobile money system in Kenya called M-Pesa, which is on it works even on really basic mobile phones.
And so the NGO gives if you don't have a mobile phone, they give you a mobile phone and they help you to register for it.
And then the money, you don't have a bank account, but it's there's a system where people, you know,
like even very poor vendors in the market, you can just transfer money between the phones.
So basically replaces the bank system. India has got that as well.
And a lot of countries are getting them.
And so with that capacity, it's made it actually very easy for governments to send money to people's mobile phones,
which, you know, that then becomes very important during during COVID.
But the NGO has been a leader in using that technology to transfer money to to the households.
So, yeah, so that's that's how the how it gets done.
And so then it sort of sits on the phone like kind of think of your phone as a credit card, basically, or a debit card.
And it's every household in this say there's 400 villages in western Kenya.
Did every household get the money? So it was targeted at the poorest 40% of the households.
So we use what's called a proxy means test.
So you get the kind of best measure of poverty tends to be what households spend every month.
But researchers have developed a proxy for that, which tends to be sort of their basic assets.
So the state of the House, the quality of the floor, that sort of so it's we use we would measure that before the NGO went to the households.
They would measure that and then they would use that to target.
I mean there's there's quite a kind of cut off in the communities.
You can see at the very, very poorest people can't afford to put an iron roof on their houses.
And so they have to redo it every year with the thatch and they'll have a mud floor and they won't have even a basic mobile phone.
And that's the kind of very poorest people. And so that was who we were.
We were targeting with this program. And I was interested whether you see a kind of lifting of all the chips,
if everybody in the community is doing a bit better economically, does that have repercussions within the community?
Yeah. So actually one of my colleagues in the economics department did the first study on this with with the same NGO,
it's said in an adjacent area, and they do find that that's the case.
It's as Kagame's told us in the 1950s, when you inject more, you know, particularly in a recession,
but at any time when you inject more money into a community, it so if you have a very limited supply of goods and services, it can lead to inflation.
But in this case, actually markets are working pretty well.
And so when you give this big cash injection, people spend it because they're poor,
they don't buy most champagne, they're buying locally produced goods.
And so that actually kickstarts a process of economic growth in these communities.
More businesses open.
The businesses sort of make more make more profits, often because they're selling more goods and services and they reckon the multiple.
The effect of aid that's given is around between two and 2.5, which is, you know,
it really does kick start a kind of process of of economic growth, which is fantastic.
So the NGO is actually on the basis of these different evaluations, is now looking at working with the governments of Kenya and Malawi.
And they're going to be trying to do something like this at a national level to see if, you know,
just a really big injection of cash distributed to the poorest people can kick start a process of economic growth.
Very interesting. So let's get to go back now.
Can you remember where you were or under what circumstances you first heard that something was going on in China and that might affect you?
Yeah, I remember very vividly because my my fiancee worked on the vaccine team.
And so in I was just after Valentine's Day.
And so we'd gone away for a nice weekend and we started he started seeing the stuff coming
out of China and he was absolutely freaking out as any infectious diseases doctor was.
I thought he'd lost a little bit, to be honest. And so we and that's that first kind of couple of weeks he was really trying you know,
there was just a lot of conversation trying to get people to pay attention to the issue internally in the UK.
But then, you know, almost immediately we started to realise he started to realise that there was going to be both possibility for
vaccine production and that it was very likely that developing countries weren't going to be able to buy it.
And so yeah, so I think the first bits of the pandemic before I kind of got into like how is this
going to apply to welfare systems actually about the first two months we spent.
So he this is Sandy Douglas and he's got close.
He has also been interviewed as part of this project Trust.
Right. Adrian Hill, who runs the Jenner Institute, and then my old PhD supervisor's professor, Stefan Dirk on.
He's a prof at the Public Policy School as well.
And so he was at that time had just left as the chief economist at David.
And so we've all worked, you know, they work much more.
The whole DNA Institute's thing is trying to realising that there are places where there aren't markets for drugs.
So, you know, the drugs work and they have benefits or drugs or vaccines, but no one can afford to pay for them.
And so they've got this whole, you know, trying to have universities as a public service,
trying to invent low cost, publicly available technologies that,
you know, not for profit so others can use to get those those benefits up to poor countries is very similar to the sort of work we do.
And so we had a lot of discussions and then we ended up writing a kind of big sort of policy note,
but basically arguing that this issue was going to hit vaccines for poor countries and so that they might be under-investment in vaccines in general,
but there was particularly likely to be underinvestment in vaccines that would go to poor countries.
So that didn't need a fridge and that potentially could be administered in fewer
doses because obviously the distribution systems in those countries are really,
really limited. So yeah, so from February through March.
So I guess by about March 6th we had written that note and we were talking with people in the UK government and at the Gates Foundation and,
and Cepi and all of those sorts of places trying to just get this point out there.
And I mean, I think this is COVID, I would guess, in video,
but it ended up that the that was that note was quite influential in the World Bank and others
setting up the sort of alliance to pool funding to help developing countries get vaccines.
But it also was a big motivator for the AstraZeneca deal with Oxford was very good,
you know, got a very low price for the vaccines for poor countries.
And then they also did this amazing outlicensing where they manufactured it in a bunch of poor countries so that it could be easily distributed.
Yeah. So I mean, this sort of on a personal level of the pandemic, there was this we don't work together.
You know, we, we live together, but we, we suddenly realised that the economics and the science needed to go together to make this point.
So we had a couple of really interesting.
We can try to kind of hammer this, no doubt, together in language that made sense to both to both constituencies.
So you're trying to really distil the complicated science down of, you know,
what were the key the key parameters of a vaccine that were going to mean that some of them work for poor countries and some of them didn't.
And then, you know, trying to explain some of the quite complicated economic problems in ways that the scientists would understand.
So it was quite it was it was very challenging. I mean, quite a quite an interesting process,
but it was a weird sort of serendipity that we happened to be able to have the interdisciplinary plenary discussion in the living room,
which was quite, which was quite helpful. Yeah, Yeah.
And I mean, great to then be able to connect Stefan and Adrian, who, you know,
then subsequently of that, that connection is kind of staged and you know,
it really was quite a, a useful nexus, I think, to connect those two very different worlds in a way that could get the resources.
Because the big issue they were facing actually was money. It was, you know,
and they've got these initial Treasury grants and then World Bank grants that
would make sure that there was sort of money flowing into the vaccine manufacture.
Right. For them to start at the beginning. So it was quite that was very exciting to be was nothing to do with my normal job.
But that kind of took over for the first first couple of months.
Mm hmm. But then then turning to your your normal job, as you called it.
How did. I mean, from March, obviously, from mid-March. We were in lockdown here.
Yeah. I mean, I guess unlike most of us, you had already done quite a lot of remote working because you you're international colleagues all the time.
So did it make a big difference to how you were able to work?
So, I mean, the the big thing that we were very lucky with, we weren't actually in the field.
So. So usually when we'll do an evaluation with the government or an NGO,
there's a period when you're actually giving the, the sort of policy intervention to people.
So, you know, GiveDirectly is going around surveying 10,000 households and then giving them the cash transfers.
So I didn't have a project of that kind in the field at that stage,
which was which was really lucky because I had many colleagues who they were in the middle of trials and they had to shut them down.
So I wasn't actually in that stage. We had finished this trial and we had the results and we were writing.
We were writing them up and doing doing analysis.
So my own work wasn't wasn't that affected?
We had one or two projects that we that we stopped and we did have.
We actually had some teams in the countries sitting who would normally have been doing the field work,
but they didn't have they didn't have work at that stage. So that actually ended up being quite useful in some of what we what we ended up doing.
So you must have realised, sorry, I shouldn't put words in your mouth.
I mean, did it how soon did it become apparent that the policy response to the pandemic was going to have an impact on people in poor communities?
So, I mean, we we. Yeah.
So we finished. We finished that note. The note, the Gates vaccine note was like March 6th, seventh.
And then after we finished that, I started chatting with two other colleagues,
have a a colleague at Warwick and one at Queen Mary Clement and then Francois Gerard.
And so they both work on Francois,
works on unemployment insurance and claim all works on kind of public works and cash transfers very similarly to me.
And we started talking. So the lockdown sort of rolled out.
A lot of countries weren't locking down in March.
And then by March 21st, this the countries that have started locking down and then we realised it was going to be and it was absolutely devastating.
You know, these are not countries.
I mean, in developed countries, many places put people on furlough, so they kept work, you know, they weren't working, but they kept being paid.
The firms didn't want to keep them on. And so the government paid to take them on.
That didn't happen in many poor countries. So they were just millions of people overnight who were laid off.
And, you know, in urban areas was really difficult because often either I mean, you saw in India,
people were laid off en masse and there was this huge migration out to rural areas with the virus in many countries tried to stop that happening.
So they shut down and then they they closed down travel out of the cities.
But then you have a whole lot of people in the cities who have no jobs and are not getting an income and they can't eat.
So, you know, we you could see that happening very quickly. And so when that as soon as that started.
So I think sort of from about the 21st of March, we started writing a paper about,
you know, what could the social protection response be from countries.
So it has so that that published and went up just as a blog initially and then we
did some kind of podcasts and things around it in those first couple of weeks.
But it was basically saying, you know,
countries need to stop worrying so much about exactly whether they can target the poor and just get money out like you just and,
you know, we had a three kind of different ways in which countries could could respond.
You know, one was using the traditional unemployment insurance that the few former workers would have.
So trying to extend that, make it more generous if countries could put people on on furlough.
The second thing was just using the sort of existing social assistance programs.
So they are cash and food relief programs.
So we were saying try to use the infrastructure that's already paying people, but pay them more.
And then we were also talking about informal community channels of support that people could use.
And so that was quite a broad ranging paper in the sense of, you know, COVID.
We covered different countries, but I started to realise I know South Africa very well,
and we work quite a lot with a provider that works a lot with the government.
And so, you know, I as soon as we finished that, so that took about a week.
And then as soon as we'd finished that paper, I started to look at what was going on in South Africa.
And then we started to think about about how we could get involved in that for that particular country case.
And you do you already have channels of communication set up between you and the policymakers.
So they. I didn't have at as high a level as we are.
So I knew sort of personally the one of the president's economic advisers and then
one of the people who worked in the presidency actually was a student at BSG.
And so I knew I knew the treaty Makhanya, the president's economic advisor.
And so I, I mean, this was this sort of unusual time, but I just wrote a four page note.
And so the first the first kind of thing that was a real issue in the South African context is that the.
If you're destitute, if you're absolutely starving,
you can go to a welfare office and they'll give you a food parcel, and they'll do that for a period of three months.
The portion of people who were destitute suddenly ballooned.
So they were in South Africa, has 50 million people.
There were 9 million people who were saying they were going to bed hungry every night and they were trying to get food parcels out,
but in the middle of the pandemic, so that at that stage in in April, they were about I think they were getting out about 1 million parcels a week.
So just know one ninth of what they needed.
And so the I was using the Evidence from Kenya project and then also from what is known in the rest of the world.
So there's loads of major studies and things just basically saying you need to shift from food into cash.
So, you know, the the thing that you can pay everybody quickly is cash.
And in normal times, we sort of worry, well, if the government gives out cash to poor people, then maybe they're not going to use it well.
So we must make sure they. I don't agree with this, but we must make sure that they get it as food so that they spend it properly.
There's no actual evidence that actually.
So what I was saying in the note was we know that if you give people cash, mostly they spend it on food anyway.
Cash is more cost effective to distribute because you instead of trying to move fresh food around or bags of lentils around, you know,
then you just in the cash through the banking system or through these mobile money transfers,
it's less likely to get stolen, easier to, you know, you can have security on the channels of distribution.
And, you know, there's lots of studies being done. It delivers similar gains in nutrition and it's less expensive.
So kind of put that together in a note. And I sent it to Judy and said, you know, this is this is the evidence base.
You know, what should we. This is what we think we should do. And then I also did a bunch of radio and TV adverts,
and then there was another group of South African academics who were doing some modelling at the same time.
So was in communication with with them.
And so there was this whole sort of set of different pressure groups on the government suggesting that they should make this shift.
And they did. And so they overnight well, not overnight.
I mean, they worked through, I think it was sort of by the end of April.
They the president's announced in South Africa announced this big relief package,
and it was the biggest relief, biggest change to the welfare system since about 2004 and 2004.
They started giving a child benefit. And this time they said they did two things.
The first was existing people who were already getting government grants.
So pensioners and people who were caregivers of a child, they increased the amount that they got.
And then the second thing was they they put they said that anyone who was unemployed could
apply by mobile phone to get an unconditional cash payment and they were going to get three.
It's about $35 or £20 a month, and that had never existed before.
They'd never been welfare for the able bodied before. So they set this up.
It was absolutely astounding. They set up I think they've got 6 million applications in like the first three weeks for this grant.
And then they started paying out the money, you know, and increased the and so that that change in policy, they reckon,
stopped 5.6 million people from falling into food poverty in those first those first couple of months after the lockdown.
So it was really an amazing, amazing change by government, but also amazing campaign by civil society and academics.
So alongside the academic papers,
there was this big pressure group which was the unions and various civil society organisations called Pay the Grants,
which was basically arguing for this, the shift away from food parcels into the into the cash provision.
Did they have the money in the Treasury or did they have to get money from international sources?
No, that's a very that's a very good question. They they went.
So there was I think there was obviously a lot of government spending that didn't happen in that in that period.
So I think some of it came from from that. I mean, infrastructure projects and projects.
And so I think there was a lot of a lot of stuff that just wasn't going to happen.
Wasn't going to happen. It was an emergency budget.
So they, you know, as many governments were doing. I don't think at that stage that they and I don't actually think South Africa has gone before.
They later went for a World Bank loan, but I think that was for different purposes.
There were massive issues, though, like countries that just didn't have.
So they reallocated budget and they have cut other things subsequently.
And but I mean, there definitely were countries, you know, Malawi, like really poor countries, just didn't have the ability to do this.
So it has been, you know, looking across the different countries,
it has been the case that it's more been in middle and lower middle income countries.
So countries where there's some tax base and then they can redistribute.
But I think then the IMF later on tried to help countries to borrow more easily.
There's a system called special drawing rights that they reallocate.
Yeah. But they basically did try to help countries to do some more of this.
But it has been there has been inequality within poor countries and what they were able to do.
And you tell me if I'm jumping ahead to that. One of the things you've been interested in doing,
I gather your part of the Mind and Behaviour Research Group is actually building self-efficacy
among poor people so that they feel more confident about using the money that they've got.
Can you tell me a bit more about that? Yeah.
So in my Ph.D., the one of the things that I worked on was these sort of interventions to boost people's aspirations and increase self-efficacy.
So the particular intervention we designed was a set of videos,
which is a set of successful life stories about people who were very similar to the people who were.
So we did this in rural Kenya in the study that I was talking about and also in rural
Ethiopia sits with farmers who often women who are often sort of of lower status.
And so we show these stories which are about real life people who've managed to improve their own position
through their business or through studying for a further educational qualification or something like that.
So we show these life stories and we've seen in randomised trials,
so we give those randomly to some villages but not others and they actually do have an amazing impact on on people's self-efficacy,
their aspirations for the future and then on how much they invest for the future.
So interestingly, so it's often investing in kids education, but also women putting more into their businesses,
working a bit more in their businesses, and then that increases the business profitability.
And so in the study in Kenya that I was talking about,
we tested those sorts of interventions and we found those had these benefits for self-efficacy and empowerment.
And then we also tested the cash transfers and then we tested the two together.
And so interestingly, the cash transfers also have really big benefits for people's aspirations and self-efficacy.
So just giving the money really empowers people.
You know, we measure that and it has it's more expensive to give them the money, but it also has bigger benefits.
So I think that was quite an.
So one of the things we were interested in was, you know, if you add the video intervention onto the cash, can that help?
And it does help. So it particularly increases the extent to which women own the businesses are
able to control them and the extent to which there's investment in children.
So it does help. But I think the big lesson for me actually from that was just the cash.
You know, we always think of welfare as being disempowering and that it, you know, makes people dependent on it, doesn't it?
But people's, you know, how well they think they're going to do in the future, how in control they feel of their life.
You know, do they think that things are going to get better and it then changes?
You know, one of the things it's doing there is a psychological channel and that's somehow, you know, so so people always puzzled.
I give people money. Why do they keep working? In fact, they work more.
But I think it's because of some of these psychological benefits. So I think that was a really quite profound thing that I didn't I didn't expect.
And that's been a really important reason why I've argued for the scale up of this international welfare programs,
because it's simple and it's it's fairly quick to scale up.
And, you know, we already knew from our own work that it was going to have these very multifaceted benefits for people.
The other thing is it improves mental health. So levels of depression also dropped massively with cash transfers.
So, yeah, so I think it would be quite a powerful thing to be able to give.
Yes. Yes. I mean, particularly physical health as well. If people are back and they're going, yes, I haven't worked on that, but they have you know,
people can pay for medicine where they weren't able to do that before or pay for,
you know, I mean, in in poor countries, it's also you'll often see people have a huge growth or a broken limb that hasn't been set,
but for tiny amounts of money and they can't work. You know, we're seeing a version of that in the UK very sadly.
So I think it's it really the just more resources can do an enormous amount.
And so, I mean, so you're a lot of what you were doing early in the pandemic was essentially advocacy and promoting the findings of previous research.
Did you go on to do more research as a consequence of the cash transfers?
So we we haven't done so.
We didn't do any work on the cash transfer programme itself.
Some of the reason for that was, you know, in a normal time we would pilot a programme and.
We would do a randomised trial during the piloting. During this program we said, look, the kind of duty of care in this situation is this.
We think this is going to work and so we just have to give it to everybody.
So I mean it's it's tricky now because now the government has been working with the government on an ongoing basis for the last three years or so,
and now they want to scale. They want to keep the program going.
So it's running with the whole country and they want to keep it going. We don't actually know what it did.
You know, we can do some estimates, but they're not as good as the estimates we would normally have.
So that's actually quite a and I think that happened with a lot of countries
that very rapidly scaled things up and now they want to make them permanent.
So we didn't actually study the cash transfer program,
but we have been doing quite a lot of work on how you help workers get back into work because
there were these big layoffs and now workers are trying to reconnect with their employers.
So we've actually been on the more labour market side doing quite a bit of work on on
low cost ways that employers can screen workers so that they can find the best ones.
And then also how to help workers identify which jobs they'll be well suited to.
And is that a matter of technology and platforms and just communication?
So, yeah, so the main thing I mean, one of the things that happened during the pandemic was the labour market went online.
So in many countries, if there wasn't, you know, these platforms like indeed, or the government has a job search platform here,
they also have those in developing countries and they're pretty cost effective to to access.
And so work seekers often use those firms often use those.
But way more people started using them, which is great.
You know, I think in general it's been a real impetus to get a lot of stuff online, which has been fantastic.
Yeah, so we work with one of the providers in South Africa that went from, you know, during the pandemic.
I think it went from having a few hundred thousand work seekers.
Now they have 4 million jobseekers signed up on the platform. So we're doing a lot of work with that platform to try.
And the one big study that that came out during COVID was often employers will do a lot of screening,
so they'll look at your school qualifications and then they'll make you sit a numeracy test and can you
answer the phone and lots of different and that's quite expensive and then people have to do that in person.
And so we've been testing actually does that do those qualifications help?
Do they make workers more productive? Or what we we in some employers think is that actually if you test people's soft skills,
that actually probably accounts mostly for how well they do in the job and what kind of skills.
So the when we test, it's actually some very simple self-reported measures about how do you structure your day,
You know, in the last week, how often have you got done the things that you meant to do, you know, how good are you?
Are you at persisting through a task, Those sorts of things you would think people would.
People are very honest, which is very interesting. But yeah, so that actually predicts very well whether people will get hired into a job.
And then what we're testing is does that that measure predict how long they stay in the job as well?
But, you know, you can do that that measure. You can phone people and ask them can even get them to query it on their phone.
And so we're using that as a way of screening people to try and cut the screening costs and help people move back into into work.
Mm. And I've got to note that you've also had an interest in the way governments communicate with people and the message tracker.
Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. So that was another thing we did during, during COVID was, was just looking at how Yeah.
What sorts of messaging governments provide to people.
So the big thing during lockdowns was how to encourage people to sort of stick to the rules.
And then we just did it was again, a review of bit of the evidence,
but finding that making moral appeals is actually much more effective than you would think.
So people really want to do the right thing. And if you appeal to those norms, that's that's usually quite likely to be effective.
Mm hmm. And I mean, do you have any connection with the government response tracker, which is also within the ads levels spoken to our net?
Relax. Yeah. We didn't actually during the pandemic.
I mean, we didn't do as much on the government messaging as we we sort of there were a couple of things we started tracking at the beginning.
And then once this cash grant stuff started, we we basically moved the whole team over into doing that,
but we didn't really have enough resources, were doing all of the different things that.
And so that I mean, that sounds amazing. And you mentioned that you're now working with other countries as well as as well as South Africa.
Yeah. So and so. So the other main big one we've been working with is is Kenya.
But I think I mean, very similar so that the original paper that we wrote on the social protection response,
I think that has been quite widely used in a range of different a range of different countries too.
I mean, we were not the only ones making that argument, but I think the yeah, I mean,
the number of cash transfer programs has skyrocketed in during the pandemic, which has been really encouraging.
I mean, it's still the impacts on poverty have still been huge.
We've really gone very far backwards for meeting the Sustainable Development Goals, for example.
But I think there was quite a lot I mean, the negative impacts have still been.
Yeah. Yes. Yes. And how optimistic are you that that kind of government support will be stay
in place in the future and and on non-pandemic and non-emergency situation.
And I mean I think I think pretty optimistic like you know the South African case very well and it it is a battle, you know,
because as the emergency sort of thing reduces, you know, to be honest,
I think politically some of what they were worried about was literally food riots.
You know, and as things have gone a bit back to normal and more people have been employed and so on, that recedes a little bit.
And so suddenly they think, well, you know, is this going to be popular enough that we're going to put up taxes?
And so I think those sorts of questions about redistributive policy do start to become more prominent.
And there's pushback. And so actually, the South African government did drop the grant for a little bit.
They did actually then have food riots because the economy wasn't yet back on its on its feet.
So that was in sort of July 2001. And then we suddenly did a big 2000, 20, 20, 21, 21.
And so then we suddenly did another big piece of modelling saying, well, we should bring the cash grant back.
And they, they did. But I think there is, you know,
it is then I think governments face a good pressure of they have to take people
off the ground programs and those people are also voters and they can protest.
And so I think, you know, I think there has been an expansion that's probably isn't going to you know,
it will be politically very difficult for governments to to pull that back.
If you're a fan of redistributive policy, as I am, then you think that's a really good thing.
You're not a fan of the welfare state, then you think it's a bad thing. But, you know, obviously there's debate about that.
So. Yeah.
I mean, has it has working on this they are on these projects in the pandemic raised new questions that you're interested in working on in the future.
Um yeah. I mean, I think I think the you.
You're one of the things is is really that this sort of set of you know,
if a lot of workers lose their jobs, how do you help people to make back into the economy quickly?
Because I think we we do really worry that there's been a generation that's been really badly affected.
So. In in the labour market literature, it's called scarring.
So, you know, that has a psychological connotation.
But I mean, it's it's really you know, we know that if you graduate during a recession or any of that kind of downturn,
you're actually less likely to earn over your life and you have higher unemployment and so on.
And we've seen that, you know, on a really big scale with lots of.
So I think they really are worries about, you know,
how is this generation that's coming of age going to do and then also the people who were in in schooling.
But I think also it's a kind of more hopeful narrative of, well, maybe we've developed some tools that we didn't have before.
So, you know, in particular this being able to work online at low cost, you know,
and really I think it was quite encouraging for many governments and practitioners to have to say,
you know, this problem is so massive and we have to deal do something now.
And actually what people were able to do at big scale in my field was more than they'd
been able to do for 20 years before because you're suddenly there was the political will.
And so, I mean, I do think for people who are big advocates of real,
really policy that's targeted at the very poorest, you know, it's not like homelessness in the UK.
We can actually fix this if we just put enough money and time into it.
And so I think I think in that sense, people's hand has been strengthened a bit because it it is possible.
It's just a question of political will and resources. I mean,
I think that raises a quick question in my mind about the balance for policymakers between listening to people like
you who are producing an evidence base and taking making political decisions based on what they think voters want.
Those two things aren't always aligned, as we know very well.
Absolutely. And it depends if the bulk of your voting base is poor or not.
And so, yeah, I mean, I think I think that is a that is a real a real tension that many governments are facing.
And, you know, also the I think the other thing that was really encouraging that has been a powerful, positive lesson was, you know,
even when we were accumulating this whole evidence base before the pandemic, you know,
there was a good 20 years of work gone, had gone into how do we distribute cash by mobile phone?
What does it do to, you know, what is the comparison to food aid?
And it was there. And so I think there has been quite a a strengthening of the argument for that sort
of research because it helped us to really pivot very quickly in policy terms.
The other thing that's been helpful was sort of systems of data surveillance.
We talked a lot about them for health, but actually the countries that did the best were often those who had a good economic surveillance system.
If you say quality, and that's not what we call them, but you know,
you knew how many people there were of different income levels, who was going to be the likeliest to be affected?
Who should you target? How could you measure that? And so I think the country, South Africa was lucky.
We had a really good data source that we could use called the National Income Dynamics Study,
and that helped us to be able to map, you know, what would the policy look like and then how should we design it?
And, you know, that that investment will have paid for itself many times over.
I mean, you know, we're all now trying to make the case for better preparedness in the future.
So, you know, I think but but optimistically, I hope that, you know,
the lessons of data and of of building up an evidence base in in policy terms have been have been quite positive ones.
Excellent. Excellent. Can I just turn a little bit to how living through the pandemic was for you?
I mean, one question I'm asking everybody is how personally threatened did you feel by the virus?
I mean, I think not it now, but back at the beginning, before there were any vaccines, how did you how did you feel about it?
I mean, I'm very, very lucky, you know, healthy and young.
So, you know, I don't it wasn't it wasn't really something.
I mean, we were super safe. We were sitting in our little house in Headington on Skype calls a lot.
But I don't think I mean, neither of us were kind of in frontline services.
So I think that it was it was. Curiously detached in a way that I wouldn't normally you know,
always when I'm doing a study or art meeting the providers and the people are getting the policy and
you're really in the countries where I'm working and I couldn't back the the flights were closed.
You couldn't get to Kenya or South Africa. And so that was that was very weird.
I mean, I met all of the government teams we worked with a year and a half into the pandemic.
So that was that was quite strange because it felt, you know, it was also this particularly beautiful spring time.
And I knew that the world my world was like absolute carnage, but I couldn't see it.
So it was this very strange kind of I was very safe and very lucky.
But at the same time, you know, in my frame of reference, there was a lot going on that I felt like I really needed to to deal with, you know?
And I think that was also weird. There was like lot of people were baking and doing salads.
We had like upstairs was the cash grants and downstairs was the vaccine factory.
So we did think that the did you feel that the fact that you had something to keep you busy, did that help to support your wellbeing?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think. You know, I think I didn't feel this.
I only got to this sort of work part of it a little bit later.
I mean, I think the March, April, May, for the for the vaccine people was absolutely punishing.
I mean,
I just remember like feedings and the desserts because you lost ten kilos in like a because you as I've just never seen anybody work like that day.
Yeah, I was you know, I did kind of switch more into I was doing the domestic stuff,
so I was going to kind of going out to get food and, you know, making sure that the things were fed and cleaned and that sort of.
And it was literally just like taking food into his room.
So I'd be up when I got up, and then I would take out the dinner plate and he would go to bed at two.
And so, you know, I wasn't working that level of of things.
Although then later with did you know we were we're also working quite hard.
So I think that that was strange because because I think it was a very, you know,
very intellectual in the sense that it was just you with your laptop, but it was this quite punishing period in a lot of ways.
So I wouldn't have said it was was the highest levels of well-being we've had in, you know, also at the same time,
it's like in some ways you feel like you've you've kind of qualified your whole life to try and be able to do something and you could.
And so I think that was quite a quite a unique privilege, but it was also.
I think was also quite, quite stressful. I mean, I didn't I didn't ever have that that feeling that I think the vaccine people did of,
you know, literally every hour I sleep like people are dying.
And I think that was, you know, that was tough for them.
And there was this beginning point during the vaccine stuff where, you know, I mean, I think we did help with doing the funding note and things.
But it was this weird because I you know, I care very deeply about what my contribution is to the world.
And it was it was interesting as a feminist, there was this point was like,
the best thing I can do right now is feed this man in the thing that he's doing.
And and that was quite an interesting thing to sort of work through in your in your head.
But, you know, I think I think I'm very, very proud of of what they did of what we ended up being able to do.
I think I think people pulled together incredibly.
And, you know, I had teams from all over, like just working round the round the clock.
I think I think really people did get a lot from, you know, my whole team of young people just being able to contribute in some way.
I think they really felt much more, much more playful.
And it was we didn't know that we were going to achieve anything.
But it really I think we do feel very pleased with with what we what we managed to do,
obviously, and in collaboration with the with the government people.
But yeah, we we were glad when that first bit of things was was over although I think that kind of yeah,
I mean it's actually ended up being quite a long collaboration now on the social grant stuff.
It's been nearly nearly three years of sort of policy work, so it has kept going a little bit less frenetic pace, but not, not much.
Hmm. And has any of that experience changed your attitude or your approach to your work?
Yeah. I mean, I think it's it's it's quite cheeky going back to the business of like.
The the nicotine stuff of publishing papers.
You know, I do I do feel like it's definitely reoriented me towards the core of what's important in my work, you know,
And actually when it came down to it, it was you know, it was really important that the model was done right.
But you also have to do it fast. And so I think I think there are ways in which some of what we do in academia isn't completely Yeah,
you know, it's good we can dip into this emergency stuff. There is a longer, more drawn out process of producing the evidence.
But, you know, that's it is also really important. It's right.
You know, when I was looking up 20 trials on cash programs, I was very glad they were properly done.
So, I mean, I think it's made me more conscious of the work that happens,
that happens quickly, but also the importance of those those scientific standards.
I mean, I think I think we I remember Stephane at some point sending me a link of,
you know, he said there was an amazing MSF podcast about Ebola in West Africa.
And they said, you know, it got it got fixed by someone from a specialist from Uganda with a spreadsheet.
And I do think that if you care about science and you worry about the kind of anti expert thing,
I think it has been quite an affirming experience and saying, you know, the technical details actually really important in good policy.
And so I think in that sense it's made me, um, you know,
it was very draining but I think also feel much more committed to what what we're trying to do on a longer term basis.
Mm hmm. I just read it with a minute to go.
I don't. How do I tell you time when I can. I can go on if you feel good.
Because the question that I did have a note to ask you about capacity building.
Yeah. Because you know, it's all very well Oxford coming out to South Africa what to do.
But clearly South Africa ought to have its own experts.
Is that something that you've also been engaged with? Yeah. So, I mean, I think the I think our process was much more collaborative, actually.
So we so the longer term work we've been doing now.
So in the sort of rash of the pandemic and this big change in welfare policy, that was a bit you know,
there was sort of two different two or three different teams who were working on it.
So I had a team that was working with some researchers in Cape Town.
And some in at Duke in North Carolina. And so that was our team.
And then there was this other team that was at the University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch, and they had some researchers in Amherst.
And then actually for the later stages of designing.
So we're now working with the government on making this grant permanent. We actually put those teams together.
So it's it's a pretty equal distribution of researchers between them.
So the you know, we have more of the experience on the randomised trial side,
so we know more of the evidence base from other countries and then the South Africans do a particular sort of fiscal modelling technique.
So they've worked a lot more on the survey data and they've, you know, there's also slightly I do labour,
there's some differences in expertise in the teams,
but I mean I guess the question then you have to ask is how are those South African researchers there?
And you know, there's been very long term really amazing engagements in building I mean, I'm a I'm a product of that.
Like, you know, I am South African. I did my undergrad there.
There's a lot of different sort of scholarships and programs that exist to help people do short and long term experience abroad.
And then those people, a lot of them go back and teach in the universities.
And, you know, that's that's so good.
That means that there is this pretty strong economic capacity there.
And the Treasury has also invested quite a lot. They've got quite a lot of their own economists.
So I think our next stage is to kind of try and get it out of the universities into the Treasury.
But, you know, at least in in the experience of doing the collaborative work, I didn't I didn't feel like we were capacity building.
I mean, I was learning as much as, you know. But but that's unusual.
You know, it's a country that's a bit more developed. And so that wouldn't be the case in many other places.
I mean, we work a lot more on trying to do training and but I mean the research centre
work and that's a huge part of what we do is trying to get African economists,
you know, into economics, into PhD programs and then, you know, back to back to their own countries to to teach in the in the universities.
So we've got a kind of long term engagement with that. And what about international organisations like the International Labour Organisation?
I mean, is there are a move to try to get these messages spreading across the whole low income countries from a from a kind of UN based approach?
Yeah, that's so a lot of the sort of economic interventions are through the World Bank, so we work very closely with them.
So one of my collaborators runs the runs the Jobs Practice at the World Bank, and she's actually been so she's I mean, she's amazing.
Iliana Carranza She sort of manages a like a lot of research projects that deliver.
So she collaborates with academics to kind of get evidence delivered and then they do a
lot of work synthesising that and trying to get it into how the bank designs operations.
So I mean, that's probably the biggest dissemination channel because, you know,
so when like most of these sorts of programs are run with some World Bank money and
so then the bank's involved and designed how they designed and evaluated and so on.
And the yeah, I mean, in terms of the ILO, in the UN system,
there is there's quite a lot of work on what is done and they run some programs in countries.
But it's I think the move in the field has been really to try and get bilateral donors and the World Bank to fund the government.
And I really think that's much better because otherwise you set up a whole
parallel system and you actually want the government to build its own capacity.
You just want to be funding it and. Mm hmm.
And. Is there anything you'd like to see change in the future?
About how. How you were able to do the research that you do.
Yeah. I mean, I think the.
Yeah. You know, one of the the biggest things has actually been funding.
So one of the downsides has been, you know, foreign aid was massively cut in the wake of the pandemic.
So, you know, the US, the UK cut the budget from point seven, 2.5 of GDP.
I mean, wasn't it wasn't that even before. Yeah, so that was just before.
But then a lot of the, a lot of the cuts and it sort of started to come through in 2021 because they, you know,
they sort of went to the downstream from there when the cut was made and then the budgets ended up being cut.
So that's been devastating. I mean, the the.
Most a lot of the research I spoke about that was funded in the period when the UK was funding research.
And so I think the biggest thing would just be trying to get those programmes back up.
Like if we could just go up 2.7 again, you know, both on the funding research side, but also,
you know, many countries had programmes like the one I was talking about in South Africa.
They had one that was funded by DFID and that doesn't exist anymore.
I mean, those that's been one of the worst down sides of the of the pandemic.
So I think it's not a research focussed thing, but I think that's that's the biggest thing I'm worried about now is that we are,
you know, we're we just seem to be under a government that's not doesn't have those, those same priorities.
Um, but yeah, I mean I think, I think it's been also.
You know, it has changed things already in a good way in that we, being away from the countries, actually made us put the local teams in charge more.
And I think that's been really good. Yeah. So yeah, no, I mean it's it's been a real injection into things but quite energising and positive I think.
Excellent. Thank you very much.