Tewodaj Mogues is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington DC. She studies the welfare impacts of public investments in agriculture and rural areas in Africa, and conducts research on the political economy drivers affecting how governments allocate funds for development. Her work also explores how decentralising authority to local governments in developing countries affects basic service delivery to ordinary people, and the role of social networks of the poor for their ability to get ahead. Much of her empirical research has been on Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Uganda. Tewodaj leads a research cluster on Public Investments and Institutions, under a broad programme on Policies, Institutions and Markets, which spans across 15 international agricultural research centres. She also serves as co-editor of the European Journal of Development Research, where she leads an initiative to increase the capacity of early-career scholars with a recent doctoral degree to more effectively navigate the academic publication pipeline.

Tewodaj received her Bachelors degree in economics from Kalamazoo College (1995), and her Ph.D. in agricultural economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2005), the dissertation of which won an award from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association for being among the best four of the year in the field. She is born in Ethiopia, is a German citizen, and has lived in the United States the last quarter century.

Fun fact: Tewodaj and a friend spontaneously did a three-week long road-trip criss-crossing Iran, both thus going from having no prior exposure to the country, to falling in love with its beauty and its people. When they once sat in on a professor’s economics class at a university, they understood everything, without knowing a word of Farsi (Clearly, science has a universal language!)