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Public policy professor Ashu Handa has won two research grants, each worth $634,000 over two years, to evaluate social cash transfer programs in Malawi and Zimbabwe.

Handa is chair of the public policy department in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also is a fellow of the Carolina Population Center.

The grants were awarded by the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation  (3ie), an organization devoted to improving lives in low- and middle-income countries through better policies, programs and projects based on results from impact studies.

Handa was one of 220 applicants for the 10 grants awarded and won two of them. In both Malawi and Zimbabwe, Handa will investigate the economic impact of government direct cash payments to poor families on the households and the local community.

Handa is a former social policy adviser for UNICEF’s Eastern and Southern Africa regional office in Nairobi, Kenya. His areas of research focus are poverty, population and human resource economics, social policy and safety nets, and applied development microeconomics.

For details on both projects, visit http://www.3ieimpact.org/funded.html?id=75 and http://www.3ieimpact.org/funded.html?id=77.

College of Arts and Sciences contact: Kim Spurr, (919) 962-4093, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it