福利姬自慰

Research in Rwanda: 福利姬自慰undergrad analyzes impact of connecting isolated villages with roads

World Bank project helps student land job with Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research after graduation

When Quan Le was in Rwanda making maps for a World Bank road project last summer, he found himself wondering whether people would take his cartography seriously if they knew it was being done by an undergraduate student from the University of Toronto.

Then his professor reported visiting the office of a Rwandan government official and spotting one of Le鈥檚 maps hanging prominently on the wall.

鈥淭hat was pretty cool,鈥 says Le, who came to Canada from Vietnam in 2010 when he was still in high school and just four years later became a research assistant for 福利姬自慰economist Marco Gonzalez-Navarro through Ontario鈥檚 work-study program.

The chance to travel to Rwanda and do economics research in the field was the result of that experience. Gonzalez-Navarro was charged with evaluating the impact of a five-year project to connect isolated villages to the rural road system in Rwanda, funded by the World Bank and Innovations for Poverty Action, a U.S. non-profit. Le became part of Gonzalez-Navarro鈥檚 team, serving as the professor鈥檚 eyes and ears in Rwanda for six weeks in July and August 2015. 

After graduation this year, Le will begin a two-year contract as a research assistant at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

鈥淒uring that interview, the professors at Stanford expected me to be very knowledgeable about this Rwanda project, because I鈥檓 part of the team that鈥檚 running it,鈥 says Le. 鈥淚 think if I didn鈥檛 have this position, I would never have gone to Stanford.鈥

The only undergraduate on the project, Le collected data to help create algorithms showing the impact of constructing better feeder routes for isolated villagers trying to get to national markets. The opportunity to actually go to Rwanda helped make all those numbers very real for Le, who says his field research experience was the highlight of his work. 

鈥淓ven putting the market just 500 metres closer makes a big difference when you are carrying 20 kilograms of bananas or sweet potatoes back and forth on the road every day,鈥 Le says. 鈥淚 was able to make those numbers concrete, because it鈥檚 kind of hard to interpret data if you don鈥檛 know what it really means.

鈥淵ou can read papers and you can look at pictures of the roads, but there鈥檚 always the value of experience 鈥 nothing beats being there.鈥

The trip also helped Le understand how rural surveys and field research are organized and conducted by agencies like the World Bank, with their vast experience in development economics.

Le plans to focus on development economics in his future career and is interested in how 鈥減overty traps鈥 such as a lack of market access impact poor people in terms of income, opportunity and the costs of goods and services. Most Rwandans in rural areas have to walk or ride bikes to reach the markets in the hilly African nation.

鈥淭here are people in these pocket villages with no viable transportation to the general highways, because the existing feeder roads are so bad, but if you have a better road, the cost of trade is lower, and that facilitates access to national markets,鈥 says Le.

鈥淭his experience in Rwanda helped provide a lot of context for that kind of situation. I want to be able to run one of these studies myself one day.鈥

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