Bidisha Barooah

Bidisha Barooah
Designation: Lead Economist, IFAD
Bidisha Barooah was a Senior Evaluation Specialist at 3ie. Bidisha lead 3ie's work on rural livelihoods and women's empowerment. She holds a PhD in Economics in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics.

Blogs by author

Innovative study to measure gender norm foundations and change in rural Bangladesh

Vegard Iversen, Bidisha Barooah, Rohan Shah, Amanda Wendt, Adrienne Martin 26 May 2023 blog  

Gender norms or shared beliefs about what women and men ought to do in a particular social context determine how they interact with each other. A critical shift away from regressive gender norms is imperative to make progress toward gender equality. But these norms are considered particularly resistant to change and are often the reason behind limited impacts of development programs on gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Five lessons from our Transparent, Reproducible, and Ethical Evidence (TREE) reviews

Chandan Jain, Charlotte Lane, Andrew Tangang, Jennifer Sturdy, Bidisha Barooah 22 March 2023 blog  
We have been consolidating our efforts to develop stronger systems for producing transparent, reproducible, and ethical evidence (TREE). We have emphasized asking ourselves the right questions at the right times, even when there are no easy answers. We’ve examined very specific questions such as: Does a state of scarcity or equipoise make it ethical to withhold an intervention from a control group?

A framework for examining women’s economic empowerment in collective enterprises

Bidisha Barooah, Shreya Banerjee, Aastha Dang, Krishna Kejriwal, Ridhi Aggarwal 30 August 2022 blog  
Swashakt, launched with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2020, has now reached more than 6900 women across 480 villages in 10 Indian states who have become a part of farm or non-farm women’s collective enterprises. In this blog, we discuss how we define and measure women’s economic empowerment in the context of our program.

It’s time to take note of the Self Help Groups’ potential

Bidisha Barooah, Ritwik Sarkar, Zeba Siddiqui 02 June 2020 blog  
As the world is scrambling for resources to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak, India is fortunate to have a motivated cadre of women assisting the fight at the community-level. Rightfully called the ‘silent soldiers’, the 690 lakh or so women members of around 63 lakh Self Help Groups (SHGs) across the country formed under the Indian government’s flagship Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM) have come to the forefront.

Phone surveys in developing countries need an abundance of caution

Subha Mani, Bidisha Barooah 09 April 2020 blog  
Subha Mani and Bidisha Barooah write about the need for researchers to exercise an abundance of caution before conducting phone surveys to collect data during this global pandemic. In this blog, they discuss some of the risks that survey respondents might face and offer suggestions on how researchers could mitigate them.