Rachel Glennerster

Rachel Glennerster (born 21 October 1965) is a British economist. She is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, and served as chief economist for the Department for International Development (DFID) and the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) between 2018 and 2021. She has been announced as the new president for the Center for Global Development (CGD), starting in September 2024.

Education
Glennerster received her BA in PPE from Oxford University in 1988, where she was a member of Somerville College. She then proceeded to obtain a Masters in Economics from Birkbeck College, University of London in 1995 and a doctorate in economics from the same institution in 2004.

Career
Between 1988 and 1994, Glennerster worked as an economic adviser to HM Treasury. She was a member of the UK delegation to the IMF and World Bank from 1994 to 1996, and a development associate at the Harvard Institute for International Development in 1996-97.

In 1997, Glennerster joined the International Monetary Fund (IMF), first as an economist and then as a senior economist, where she stayed until 2004. She also taught at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government as an adjunct lecturer from 2000 to 2004.

From 2004 to 2017, Glennerster was executive director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She was also the co-chair of J-PAL's agriculture sector program between 2004 and 2014, and has been the education sector co-chair since 2014.

In 2010, she became the lead academic for Sierra Leone at the International Growth Centre, a research centre based jointly at The London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Oxford.

In 2018, Glennerster joined the Department for International Development (DFID), the UK's ministry for international development cooperation, as chief economist. In 2020, following DFID's merger with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), she became the FCDO's chief economist, a role she fulfilled until July 2021. She also sat on DFID's Independent Advisory Committee on Development Impact and the FCDO's executive committee.

In 2021, Glennerster joined the University of Chicago as Associate Professor of Economics in the Division of Social Science.

In May 2024, the Center for Global Development announced that Glennerster would be its next president, starting September 2024.

Initiatives
In 2007, Glennerster helped establish the Deworm the World Initiative, a program that targets increased access to education and improved health from the elimination of intestinal worms for at-risk children and has helped "deworm" millions of children worldwide.

She has been a member of Giving What We Can, an effective altruism organization whose members pledge to give 10% of their income to effective charities. She joined the initiative at its inception in 2009.

Research
Glennerster's areas of research includes and focuses on randomized trials of health, education, microcredit, women’s empowerment, and governance. Geographically, her research has spanned West Africa and South Asia, including countries such as Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.

Findings of her research include:


 * Community-driven development programs, a popular strategy for foreign aid donors, have a positive short-run effect on local public goods provision and economic outcomes, but little effect on sustained improvements in collective action and inclusion of marginalized groups. This evidence is based on randomized allocation of community-driven development programs across regions in Sierra Leone (with Katherine Casey and Edward Miguel).
 * A randomized evaluation on the impact of microfinance in India showed that microcredit group-based lending had little impact on consumption, health, education, women's empowerment, average business profits, starting a new business, and on average monthly expenditure per capita. Yet positive effects were found on durable goods expenditure and business investments (with Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Cynthia Kinnan).
 * In a research of behavioral economics of complying with tuberculosis medication in Pakistan, researches measured the impact of daily SMS medication reminders of treatment outcomes to patients of tuberculosis. No impact was found between the SMS messages and patients' self-reported adherence to treatment regimes, physical health, and psychological health (with Aamir Khan and Shama Mohammed).

Books
Glennerster is the coauthor of Running Randomized Evaluations, a book on running randomized impact evaluations in practice in developing countries, and Strong Medicine: Creating Incentives for Pharmaceutical Research on Neglected Diseases, a book that strategizes incentives for developers to undertake the costly research needed to develop vaccines.

Recognition & awards
Glennerster was appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to international development.

She is cited as among the top 2% of female economists as of April 2024, according to IDEAS/RePEC.