I run a small consulting business for international economic development (also known as Altitude Worldwide Consulting) and conduct independent research on issues of gender, health, education, and violence in low- and middle-income countries out of Denver, CO. I work with international and local NGOs and multilateral agencies to maximize impact in programming, analysis, and policy design on issues related to economic development; gender equality; female labor force participation; and reductions in poverty, discrimination, violence against children, and gender-based violence. I assist organizations in identifying key questions for research, consolidating existing knowledge, methodological innovation, and understanding programming and policy impact.
Completed flagship projects include a study of social norms of violence in and around schools in refugees and displaced persons in Tanzania and Iraqi Kurdistan and a pilot to conduct livelihoods analysis using household data in Nigeria, a landscape assessment of tools to measure youth workforce development skills, and a body of work on reducing child marriage, primarily in South Asia. I’ve also worked with organizations and on research questions in India, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Guatemala, and in the US as well as conducted global reviews of programming. Smaller projects included of research, survey, and evaluation design and implementation; evaluation; cost-benefit analysis; and formative research. Work samples and quotes are available upon request (erinkfletcher+web [at] gmail [dot] com), or here.
I serve on the advisory board of the coffee company Al Mokha (full disclosure: I don’t drink coffee, but I’m very interested in the possible links between conscious enterprise and violence reduction).
I tweet (frequently), and write here (less frequently lately). Mostly I write about gender, gender-based violence, development, coffee, countries I’ve spent a lot of time in (Tanzania, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, India, Iraq) or am preparing to spend time in (Nigeria), education, and women’s labor/wages/work. Sometimes I post pictures from my travels.
I completed a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Evidence for Policy Design, a research group at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. With Rohini Pande and a team of economists from Duke, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Columbia, we worked with the Asian Development Bank to to identify trends in and challenges to women’s labor force participation in Asia.
Before Harvard, I spent three years as a visiting assistant professor of economics at two liberal arts colleges in Pennsylvania, Lafayette College and Gettysburg College. I taught courses in Econometrics, Labor Economics, Economic History, and Development, but primarily econometrics. A LOT of econometrics.
Research-wise, I am interested in labor and development topics with an emphasis on gender, families, investments in children, health, health systems strengtheing, social norms, and interpersonal violence. I engage across disciplinary boundaries including work from social psychology and sociology and emphasize a focus on co-creation, learning, and right-fit evaluation and measurement methods. During graduate school, I did a little bit of work in economic history, primarily on 18th century financial markets and global civil conflict.
I completed my Ph.D. in 2011 under Professor Terra McKinnish at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Before that, I did my undergraduate work at Duke University in Economics and Spanish/Latin American Studies, wrote a senior thesis on Venezuelan exchange controls with Professor Ed Tower, spent a semester at la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, and worked as a journalist in Venezuela. My heart is still in in Caracas, but my passport is somewhere in the forest outside of Bariloche (please return if found). I’ve also taught swim lessons, lifeguarded, and worked in pricing and marketing for Dex, the local/regional yellow pages in Colorado.
I’ve lived in half a dozen countries and forgotten at least as many languages. My Spanish is all there and my Portuguese is still decent, but please don’t ask me anything in Tamil besides whether I’m thirsty.
Download my current CV here (in pdf).
Photo on this page thanks to the amazing Katy Doyle Photography.
Photo in sidebar thanks to the wonderful Breyt Photography.
Media:
“Can Economics Fix its Gender Problem?: It’ll take more than research, women say.” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 11 2019.
“Can We End Corruption in Oil, Gas and Mining?” Brookings Institution Panel. July 1, 2020
“Challenges of remote surveying during COVID-19.” With Zara Ali, Luz Allor del Valle, Julius Josepha and Taylor Salisbury. August 27, 2020.
ERIN K. FLETCHER 
Hey Erin,
David here. We met in the courtyard during your visit with Becky and Joel. Your website design is easy to navigate. I’ve read several of your entries so far. Your writing is sharp and easy to read because you spice it with proper doses of humor. I enjoyed “The Westerns” entry. Here’s a funny thing — the night we were talking in the courtyard about how many colleges I attended, we never got to the college where I graduated — Grand Valley State, where Claudia Smith is a professor. (I attended Thomas Jefferson, one of the 4 clusters — the hippie college.)
I enjoyed meeting you. I’ll be a frequent visitor to your site.
Thaagam edukardha? There, I asked.