This post is Part II of a five-part series on measuring impact and progress at Al Mokha. A version of it is also available on Al Mokha’s blog. Part I is available here.

For my friends and readers, this post is something of an announcement that I’ve joined the advisory board of a start-up coffee company. Al Mokha is coffee with a purpose, premised on a big idea: that revitalizing a 500-year old industry can be a vehicle for peace and prosperity, that strategic investments in certain markets can be an effective foreign policy tool.

Coffee, Erin?, you might say. Didn’t you write not too long ago about how you had your first cup of coffee ever? Like, literally ever?

It’s true; I don’t drink coffee (though I did have my second cup ever in Tanzania in February–you try telling an Ethiopian and an Italian that you don’t drink coffee). So, I can’t even really tell you whether I think the coffee is tasty. But, I do know that other people really like this coffee. And I think this is exciting. So, bear with me.

Author conducting research for the IRC in Nyarugusu, Tanzania

In Part I, Anda–the founder of Al Mokha–wrote about the perils of trying to be a salesperson / academic, and how that duality plays out in the business: investors want to see sales growth whereas economists (me!) want to see real, measureable change in things like poverty levels, in coffee production, in anything we can quantify with data.

So we’re working towards that. In this post, Part 2, I introduce myself and in parts III- V we tackle some tough questions.

Well, who am I? If you visit Al Mokha frequently, you know Anda and you’ve heard mention of some of his advisors (as he spins tales of sinking all his time into a startup). I’m the nerdy PhD obsessed with data and development. I have a doctoral degree in economics. I spend most of my time reading and writing papers on violence against women and children and female labor force participation. I spend a lot of time thinking about very economist-y things like incentives.

For a while, I did this thinking and writing at Harvard. That’s actually where Anda and I met. Over beers at Shay’s in Cambridge, he was quick to tell me he didn’t want to talk about work (and thus didn’t want to talk about Al Mokha). Faced with a real-live economist, though, he couldn’t keep quiet long, and we spent the evening having a super nerdy academic discussion about development economics, foreign policy, and reducing violence. We talked about famous development scholars like Angus Deaton, and making lists of other economists he should read, like Marc F. Bellemare.

These days, I do similar work for international organizations. I’ve worked with UNICEF to model what a fully functioning child protection system would look like in Zimbabwe. I’ve advised the United Kingdom’s Department For International Development (DFID) and the Nike Foundation on social norms. And in a room full of experts on evidence for the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), I’ve found consensus on evidence in programming for adolescent girls. I’ve written and administered surveys to better understand poverty, disease, and violence in Nepal for Engineers Without Borders, and Kurdistan and Tanzania for the International Rescue Committee (IRC). These may seem like disparate topics, but I think what they reveal is that I like thinking big—about varieties of programs, about outlandish ideas, about what the best model is to solve a problem in development.

At Al Mokha, this is also my job. Anda and I share a vision of development that is big. It is, however, nestled in the details, of course: I read articles about agriculture and development, but with each paragraph, I’m highlighting what I think is relevant to Al Mokha’s model, whether it helps or hurts the plan to revitalize Yemen’s coffee sector. We talk about how new research supports or hurts the underlying motivation and theory behind the business. What makes this big? What makes this different? Currently, we’re also spending a lot of time thinking about measurement, which is really what this blog series is about.

Can coffee actually stem terrorism? Can we foster a big enough market for Yemeni coffee to actually have an effect on poverty and people’s general wellbeing? Is it even possible to build up an export business in what people are calling a failed state?

War memorial in Kurdistan (taken by author, 2015)

I don’t know if coffee can bring peace to earth, or even to Yemen. The evidence on how economic activity affects terrorism and violence is mixed. Some say that agriculture and people getting training and jobs can reduce violence, but the programs that have been tested are complex and require a lot of inputs. It’s also messy and full of endogeneity problems. I’m not really sure what the best way to measure peace is. I also don’t know if boosting the coffee sector is the right thing to do for Yemen’s economy. Could money and effort be better spent on technology or some other industry?

But there’s also a lot of promise in the idea. Yemen’s embassy in DC and Yemen’s Ministry of Agriculture, for example, see coffee as an engine for rehabilitating Yemen. This particular coffee is really good. And creating a stable market for a commodity could reduce price volatility for coffee, encouraging farmers to plant more. Okay, I already got more technical than I intended for this post, but I promise we’ll come back to price volatility.

So, who’s right? And what does it take to show that Al Mokha works? What does “work” even mean in this context? What can we learn? I have lots of questions, and a few might have come to your mind as well. There are probably many more I haven’t even thought of. But that’s super exciting to me; there’s so much to find out.

Over the next three weeks, I’m going to write more about Al Mokha’s impact and how we are going to measure that. It’s something we expect to evolve as the company does and we hope to get some of you involved in our research and thinking about how we go about it.

It might get a little nerdy. You’ve been warned. Stay tuned!

Those interested in trying Al Mokha’s coffee can shop at www.almokha.com

Note: I have no financial interests in Al Mokha and have received no compensation for this post. As a member of the advisory board, I occasionally receive coffee samples, which I hand out to friends and family as I only learned how to brew a cup of coffee last month.

Japan and South Korea announced a deal today whereby Japan will pay $8.3 million to the government of Korea and apologize for its use of comfort women during World War II. The money will go to create a fund for victims, according to the AP, though I haven’t seen details of what that will look like.

I’ve only recently become acquainted with comfort women stories, but from what I’ve seen (first from my visit earlier this year to the Nanjing Memorial Massacre Hall), I’ve found comfort women stories very weirdly impersonal. They seem portrayed as crimes against the state or about honor, and never feel like they are really about the women. The euphemism “comfort women” is especially divorced from reality. It feels like this collective failure to protect women from outsiders leads to embarrassment and emasculation of men, rather than concern for actual women who were trafficked, enslaved, and raped repeatedly over a period of years.

I’ve managed to get two papers out over the past two months on obesity and pregnancy with my wonderful co-author, Susan Averett. One is available online at Maternal and Child Health Journal; the other is forthcoming in an edited volume, Applied Demography and Public Health. The basic gist of both papers is that maternal obesity is probably not as bad for kids as we tend to think. Using maternal fixed effects we show that kids of moms who were obese pre-pregnancy are not doomed to have worse outcomes than their siblings who were born to the same mothers but when they weren’t obese. There just aren’t that many differences in terms of adverse birth outcomes or obesity in early childhood.

One thing we can’t control for, that I’ve been discussing with a friend recently, is how gut bacteria plays a role in all this. This friend* is pregnant, very close to her due date, and, as she approaches her due date, has been religiously eating dates, largely based on the results of one study in Jordan that women who ate dates were more likely to go into spontaneous labor, labored for fewer hours, had higher mean cervical dilation, etc.

My immediate response was, “well, how can we be sure the women eating dates were different somehow than those who weren’t?” And my next move was to find the paper and point out this line:

As date fruit consumption is a part of the cultural beliefs of the population under study, it was difficult to get patients who would commit to not taking date fruit at all (control group), therefore the study group had more patients than the control group.

The authors are actually careful to say that the study should be repeated using a randomized control trial, but I don’t know that we learned that much from this as the control group is clearly different in this obvious way from the intervention group (they’re willing to give up dates). It is interesting, though, to think about how foods change our gut bacteria and how that might affect other health issues.

*Addendum: This friend would like to point out that she likes dates and was aware of the limitations of the study. “It can’t hurt!” she says.

As part of data collection training this week, we spent some time talking about how to give a good interviewer. Training included a discussion of how to approach someone you’re going to interview, active listening, using non-judgemental words and body language, and most importantly for interviews concerning violence, how to recognize distress, take care of victims of trauma, and prevent recurring traumatization from occurring during the interview process.

My team seemed to be very familiar with how people might show distress, brainstorming worst-case scenarios with me and easily offering quick solutions to difficult situations. However, it took a lot of prodding for them to meet me with the idea that talking about violence might ultimately be distressing to them. You’re going to do this a lot, I told them. It’s exhausting, it’s hard work, and it kind of sucks to hear over and over again about really unpleasant things. They nodded, laughed at my bad jokes, and a few jotted something down when I mentioned they might try journaling.

But it’s not any different than what we hear every day, Erin, one offered.

The weight of years of war, and everything that came before it, smacked me in the face. Trauma peeked out from every corner of the room. It had been hiding, and still was, but that doesn’t mean it was absent. Okay, I said, but that doesn’t mean that self-care isn’t important. Isn’t that part of the issue? That the way we talk about violence once it’s passed doesn’t preclude it from happening again? That no one recognizes the lasting effects?

Up to that moment, I hadn’t heard any of their stories. I knew where they came from, cities and places that stream out over the news and maybe hint at something terrible, but I didn’t really know where they came from. Over lunch, though, a few opened up, telling stories of the times when they had been displaced themselves, what they missed about their homes, what they had seen, and where they had gone.

In one year, they told me, everyone left the city and headed to the border regions. In another, just the political people left, the ones whose party was being replaced by a new one. One of my enumerators remembers enjoying the camp she stayed in for only two days when she was four years old, as if she were talking about summer camp, or visiting her grandparents on vacation. Then, it was sort of a game, fun, you didn’t realize what was going on, she told me. Another recalled the chaos that dominated parts of the city, while other parts seemed totally normal. I was just walking down the street, laughing, with my aunt, until someone told us we shouldn’t be so lighthearted while everyone was afraid and packing to flee.

But then it ended, they said, and people mostly forgot. Isn’t that how it works? one of them said to me. Lots of people die and there’s a lot of violence and then the politicians act as if nothing ever happened.

And they say it so nonchalantly. Matter of fact. There’s violence. People die. The politicians move on.

When there’s enough violence, maybe you don’t have to work so hard to get people to talk about it. They eventually come to you. But you might not like what they have to say.

1. I had my first cup of coffee today. Ever. I know this is extremely weird, that by 33, someone would have never had a cup of coffee. Especially someone who has traveled so much and been in many situations in which someone might offer you coffee and it would be rude to refuse it. But it’s true; I’d never had coffee, at least on purpose, and never more than a taste, until today. But when the most imposing woman you’ve ever seen in your life tells you (disdain clearly dripping from every word of a language I heard for the first time a week ago and know maybe about ten words of) how she’s used to international organizations coming in and taking surveys and then disappearing and it’s apparent she thinks you’ll do the same, but then she somehow changes her mind when you tell her you’re not actually promising anything more than information and that you’re interested in a wide range of experiences, and she smiles at you, but you still know she’s powerful; she’s formidable. When she insists you drink the super strong Arabic coffee made for just for you and says she’ll cook for you when you come back to the school to do focus groups and interviews, well, you drink the coffee.
2. I sang a few lines of “You’re Gonna Miss Me” for the Education staff at the office today, into a recorder. I have no idea what possessed me to do this.

I’m in the midst of writing up some more accessible summaries of the research I and a team of economists have just finished on female labor force participation in Asia. It’s a different kind of writing than I have done for awhile, which is super fun, but nonetheless reminds me that at least 90% of all good writing is research.

I spent the better of part of half an hour searching for information on laws restricting women’s work in India, and eventually found this website dedicated to laws pertaining to women, which I highly recommend. Most importantly, I found these gems from the 1948 (1948!!) Factories Act:

No woman or young person shall be allowed to clean, lubricate or adjust any part of a prime mover or of any transmission machinery while the prime mover or transmission machinery is in motion, or to clean, lubricate or adjust any part of any machine if the cleaning, lubrication or adjustment thereof would expose the woman or young person to risk of injury from any moving part either of that machine or of any adjacent machinery.]

And (amended in 1976 to reflect the shorter restriction):

b) no woman shall be 2*[required or allowed to work in any factory] except between the hours of 6 A.M. and 7 P.M.

Provided that the State Government may, by notification in the Official Gazette, in respect of 2*[any factory or group or class or description of factories,] vary the limits laid down in clause (b), but so that no such variation shall authorize the employment of any woman between the hours of 10 P.M. and 5 A.M.;

And:

Prohibition of employment of women and children near cotton-openers. No woman or child shall be employed in any part of a factory for pressing cotton in which a cotton-opener is at work:

It’s only those three things, really, but they’re pretty big. Here’s a few dangerous (read: probably more lucrative) jobs you can’t do, and you can’t work the second shift. I imagine the night shift provision ostensibly had to do with safety, but is it really safer to leave work at 9:30 or 10 at night than to work through night?

Can anyone confirm that these provisions are still in force? I know there have been proposed changes to the Act to allow women to work in the more dangerous jobs, but I’m not sure about the shifts provision or whether the changes passed.