Alia Aghajanian is an economist with World Bank’s Poverty and Equity Global Practice, Middle East and North Africa Unit. Her work focuses on the measurement of welfare and household behavior and has extensive experience with data collection, primarily in Ghana, Lebanon, Nigeria and India. She aims to improve the quality of data and our understanding of welfare by studying “hard to measure” indicators that are often overlooked, such as mental health, social capital and connections, coping strategies, conflict and violence. She received her PhD from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex.
Arden Finn is a Senior Economist in the World Bank’s Poverty and Equity Global Practice, where he is currently the poverty economist for the West Bank and Gaza. His work focuses on economic mobility, the measurement of welfare, statistical capacity building and geospatial targeting. Prior to joining the West Bank and Gaza office he worked primarily on South Sudan, Ethiopia and Zambia. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Cape Town.