Maria Caridad Araujo is a lead economist in the Social Protection and Health Division of the Inter-American Development Bank. Her work at the IDB has focused on early childhood development and poverty alleviation issues.
From 2003-2005, she taught in the master of public policy program at Georgetown University. Between 2003-2009, she worked at the World Bank in the areas of impact evaluation, measuring poverty and inequality, program targeting, education and social protection, in a number of countries in East Asia, Central Asia and Latin America. Caridad’s work has been published in peer reviewed journals including the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, Economía, the Journal of Public Economics, and Cuadernos de Economía. She is also the author and co-author of book chapters on social protection, poverty, and the political economy of policy-making processes. She is Ecuadorian and she holds a PhD in agricultural economics and natural resources from the University of California, Berkeley.