Any act of measurement brings with it concerns about data quality and replication. Yet very little of this work has focused in detail on the specific measurement and data quality concerns related to conducting research in the Global South. Busara operates both remote and in-person data collection, employing everything from photovoice to laboratory ‘games’ to list experiments. Across both of these domains, we will build on our long tradition of careful testing of measures and techniques to ensure high levels of access, response, attention and comprehension. We will examine what methodological practices work best for various populations, especially those with the least social power, in the Global South, to maintain data quality (this differs from our closely related program of work on cross-cultural validation of behavioral science constructs). Busara is well-positioned to do this, and to disseminate protocols for the use of these methods.

Civic engagement is considered an important element of a healthy polity. Yet, many attempts to induce it fail, and experimental evidence on ‘what works’ to induce it is limited. Further, most experimental studies in this area of research focus on self-reported or low-cost proxy behavior outcomes. This paper describes a laboratory experiment with 809 participants to measure the impact of short behaviorally-informed messages on civic engagement in Uganda. We randomly assign participants to three treatment audio messages, applying different self-efficacy enhancing techniques, and one control audio, and measure their effect on two primary components of civic engagement: a lab measure of attention to political and pre-political information, and a real-world activity measure: attendance at a community meeting. We find that short audio messages can prompt people to pay more attention to pre-political information, but do not encourage overall civic engagement behavior, and some treatments produce a significant negative effect on our measures of engagement. We also find that a rights-focused message, closely modelling current civil society practice, does not generate increased civic engagement. We conclude that one-off behaviorally informed audio messages are insufficient to generate civic engagement in this context.

Promoting the economic empowerment of women requires more than just helping them get a foot in the door and hoping for the best. We need women to remain in the workplace, to thrive in their work environments, job descriptions and careers, and to derive the self-efficacy and emotional fulfillment that comes from work. To achieve this, we need to recognize that few workplaces are gender neutral. Instead, they harbor norms and protocols that accommodate male preferences and emotional needs, while neglecting those of women. This bias will push women out or undermine their success. Unfortunately, we feel that the international development agenda has not paid sufficient attention to the importance of female workplace retention or the emotional toil that mismatched norms can inflict. This research agenda hopes to address this failing by outlining ways we can identify, understand, and correct norms and patterns that make it difficult for women to continue working. We feel that this is particularly important in many workplaces of the Global South, where norms prevail over formal procedures, and it will become more relevant as businesses in LICs formalize and establish organizational rules.

Data-driven policy-making is the most effective way to alleviate poverty and improve human welfare. However, these policies are only as good as the data they are based on, and it appears that much of this data is systematically biased against women. This poses a crucial problem not just for policy design, but for the practice of science itself. Unfortunately, resolving this gendered research gap has remained a low priority in science, and many researchers treat it as an extraneous nuisance to their work. But women represent half of the world, so any effective and accurate scientific contribution must prioritize understanding and incorporating their experiences into the research process. Otherwise, we risk reinforcing a “world designed for men.” This research agenda outlines questions and topics to help us improve our understanding of gender bias in the research process.

The events of recent years have made especially plain the inequities between Global North and South. One such inequality is in the way some social groups are often missing from the data, so that knowledge, policies, services and products do not take proper account of them. This bias exists strongly in the conceptual development of the behavioral sciences, and it makes the research base fragile, with papers making claims of universality that do not stand up to scrutiny. In order to deal with concerns about replication, external validity and the strength of this research base, there are now many initiatives to improve experimentation in the social sciences. However, truly generalizable findings come about when institutions are present in the long term to aggregate across studies. That works even better when those institutions have a deep understanding of the contexts in which they seek to generalise from and to. Busara was founded as an institution to apply context-specific behavioral science literature, and this work has been a constant throughout our history. We now propose to launch a structured three-year Open Science investigation of the gaps in the understanding of canonical patterns of behavior, cognitive processes, preferences, beliefs, and decision-making processes in the Global South, comparing our work in multiple contexts and exploring variance across time, place, and demography. At the conclusion of this project, we will begin integrating our findings into wider theories of global cultural, psychological and microeconomic heterogeneity.