Esther Duflo, Nobel Prize Winner and a poverty alleviation and development economics professor, will be the guest speaker at the 46th Sir Winston Scott Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Central Bank of Barbados.
For the second year running, the event will take the format of a conversation featuring the guest speaker and Central Bank Governor Cleviston Haynes. They will discuss “Radical Rethinking of How We Fight Global Poverty and Develop New Social Policies”.
Governor Cleviston Haynes described it as an absolute honour to have an eminent scholar like Dr. Duflo talk to Barbadians on a topic that is of burgeoning significance globally. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the COVID 19 pandemic resulted in 100 million more workers falling into poverty in 2021.
Professor Duflo, who is also a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), seeks to understand the economic lives of the poor, with the aim to help design and evaluate social policies.
She has worked on areas inclusive of health, education, financial inclusion, environment, and governance. As the recipient of many international awards, she has also authored Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, which won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2011 and has been translated into more than 17 languages, and the recently released Good Economics for Hard Times.
As the title of her publications suggests, Professor Duflo holds non-traditional views on how we should fight poverty that will allow her to offer us novel views on the subject.
The Bank will pre-record the 46th Sir Winston Scott Memorial Lecture and air the programme on its Facebook and YouTube channels on Thursday, November 25, 2021 at 8:03 p.m., as well as on some regional television stations; and on CBC TV 8 at 9:03 p.m. We encourage everyone to tune in and to take advantage of the opportunity to hear from Professor Duflo.
The Sir Winston Scott Memorial Lecture honours Barbados’ first native Governor General and is the island’s longest running lecture series. Past speakers include Giza Gaspar Martins, Dr. Carissa Etienne, the Right Honourable Patricia Scotland, Q.C., Dr. Richard Drayton and Dr. Ngozi Okonjo- Iweala.