Ali Akram

Ali Akram is an applied economist with 10 years of experience working in climate change, agriculture, water, and public health.

Akram serves as project director for a USAID-funded water access and quality investment project in Uganda, leading the design and implementation of cost-benefit modeling and analysis. He is also quantitative evaluation lead for a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded multicountry quantitative impact evaluation of a private sector agricultural extension program in Africa (the village-based advisor model). For this project, he is responsible for ensuring that the evaluation design and associated measurement activities address the research agenda in a scientifically rigorous way. Additionally, Akram serves as deputy project director for a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded market test of a nutritional supplement (balanced energy and protein) for pregnant and lactating women in Pakistan. In this role, he contributes to quantitative data collection and analysis as part of the project monitoring, learning, and evaluation (MLE) activities. He also serves as the quantitative analysis lead for an evaluation of a family planning project in Indonesia, along with providing quality assurance on quantitative analyses and data collection activities more broadly at the company.

Before joining Mathematica, Akram was an assistant professor of economics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, teaching quantitative methods for impact evaluation, development economics, and environmental and resource economics. He was also an economist with the United Nations Development Programme and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, providing quality assurance and technical input on a portfolio of climate change adaptation impact evaluations and cost-benefit analyses. Akram holds a master’s degree in environmental management and a Ph.D. in environmental economics from Yale University.