Jovera Shakeel has recently joined the CORE team as an intern. Before joining us, she studied economics and mathematics at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), and set up an e-commerce platform helping marginalised artisans reach a wider market. We caught up with her to hear about the journey.
Hi Jovera, thanks for joining us. Could you tell us about your academic background?
I did a joint major in economics and mathematics at LUMS, and I’ve just earned my master’s in economics at Oxford. LUMS is where I was first introduced to CORE, actually. We studied The Economy in the microeconomics foundation course, and that’s how I got interested in the curriculum in the first place.
LUMS did what I think any good education system should do: it opened me up to all sorts of possibilities, all sorts of ways of thinking, and gave me both a technical and a theoretically grounded education. But it also left me with a larger question about what my big academic purpose was. That is part of why I went on to do the master’s.
What was it that drew you to economics specifically?
When I came into LUMS, I used to think the questions I was interested in were all to do with public policy. LUMS made me realise that they were actually hardcore economic questions, questions of supply and demand.
My teaching experience was a big part of this. Alongside my A-levels and then LUMS, I taught at a state school in Pakistan for five years. The Pakistani education market is highly fragmented, with public and private sectors and cleavages around caste, gender, and class. I started to ask myself: how is it that we’re trying to give these children a good education, but that education isn’t translating into economic returns for them? I had parents come to me asking to pull their children out. It’s hard to convince a parent who doesn’t know how they’re going to put the next meal on the table that their child should stay in school because education has intrinsic value.
I started thinking about the divide between education and economic outcomes. How do you design a system where a good education can also translate into economic returns later, especially for people at the margins?
Tell us about Muktalif, the platform you set up during COVID.
I set up Muktalif with a small grant from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). I wanted to work with the same communities I’d become interested in through teaching, particularly people who had skills like embroidery and crochet but weren’t seeing economic returns from them, because they weren’t able to market themselves or engage with the digital economy.
I started with a small group of artisans: a former sex worker, a person with a disability, and an artisan from Pakistan’s Hindu minority community, which is often subject to discrimination. They would make their products and send them to me. I would photograph, market, and sell them, and handle the deliveries, and all the profits went back to them. I was client-facing so that they wouldn’t face the discrimination that had previously kept them out of the market. The success of the model got me thinking about organisational design: how do you build systems that are inclusive on both the education side and the economic side, and that integrate people who currently sit at the margins of the economy into the mainstream?
Was your master’s thesis at Oxford related to this?
Yes. I used a panel dataset of about 1,600 children in rural Punjab over four years, and looked at how two forms of household shock – parental illness and agricultural income loss – affect children’s educational outcomes. I was particularly interested in which households were the most resilient: whether it was households with assets, households with strong social networks (which matter a lot in rural agricultural villages, because if you are not eligible for credit at a bank you may rely on informal lending), or households receiving remittances from family working abroad.
Inclusion is a key theme in your work. When did you start thinking about that?
When I was at LUMS, I noticed that some of the brightest students came from places I hadn’t even heard of. It was depressing, but also encouraging. Depressing, because if they had not been given the chance, I would never have met someone as bright. And encouraging, because knowledge is truly democratic. It exists everywhere, and it’s a matter of picking those people out and bringing them somewhere they can realise their potential.
Is knowledge of economics democratic?
I don’t want to paint a completely rosy picture. Economic research is really hard, and economics as a discipline is a little frustrating. In its foundations, it gatekeeps a lot of information and is quite hierarchical. That is probably true of many disciplines, but I am particularly aware of it in economics. To establish your career you have to signal to the right sorts of people, network, and get your work talked about in the right places. Good research alone isn’t everything, and I am not the best at those other aspects.
That is one of the reasons I really appreciate initiatives like CORE. To me, doing good, rigorous, technical work matters, and I was able to do that with my thesis. But I don’t want to pretend that the wider discipline is completely democratic, because we all know it isn’t.
We’re really glad to have you on the team. What will you be doing for CORE?
I’m working on two things, both on Understanding our Economy, the new textbook. Right now, I’m reviewing the figures to check they make sense with the text, writing captions, and flagging any content that doesn’t look accurate so it can be improved. Later, I’ll be preparing the teaching materials for the book: writing exercises and their solutions, and checking for errors in the text.
Welcome to the team, Jovera.
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