Curiosity is the driving force behind the desire to learn in ways that can foster experimentation and innovation. I learned curiosity from my parents, who are both academics.

 

Some of my earliest memories involve riding in the back of a pick-up truck on rough and windy roads in the Andes Mountains in Peru to visit my dad’s project with a rural community and hearing my mother’s stories as a nurse working with indigenous communities in Peru. I really deep dived in curiosity when I decided to quit my job in corporate America to follow some of the questions that I had from my early childhood. What was it like for my parents working with rural communities in the Andes? Which intervention strategies are really effective to reduce poverty?

 

After selling everything I owned I moved to India to learn about microfinance. A year latter I had mixed feelings about the impact of microfinance and wanted to answer my doubts rigorously. So I accepted a job with Innovations for Poverty Action to use rigorous scientific methods to evaluate the degree to which microfinance could be part of the solution to reducing extreme poverty in the same areas of Peru in which my parents had worked several decades earlier. It was wonderful to combine qualitative work visiting and spending time in communities with quantitative methods to rigorously determine the benefits. One of the studies I supported did end up demonstrating that certain forms of microfinance was effective as a part of a package to reduce extreme poverty in several parts of the world.

 

While my interests are quite different today, I can say that curiosity is an ever present driving force in exploring and discovering better ways to awaken transformation.