Amrita Ahuja

Amrita Ahuja
Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
506 Rubenstein Building
Mailbox 81
79 JFK Street
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
Tel: (1) 617-496-0426
Fax: (1) 617-496-8753
Email: amrita_ahuja@hks.harvard.edu
Group affiliation: Giorgio Ruffolo Research Fellow in Sustainability Science

Amrita Ahuja is a Giorgio Ruffolo Research Fellow in the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She is also Managing Director of Innovations for Poverty Action 's Safe Water Program. Her research interests include understanding how to build reliable systems to market and distribute goods and services that fulfill basic human needs across dispersed geographies using both market and non-market channels. She received a PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University in 2009. Amrita worked as a management consultant with The Monitor Group in Europe, the US and India from 1998-2003. She developed expertise in understanding individual's attitudes and behaviors with respect to decisions around product purchase and use. She has also volunteered with and worked as an advisor to non-profit organizations working on child health and education. Her faculty host at Harvard is Michael Kremer.

Distributing goods for sustainable development: Combining free provision with incentivized delivery systems
Understanding the structure of incentive and monitoring systems that need to be in place to ensure delivery of safe drinking water to households in rural Kenya is the focus of this research. Contaminated drinking water is a leading cause of diarrhea, which kills about 2 million children a year. Chlorination of household drinking water significantly reduces diarrhea morbidity and mortality, but driving adoption has proved difficult. A new technology - chlorine dispensers located at water sources - has had very high uptake and low costs in pilot studies. This project is directed at scaling up this new technology. The primary focus is to understand the optimal design of incentives and the structure of monitoring for participants in the supply chain for chlorine, so as to design a distribution system in which participants are motivated to keep dispensers functioning and reliably stocked with chlorine. This project is having a significant impact on the health of children in the developing world. Additionally, it has broad relevance to the distribution and management of a wide range of public goods across dispersed geographies.

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