Alumni Profile: Maajid Bashir, Policy Research and Innovation Bootcamp’24

Maajid Bashir brought ten years of international development experience to the Policy Research and Innovation Bootcamp (PRIB) at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy this past summer. He currently works as a Social Development Advisor for the UK Government’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), where he leads on Social Protection in Pakistan. “I ensure that social development—the inclusion of traditionally marginalized groups—is front and center in all of the programs the FCDO operates.”

While he’s undertaken a great deal of real-world research at FCDO and over the course of his career—including serving as an Education Advisor at Adam Smith International (ASI), a Performance and Monitoring Specialist with the World Bank Group, and a Senior Research Associate with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)—pursuing a PhD has always been on his mind.

“I’ve always aspired to engage in more focused research, but I haven’t had the opportunity to really focus on one sector. While I know the lens will be social development, I’m still exploring the exact direction that resonates most with my interests and aspirations.”

To that end, Bashir said he wanted to explore the research field and see whether he liked it enough to commit to a PhD program. “Plus, I wanted to get a sense of the kind of opportunities available after earning my PhD.”

PRIB, he said, seemed a great opportunity to do this. “From the diversity of the career tracks my classmates had, to the papers we wrote, to the guest speakers who discussed their careers, to the Policy Hackathon, it was an amazing experience.”

Speaking with PRIB presenters—including Associate Professor Austin L. Wright—about the “before and after” of a PhD clarified a lot for him, Bashir said. “They really emphasized the necessity of taking the time to choose a field, a research topic, and a sense of where I’d be going with the work.”

However, Bashir said the most valuable part of PRIB was the Policy Hackathon. “We were broken into groups, given a large data set, and tasked to formulate our own research question and subsequent proposal. My group looked at instances of yellow fever in Ghana—whether people knew it was a serious problem and whether they knew if they had been vaccinated or not. Our idea was to coordinate the implementation of a vaccination program and an outreach plan. Our data analysis showed that vaccination is extremely cost efficient compared to treatment per person. We then highlighted the financial incentive for the government to create a vaccination and communication plan to produce better health outcomes for the people, who were mostly unaware of the risks yellow fever posed in Ghana.”

When asked what set him on the international development path, he said his first job after graduation made the greatest impact on him. “I worked as an education advisor for ASI—essentially consulting in a private sector firm for international development. One of the first projects my team worked on was figuring out a cost-effective solution to enroll Pakistani children in schools. We developed two programs: a voucher system for areas with private schools but no government schools, and community schools for areas with no schools at all, where local women were paid by the government to teach in their homes. Both initiatives were ambitious and carried substantial financial risk for the government.”

Fourteen months later, 112,000 children were enrolled in the two programs. “At the end of the year there was a ceremony for all the children in this program who qualified to move to the next grade. Seeing them walk up to the stage to be recognized was…if you want to talk about a formative experience, nothing comes close to that. Seeing that impact still drives me to this day.”

As for next steps, Bashir is narrowing down possible PhD topics—and future career goals. “Researching graduation rates from social protection programs greatly interests me, because graduation is the major success metric we look for. I’m still exploring which social protection program would be the most impactful to study and what research would yield the most valuable outcomes for the most people.”