Owoo, Nkechi S.
Nkechi S. Owoo (PhD) is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Ghana. Currently on Sabbatical, she is based at the World Bank’s Development Economics Research Group (DECRG) in Washington DC. In addition to her being a Research Fellow at the Environment for Development (EfD) initiative, she is also a Non-Resident Research Fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD) in Washington DC; the Partnership for Economic Policy (PEP) in Nairobi, Kenya; as well as the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research (ACEIR) in Accra, Ghana. She was also a Senior Research Fellow at the Population Institute in Washington, DC, and has also been a Visiting Research Fellow at Cornell University and the University of Michigan, both in the US, as well as the University of Pretoria in South Africa and the University of Bristol in the UK. She currently represents the Africa region on the Governing Board of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) based in France and is an Invited Researcher with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL). Prof Owoo has been featured as part of the International Economic Association’s (IEA) Featured Economist series, as well as JPAL’s African Scholar Spotlight blog series. She has also been a resource person for the World Bank, International Labor Organization (ILO), Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), as well as the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). Her research focuses on spatial econometrics, health and demographic economics, poverty and inequality, gender economics, as well as climate change and environmental sustainability. In her current work, she combines geocoded disasters data with household survey data to explore the role of climate shocks on various micro-level outcomes such as food security, child nutrition, mental health and women’s experience of intimate partner violence. She has published articles in notable peer-reviewed journals such as Oxford Development Studies, Feminist Economics, Journal of International Development, Journal of Demographic Economics, among others. She received her Masters and PhD in Economics from Clark University, Massachusetts, in 2009 and 2012, respectively.