Lucia da Corta

Lucia da Corta

Research Associate
Lucia da Corta is a Research Associate in the Equity and Social Policy programme. Lucia has a longstanding research focus on developing longitudinal and contextually based qualitative methods in order to evaluate the impact of policies and programmes on poverty pathways (chronic poverty, impoverishment, and sustained escapes) within large mixed methods multicounty research projects. Presently this includes Zambia and Niger (focus on youth employment,) and in recent years in Tanzania, Malawi, and Rwanda. Lucia also has extensive experience in India on gender, labour (bonded, child, decent work) and agrarian political economy, and in Bangladesh using life histories to evaluate sustained movements (‘graduation’) out of extreme poverty.
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Lucia da Corta has a longstanding research focus on poverty dynamics and the qualitative methods used to study these dynamics in mixed methods research. She has a particular interest in re-integrating concepts from critical social theory into qualitative research and in adapting critical realist methods of analysis for the study of poverty dynamics. Over the past 20 years she has published on issues related to extreme and chronic poverty, agrarian political economy, gender, labour relations, and child labour. She is currently working on poverty dynamics studies in Zambia and Niger (with a focus on youth inclusion) and in recent years has led similar projects in Rwanda, Malawi and Tanzania for CPAN and contributed to several of the Chronic Poverty Reports. She has also worked extensively in south Asia (on Extreme poverty in Bangladesh) at the University of Bath and on labour relations, gender and economic mobility in India (Oxford). She was trained at Cornell University, the LSE in International Relations; at St. Antony’s College, Oxford in Agricultural Economics and held a Junior Research Fellowship at St. Anne’s College Oxford.