Tanu Kumar

Biography

Tanu Kumar was a post-doctoral fellow who works with GRI’s Digital Inclusion and Governance Lab (DIGLab) and AidData. She also directs the Global Cities and Digital Democracies Lab. Kumar holds a B.A. from Bowdoin College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. She studies political behavior and service delivery in developing countries. One strand of her research explores how policies to house and provide essential services to growing urban populations shape, and are further shaped by, the behavior of urban citizens and politicians in India. Another strand looks at how low-income households use mobile phones.

With her GRI mentor Professor Phil Roessler, Kumar worked on a collaborative project (funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and BRAC) in Blantyre, Malawi, that aimed to understand how providing women with smartphones affects household consumption, and whether interventions to promote cooperative intra-household use of the phone further affects outcomes. Kumar’s work has been published or is forthcoming with the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Development Economics, and World Development. Starting in summer 2022, Kumar will be an Assistant Professor in the Division of Politics and Economics at Claremont Graduate University.

Website: https://tanukumar.com/