I love economics. For me, economics is the study of incentives and I loved studying how people deviate from classical economic theory in responding to different incentives.

When I was asked what I would like to do when I graduated, I replied that I wanted to understand what incentivizes civil servants and public sector employees to do their job well, what harnesses prosocial motivation and what crowds it out. So I decided to join the public sector in Egypt in order to observe how the environment affects the behavior of public servants. I took my learnings with me all the way to graduate school, where I had the liberty to deploy them into my research on prosocial motivation and efficient public service delivery. 

I was inspired by academics who believed that knowledge, and especially that which aims at understanding human behavior, is not solely generated through the research that we do, it is co-generated through interacting with and listening to the people for whom we do the research, and that it is a luxury to be able to seek answers without having a clock ticking to release a policy or design a program that would affect the lives of thousands or millions of people. Therefore, it is our responsibility as researchers to both understand and share what we learn.

Whether in exploring how the ultra-poor make decisions and investigating their intra-household dynamics, or in understanding the factors at play for irregular migrants to make the costly decision to irregularly migrate, engaging civil society organizations and policymakers in the discussion and sharing knowledge throughout the different phases of a study.

As a Research Lead for labs and academic collaborations, at Busara,Engy leads our portfolio of academic research that Busara conducts in order to understand human behavior under poverty conditions. She carries this principle along the chain; from the collaborations we seek to the team who makes the research happen and across the whole organization. We listen and keep an eye on the most pressing issues in the context we operate in, we conduct rigorous research that is inspired by relevant problems and we share and package the findings to contribute to the process of problem solving.

Languages: Arabic, English, French

Profiles: LinkedIn, Twitter