Busara’s Low Income Panel

The Busara Center for Behavioral Economics is an advisory and research organization focused on the evaluation and implementation of behavioral, economic, and social interventions in the Global South. Busara’s mission involves the application of rigorous research methods and evaluation tools to enable partners to improve program design, assess existing interventions, and optimize internal processes. Busara was founded in 2013 and has active operations in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Uganda and India. To enhance our ability to conduct rapid behavioral experiments and develop quick insights, we have constructed an exhaustive panel that can be easily drawn from. Our primary sampling pool encompasses respondents from across Kenya, but we place a particular emphasis on low-income residents in Nairobi. We are also constructing comparable sampling frames in low-income areas of Lagos, Nigeria and New Delhi, India.A key question for research is the representativeness of the experimental sample. To better understand the generalizability and characteristics of Busara’s sampling pool, we analyzed its comparability to the 2016 Integrated Household Budget Survey (IHBS), a nationally-representative survey prepared by the Kenyan National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS). Given Busara’s emphasis on poverty alleviation, our sample is expected to lean towards a low-income demographic. Appendix available upon request.