Influencing Careers with Catalytic Funding: Development Economics Challenge

Samarth Bordia, Finance and Reporting Manager at CEGA and the program lead for the Development Economics Challenge, speaks with recent UC Berkeley graduate students about how early-stage funding from CEGA impacted their research and advanced their careers, and why investing in junior researchers promotes innovation in the field of development economics.

Opportunities for junior researchers in development economics are shrinking. This year’s job market was particularly competitive. At CEGA, we have seen funders move towards established projects, led by senior researchers, often taking the form of topping up existing initiatives. While the approach is understandable from a risk minimization framework, this environment limits opportunities for new ideas, perspectives, and scholars to make their mark on the field of development economics. Another result is a substantial narrowing of the set of policy questions the development research field is able to address.

At CEGA, we believe that funding more research, not less, is critical to driving large social returns and maintaining a healthy scientific community—and we are proud to invest in projects led by junior researchers. Through the Development Economics Challenge, an open-ended research grant competition, CEGA has provided more than $1.3M to 130 projects over the past five years alone. These projects seed new ideas, provide researchers with hands-on learning opportunities, and help PhD students land tenure-track positions. Here, Samarth Bordia, who leads the Development Economics Challenge, chats with recent UC Berkeley graduate students (who are now tenure-track faculty members at their respective universities) about how flexible, early stage funding shaped their research agenda and transformed their careers. 

Initial Opportunity

Researchers often face a chicken/egg problem when it comes to finding support for their early ideas: global development research can be messy and complicated which means that most funders are reluctant to provide support for unvalidated ideas, but without funding, researchers cannot test them. The Development Economics Challenge closes this gap by seeding projects with exploratory “scoping grants.” By design, these grants have a high risk profile, allowing researchers to explore the feasibility of their ideas. Many run into issues, forcing recipients to pivot to new ideas or adapt their design. Our belief is that better projects come from a well-developed understanding of the study context and that a “portfolio approach”—where some projects may fail (while still providing valuable insights) and others generate outsized impacts—can provide important public goods for the field and global development ecosystem writ large 

Samarth: All of you initially received funding as a scoping grant, can you speak to how these grants influenced the direction of your subsequent work?

Nick Swanson: “To raise larger grants, you usually need not just an interesting question but some indication that the project is feasible and promising. Pilot data and early evidence are often crucial for that. I think the CEGA support was instrumental in helping me generate exactly that kind of proof of concept. It helped move projects from being speculative ideas to something concrete enough that other funders could take seriously.”

Luisa Cefala: “I relied on this funding at the very early stages of my projects to refine the research question and design, and to cover data collection costs when there were delays with other external funding sources or no other calls for proposals were available.”

Gwyneth Miner: “When I first received CEGA funding through the Dev Econ Challenge, it was the summer of my third year. At that point, I knew I wanted to run an RCT that explored barriers to rural-urban migration in Kenya, but I needed more context in order to decide on what frictions to study. My first CEGA grant funded this scoping project, where many individuals reported uncertainty around urban employment as the major roadblock to migration. This observation motivated the treatment at the core of my RCT, a migration-conditional unemployment insurance.”

Yuen Ho: “The funding gave me the stability and guarantees I needed to make significant progress with my field implementing partner, design the surveys and experiments, obtain IRB, and of course, successfully run the first set of field work that became the core of my job market paper.”

Skills-Building

Moving ideas from the academy to the field comes with a steep learning curve as researchers interact with implementing organizations and learn the local context. With the Development Economics Challenge, recipients of funding are the principal investigator and they lead the project. Our panel (and many others) report that these initial funds helped them grow their confidence both as academics and project managers. 

Samarth: Was there anything surprising that you learned while working on your funded project?

Yuen Ho: “The funding allowed me to spend more time in the field, which is always useful in and of itself. Not only does it allow you to make new partnerships and build your network in-country, but it gives you more context-specific experience which is crucial for designing research and surveys that are context-specific and appropriate. I find that when I am in the field it is often a stimulating time of inspiration, idea generation, learning, and collaboration.”

Nick Swanson: “Getting that initial support gave us the flexibility to go to the field, learn, adjust, and ultimately discover a much better set of questions.”

Grady Killeen: “I received my first Dev Econ Challenge funding at the end of the second year of my PhD. It was the first project with field research that I worked on independently. It was very valuable to see that funding was available and gain experience putting together competitive applications.”

Career Impact

While initial grants may be small, we often see a compounding effect on funded projects. A scoping grant may lead to a full-scale study. The full-scale study may then attract additional funding to scale up a research agenda. 

For students, this trajectory is particularly important as they build their portfolio and make their case on the academic job market. 

Samarth: Can you describe how this initial funding continues to influence your research and your career?

Nick Swanson: “One thing I did not anticipate was just how much one early grant could lead to an ongoing chain of work. One project led to another, one round of data collection led to new questions, and one source of support helped create the foundation for the next. Over time that also meant new collaborations, deeper local relationships, and new funding opportunities. So, in that sense the funding did much more than support a single paper. It helped create a research trajectory.”

Yuen Ho: “Beyond the money itself, receiving CEGA funding early in my career gave me the confidence and motivation to dream big with my research and tackle ambitious research questions. It expanded my horizon of what it was possible for a graduate student to do, and has enabled me to lay a strong foundation for building my research agenda to come.”

Luisa Cefala: “One of the grants I received from CEGA was in collaboration with a CEGA Fellow, Michel Armel Ndayikeza, to support a joint project in Burundi.  I did not anticipate that it would become a 5-year (and counting!) collaboration with him and with the University of Burundi in general. This summer my first Ph.D. student advisee will spend the summer in Burundi, and I am regularly contacted by other researchers who are interested in working in the country. I don’t think that any of this would have been possible without CEGA support!”

Comments on the Value of Seed Funding

The U.S. federal government has historically provided support for projects led by junior researchers. With contractions at USAID and the NSF, these funding opportunities are no longer available. In turn, private funders have shifted to prioritizing established researchers and research projects. This squeeze means that opportunities for the junior researcher community are limited. CEGA aims to fill this gap with the Development Economics Challenge and is actively fundraising to continue the program. 

Samarth: Can you speak to what will be lost if funding continues to move away from programs like the Development Economics Challenge?

Grady Killeen: “Young development economists need the opportunity to learn to implement projects and compete for funding. If those skills aren’t developed, then the field will end up with too little supply of experimental economists and fail to benefit from the insights of young economists in the future.”

Nick Swanson: “If we want a vibrant field, we need institutions that are willing to take chances on younger researchers who have promise but have not yet had the chance to prove themselves fully. That kind of support does not just help individuals. It expands the set of ideas being explored and makes the field more dynamic and innovative.”

Luisa Cefala: “While they may lack some experience, junior researchers have more time to start new collaborations in contexts and countries where there is less research infrastructure. This means that junior researchers can create new opportunities to expand the field beyond more “mainstream” settings. In my case, setting up a research infrastructure in Burundi required me & my coauthor to spend months at a time in the field, which is something that would be really hard to do now as tenure track faculty.”

Yuen Ho: “The fact that CEGA specializes in supporting early stage researchers in early stage ideas is critical. When you are trying to establish new fieldwork, you need someone like CEGA to take a chance on you, so that you can get to the field, develop partnerships, refine research ideas, and test out your designs. I think it would have been much harder for me to raise co-funding from other sources had I not had the initial CEGA funding to conduct some preliminary fieldwork and develop strong field partnerships and collect existing data for motivation and scoping. I may have even ended up not being able to do a field experiment for my job market paper, which would have been a major loss and big pivot from the types of methodology and research that I specialize in.”

Advice for Junior Researchers

The Development Economics Challenge just closed an RFP in Spring 2026 to continue to support the next generation of researchers. Another round is expected in Fall 2026. 

Samarth: Do you have any advice for current graduate students that are seeking funding for early-stage work?

Yuen Ho: “Go for it, dream big, be ambitious. Don’t worry about having your idea be perfect before you start any fieldwork, have an idea and general direction, but also be open to adapting as you learn more on the ground.”

Nick Swanson: “My main advice would be: do not waste the flexibility that comes with early funding. Go to the field if you can. Spend time understanding the place and the people you are working with. Do not arrive with a fixed idea and try to force the setting to fit it. Ask a lot of questions, listen carefully, and update your thinking as you learn. In my experience, the more seriously you engage with a place, the more interesting and better-grounded ideas you will have.”

Gwyneth Miner: “I recommend workshopping your idea as much as possible and try to nail down the specifics about the questions you want to answer and how. This is important for research projects generally, but could also strengthen your funding application.”

Grady Killeen: “They should try to apply early on for a project to gain experience implementing fieldwork and time spent in the field. Those experiences are very valuable for implementing a job market paper.”

Luisa Cefala: “The first is to apply early, even if you haven’t fully nailed a research design. That’s the purpose of seed funding! The second is to spend as much time as you can in the field to understand the research context and institutions.”