Rafia Zaman

Rafia is an interdisciplinary researcher who works on off-grid solar electricity access policies. Her analyses consider market development, institutional governance, local politics, and distributional impacts associated with off-grid investments in low-income contexts. She primarily uses quantitative approaches, drawing from methods used in development economics, spatial statistics, and in the engineering sciences. At Duke, she conducts experimental and quasi-experimental research on themes related to energy development and inequality, including evaluation of clean cooking promotion policies, energy safety net programs and the political economy of energy, and (micro-)financing impacts on technology diffusion/adaptation and rural resilience. Rafia holds a PhD (in Sustainability and Innovation Management) from the University of Graz (FWF – DK Climate Change) in Austria and an MBA from the Asian Institute of Technology in Thailand.