Zara Riaz

Zara graduated in 2015 from Davidson College where she majored in Political Science and minored in Economics. Her senior honors thesis explored the role of ethno-federal arrangements on economic development in Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia. During her time at Davidson, Zara attended the Rift Valley Institute’s Horn of Africa field course in Jinja, Uganda and interned for Spark Microgrants in Musanze, Rwanda, where she created a resource guide for facilitators covering various topics relating to international development. She also spent a semester at Sciences Po in Paris and had the opportunity to travel to Colombia to study the country’s internal conflict. Most recently, she interned for the Children’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, where she researched child labor issues within mining and cocoa farming sectors in various West African countries.  She is excited to spend the upcoming year working with the African School of Economics and specifically its Institute for Empirical Research in Policy Economy, using her French, and integrating into Beninese culture.