Ms. Jessica Leino :: Sustainability Science Program :: Center for International Development

Sustainability Science Program

Ms. Jessica Leino
Center for International Development
Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
506C Rubenstein Building
79 JFK Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
USA
Tel: (1) 617-496-0426
Fax: (1) 617-496-8753
Email: jessica_leino "at" ksg.harvard.edu
Group affiliation: Giorgio Ruffolo Doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science

Jessica Leino is a Giorgio Ruffolo Doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science in the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard�s Center for International Development and a doctoral candidate in the Economics Department at the University of California at Berkeley.� She studies how to design institutions that improve the provision of local public goods.�She is collecting data from a randomized evaluation in rural Kenya to examine how the participation of women in management committees may improve local management of water and other resources.� Leino has previously worked as a researcher at the Brookings Institution and as a project evaluation consultant in East Africa for the World Bank and several NGOs.�She also has other research projects analyzing the labor supply of workers in commercial agriculture in Kenya and examining� the impact of patronage systems.� She has been awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2003), in addition to research grants from the Institute of Business and Economic Research at Berkeley.� She received an MPhil with merit in Development Studies from Cambridge University in 2001 and an AB in Economics magna cum laude from Harvard University� in 2000.

Community Management of Water Infrastructure: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Kenya. Effective management of environmental goods is of paramount concern in settings of resource scarcity, and women have traditionally played a significant role in conserving and managing natural resources at the local level.� Using data from a randomized evaluation in rural Kenya, Leino examines how the participation of women in management committees may improve local management of water and other resources using data collected from a project that randomly assigned a package of interventions to organizations responsible for maintaining newly improved drinking water sources in western Kenya. Exogenous variation in the number of women on user committees is used to examine how the participation of women in management committees may improve water infrastructure maintenance and to distinguish between competing explanations of why gender might matter for resource management.