EGN NEWS DESK
Mlen-Too Wesley has light recollections of his early childhood in Liberia, however the sharpest one has formed his life.
Wesley was 4 years outdated when he and his household boarded a navy airplane to flee the West African nation. At the time, the nation was embroiled in a 14-year civil battle that killed roughly 200,000 folks, displaced about 750,000, and starved numerous extra. When Wesley’s grandmother instructed him he would get pleasure from a meal throughout his flight, Wesley knew his fortune had modified. Yet, his first intuition was to supply his meals to the folks he left behind.
“I decided proper then to return again,” Wesley says. “Even as I grew older and spent extra time within the United States, I knew I needed to contribute to Liberia’s future.”
Today, the 38-year-old is dedicated to empowering Liberians via financial progress. Wesley regarded to the MITx MicroMasters program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy (DEDP) to attain that purpose. He examined points reminiscent of micro-lending, state seize, and funding in well being care in programs reminiscent of Foundations of Development Policy, Good Economics for Hard Times, and The Challenges of Global Poverty. Through case research and analysis, Wesley found that financial incentives can encourage desired behaviors, curb corruption, and empower folks.
“I couldn’t join the dots”
Liberia is marred by corruption. According to Transparency International’s Corruptions Perception Index for 2023, Liberia scored 25 out of 100, with zero signifying the best stage of corruption. Yet, Wesley grew bored with textbooks and undergraduate professors saying that the standing of Liberia and different African nations may very well be blamed fully on corruption. Even worse, these sources gave Wesley the impression that nothing may very well be achieved to enhance his native nation. The sentiment annoyed him, he says.
“It struck me as flippant to attribute the challenges confronted by billions of individuals to backward behaviors,” says Wesley. “There are a number of forces, inside and exterior, which have contributed to Liberia’s situation. If we actually study them, discover why issues occurred, and outline the change we would like, we are able to plot a manner ahead to a extra affluent future.”
Driven to look at the financial, political, and social dynamics shaping his homeland and to meet his childhood promise, Wesley moved again to Africa in 2013. Over the subsequent 10 years, he merged his pursuits in entrepreneurship, software program growth, and economics to raised Liberia. He designed a forestry administration platform that preserves Liberia’s pure sources, constructed an internet queue for presidency hospitals to triage sufferers extra successfully, and engineered information visualization instruments to help renewable power initiatives. Yet, to create the influence Wesley needed, he wanted to do greater than acquire information. He needed to analyze and act on it in significant methods.
“I couldn’t join the dots on why issues are the way in which they’re,” Wesley says.
“It wasn’t simply a tutorial expertise for me”
Wesley knew he wanted to dive deeper into information science, and regarded to the MicroMasters in DEDP program to assist him join the dots. Established in 2017 by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and MIT Open Learning, the MicroMasters in DEDP program is predicated on the Nobel Prize-winning work of MIT college members Esther Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics, and Abhijit Banerjee, the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics. Duflo and Banerjee’s analysis supplied a wholly new strategy to designing, implementing, and evaluating antipoverty initiatives all through the world.
The MicroMasters in DEDP program supplied the framework Wesley had sought almost 20 years in the past as an undergraduate pupil. He realized about novel financial incentives that stymied corruption and promoted training.
“It wasn’t simply a tutorial expertise for me,” Wesley says. “The courses gave me the instruments and the frameworks to research my very own private experiences.”
Wesley initially stumbled with the quantitative coursework. Having a demanding profession, taking extension programs at one other college, and being a number of years faraway from school calculus programs took a toll on him. He needed to retake some courses, particularly Data Analysis for Social Scientists, a number of instances earlier than he may go the proctored examination. His persistence paid off. Wesley earned his MicroMasters in DEDP credential in June 2023 and was additionally admitted into the MIT DEDP grasp’s program.
“The class twisted my mind in so many various methods,” Wesley says. “The fourth time taking Data Analysis, I started to know it. I recognize that MIT didn’t care that I did poorly on my first attempt. They cared that over time I understood the fabric.”
The program’s rigorous arithmetic and statistics courses sparked in Wesley a ardour for synthetic intelligence, particularly machine studying and pure language processing. Both present extra highly effective methods to extract and interpret information, and Wesley has a particular curiosity in mining qualitative sources for info. He plans to make use of these instruments to check nationwide growth plans over time and amongst totally different international locations to find out if policymakers are recycling the identical phrases and objectives.
Once Wesley earns his grasp’s diploma, he plans to return to Liberia and deal with worldwide growth. In the longer term, he hopes to guide a data-focused group dedicated to enhancing the lives of individuals in Liberia and the United States.
“Thanks to MIT, I’ve the data and instruments to deal with real-world challenges that conventional financial fashions typically overlook,” Wesley says.
