Prof. Marcel Fafchamps Stanford University, USA

Born in Belgium in 1955, Professor Fafchamps attended the Université Catholique de Louvain. After military service, he spent nearly five years working for the International Labour Organization, a United Nations agency overlooking issues of employment, income distribution, and vocational training. He was based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, but travelled to... read moreall parts of Africa.

In 1989 he completed a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the University of California at Berkeley for which he won an Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Award from the American Agricultural Economists Association. Except for a semester teaching at the University of Chicago in 1995, he spent the period between 1989 and 1996 teaching at the Food Research Institute at Stanford.

Professor Fafchamps then moved to the Department of Economics at Stanford. He taught in the Department of Economics of Oxford University from 1999 to 2013, except for a sabbatical year spent in the department of economics at Harvard (2005-6) and half a year of sabbatical in the Department of Economics at Stanford (2012). While in Oxford he also served as deputy director and then co-director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies.