Bangladeshi economist from Yale Dr Mushfiq’s masterclass arranged by YPF 

Youth Policy Forum (YPF) was founded to make youths more interested in the arena of policymaking and to make them understand the intricate nuances of this process,

As a part of their many endeavours, they started arranging masterclasses in the form of public lectures -- featuring world-renowned Bangladeshi academics, politicians and experts in this field and giving a taste of how it works in real life out there.

The second iteration of this series was taken by Dr Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak on 29 March. He is a YPF advisor.

The masterclass presented by YPF was titled "From Evidence To Policy" -- to teach the attending youths how to effectively use evidence and morph it into the world of policymaking. 

Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak is a professor of economics at the School of Management of Yale University.

Born and brought up in Bangladesh, he is the only Bangladeshi professor at Yale. He is the founder and faculty director of Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE). He co-chairs the Urban Services Initiative at MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and he also leads the Bangladesh Research Program for the International Growth Centre at LSE and Oxford. 

A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that face masks can slow the spread of Covid-19 and save lives, but mask usage remains low across many parts of the world, and strategies to increase mask usage remain untested and unclear.

In this context, Professor  Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak delivered the keynote presentation on "NORMalizing Mask-Wearing in South Asia: Scaling Up an effective Approach."

In this presentation and masterclass, he showed how he used this data as solid pieces of evidence to implement policies in the targeted areas effectively. 

The presentation targeted the findings of a study based on a cluster-randomized trial of community-level mask promotion in rural Bangladesh involving 341,830 adults in 600 villages.

The study used a series of ways to push mask usage, as well as free house distribution of surgical or cloth masks, distribution, and promotion in markets and mosques, mask advocacy by Imams throughout Friday prayers, role modelling by local leaders, village police incidental to those mask promoters, providing financial rewards or certificates to villages if mask-wearing rate improves, and so forth.

The findings recommend that free distribution of masks and role modelling by community leaders made only tiny increases in mask usage.

However, adding periodic observation by mask promoters to cue individuals to place on the masks augmented correct mask-wearing by 29 percentage points. This multiplication of mask usage was sustained overall ten weeks of surveillance and a period when intervention activities ended. Physical distancing additionally increased by 5.2 percentage points.

These results point to changes in social norms as a crucial driver of behaviour change. Village police incidental to the mask promoters had no extra impact on mask-wearing, suggesting that the operative mechanism is not any threat of formal legal sanctions; but, shame and people's aversion to a lightweight informal social boycott.

The issue is that improved mask-wearing norms are achieved while not incentives that need pricey monitoring.

Furthermore, the study suggests that masks end in one-quarter of the profit of country-wide imprisonment, however, with the tenth part of its cost.

Thus, given the speed of vaccine roll-out, vaccine hesitancy, and unfolding of the latest variants of coronavirus, mask-wearing can be the foremost cost-effective intervention. He also mentioned the challenges of distinguishing the "new poor" throughout the pandemic as reported figures of income, land ownership, and alternative assets suffer from definitional challenges and multiple interpretations.