Since 2010, Spark has built the civic and economic power of rural communities facing poverty by pioneering the village grants and facilitation approach. The approach is unique as it gets resources and decision-making power into the hands of families living in extreme poverty through direct to village grants and facilitation of annualized village planning. This enables large amounts of money to move through a decentralized mechanism directly to those meant to benefit. Spark’s model achieves this by:
- Direct transfers of $8-15K grants to villages facing rural poverty.
- Leading community members through an annualized, inclusive, village planning process.
- Enabling families to launch local projects and businesses and plan for future improvements
Institutional Representative: Sana Khan, Research Director
Sana Khan is the incoming Research Director at Spark Microgrants and is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Psychology and Social Policy at Princeton University. In her primary line of research, Sana examines the strategies that people use to understand and make suppositions about the minds of others and analyzes the consequences of these processes. In her current work, she employs large-scale field experiments to study this in the context of hypothetical and actual citizen-refugee encounters to understand what can change citizens’ subjective and policy attitudes toward refugees.
Sana has 10+ years experience of undertaking research in development and humanitarian contexts. She has worked at Innovations for Poverty Action, The World Bank, and the International Rescue Committee. Sana holds a Master’s degree in International Relations, with a concentration in International Development and Economics, from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a Bachelors in Economics and Psychology from Trinity College, CT.
Since 2010, Spark has built the civic and economic power of rural communities facing poverty by pioneering the village grants and facilitation approach. The approach is unique as it gets resources and decision-making power into the hands of families living in extreme poverty through direct to village grants and facilitation of annualized village planning. This enables large amounts of money to move through a decentralized mechanism directly to those meant to benefit. Spark's model achieves this by: Institutional Representative: Sana Khan, Research DirectorSana Khan is the incoming Research Director at Spark Microgrants and is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Psychology…