Rachel Sabates-Wheeler

Rachel is a development economist with over 20 years of experience working in areas of rural livelihoods, poverty analysis, migration, and social protection. She has been a Research Fellow at IDS since 2001 and is a founder and Director of the Centre for Social Protection. Her work has been published in top-level journals and is cited widely. Over the last 12 years Rachel has been responsible for managing teams within IDS as well as multiple large-scale, multi-country research programmes and projects, many of which explore understandings of risk and vulnerability both conceptually and empirically. These have included the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), Ethiopia; the Hunger Safety Net Programme (HSNP), Kenya; the Child Support Grant (CSG), South Africa; and a number of studies on home-grown school feeding programmes in Africa. Currently she is co- Director for the Better Assistance in Crises (BASIC) Research Programme, a £10 million FCDO initiative to develop new thinking and practical approaches for how to strengthen social assistance in contexts of protracted displacement, conflict and recurring climate shocks.