Arif Naveed is a Gates Cambridge Scholar who has already had a major impact on education policy in his home country, Pakistan. At Cambridge he will go back to basics and question the assumption that education is the best way out of poverty.
Arif has been working on issues relating to education and development for several years since finishing an undergraduate and masters programme in economics. In 2006, he transferred to the University of Bath for an interdisciplinary master in international development with the aid of a Commonwealth Scholarship. Returning to Pakistan, he joined the leading think tank, the Mahbub-ul-Haq Human Development Centre.
He started work on a DFID funded, University of Cambridge project led by Professor Christopher Colclough. Arif was the lead researcher for Pakistan and spent two years assessing how education affected the social and human development of poor communities. He oversaw the collection and analysis of data, training field researchers to find out what the poor get out of their schooling, how they acquire skills, how education enhances their life chances and whether such outcomes could be improved through better schooling. Since then he has been mining the rich data collected by the programme and working with policymakers. He was invited to contribute to the Ninth Five-Year Plan of Pakistan on education, employment and income distribution. He started work on a new model of multidimensional poverty since the government
