Rania Nasir is a Policy Economist, specializing in firms, trade and productivity, at the International Growth Centre (IGC). In this capacity, she currently manages the Small and Growing Business Evidence Fund, an innovative collaboration between researchers and practitioners to understand the most effective ways to support small and growing businesses and the socio-economic impact of their growth. Rania is also working with Aceli Africa to research the underlying issues in finance for agricultural small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in East Africa. She has worked closely with IGC country teams in Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Bangladesh, and Ghana, and has co-authored one of IGC’s flagship Growth Briefs, “Suffocating Prosperity”. Previously, she worked as a Business Advisor and a Results Measurement Specialist in Palladium Group and Cardno Emerging Markets to help private sector firms deliver innovative interventions in the agriculture sector to trigger systemic changes and create broad-based, sustainable, pro-poor growth. She has also worked on a randomized control trial (RCT) that investigated whether and how vocational training programs provide economic opportunities in Pakistan as well as an RCT on how to increase local political accountability in Uganda. Rania has a variety of research interests, including understanding how to provide more opportunities to local researchers, how to increase the impact of SMEs, and how to meaningfully improve the workplace for underrepresented minorities. She was also awarded the Fulbright Masters Scholarship for the years 2012-2014 and holds a Master of Public Administration from Columbia University, concentrating on Economic and Political Development and specializing in Advanced Economic Policy Analysis.