Growing up in Paris, Esther Duflo felt lucky to grow up there, with good schools.
Her luck meant she felt she should do something for other people.
“When I was very young, I already had the idea that we have to help people – to save the world.”
Esther Duflo
Esther is in the news because she just won this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics.
The Nobel prizes are the most famous awards for scientists. And Esther was the youngest person ever to win a Nobel for economics – that’s the science of how people produce, sell and buy stuff.
She and her husband won it because they went to where poor people live, in India and Africa, and tested simple, practical ways to make life better.
They found answers that were not obvious to politicians or to people who send money from rich countries to help the poor.
Esther found ways to help poor children learn better without spending more money on schools.
And she found that giving poor Indian parents a free bag of lentils if they brought their child to be vaccinated against diseases massively increased people’s health for almost no cost.
Esther says it fulfils her childhood ambition – “to help people” and “make the world a better place”.
In a decade – 10 years – India has halved the number of its people counted as poor. Only a quarter of Indians are poor, down from over half.
