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LSE Africa Dissertation Prize

Every year the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa awards its Master’s Dissertation on Africa Prize to the best thesis of the year by an LSE student. Aimed at encouraging and celebrating LSE's outstanding fieldwork and research on Africa, the Prize recognises the year's most innovative and significant dissertation that furthers our understanding of the continent.

This year’s winner is Olivia Dopheide who graduated with a MSc in Anthropology and Development. She has previously worked in international development, helping manage programs focused on improving education systems. She hopes to continue her career advancing research and knowledge about effective solutions to poverty alleviation and the merits of both qualitative and quantitative methods in program evaluation.

Olivia Dopheide

Her dissertation, Circulating More than Money: Remittances within the Somali Diaspora, uses ethnographic accounts of Somali resettlement and migration experiences to explore how sending money across borders often involves more than just financial exchange. It explores affective experiences like guilt, pride, and obligation and their circulation alongside money when migrants and resettled refugees send money back home. This anthropological look provides an additional analysis of one development finance mechanism and adds complexity to the debate about its potential.