Ashrakat Elshehawy

Ashrakat Elshehawy was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the King Center on Global Development. She earned her PhD at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the Political Economy of Development and Foreign Influence on Domestic Political Economy. Her work evaluates the effects of foreign interventions on domestic politics, local governance, public service provision, and inequalities. Her methodological expertise lies in the field of Computational Social Sciences. She employs and advances methods of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning in a multilingual setting, working with a variety of Western and Arabic languages. Her work incorporates the retrieval and digitalization of historical maps, textual data, and several other sources of archival data. She is passionate about using her computational skills to generate new sources of quantitative data that reveal valuable information that would be otherwise lost in the archives.

King Center Supported Research

2023 - 2024 Academic Year | Global Development Research Funding

Agriculture, Human Capital, and Public Health in Egypt 

The global landscape of cotton farming was transformed by cotton capitalists, in Egypt global demand for cotton and shocks to cotton pricing enforced changes in labor patterns and irrigation infrastructure during colonial times. The immediate and lasting consequences of these agricultural shifts on the development of the communities involved are still not completely empirically fully explored in Middle Eastern countries like Egypt. This project is aims at reshaping our understanding of the short and long-run impacts of agricultural labor policies and poorly implemented modernization projects set under colonialism, focusing particularly on implications for education, and public health.

An innovative aspect of this project lies in its use of developments in machine learning and computer vision to convert and examine vast quantities of historical data that were once difficult to handle. Available data to study these topics, especially in the Middle East, tend to be scarce. Historical maps and Arabic text are excellent sources of data, however, processing proved previously to be difficult and require innovative techniques. By applying new cutting-edge AI technologies, she plans to extract valuable information from various archival resources, with the ultimate goal to utilize this extracted data to explore significant issues related to the political economy of development.