Shelby Carvalho

Shelby Carvalho is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the King Center on Global Development. Prior to joining Stanford, she earned her PhD in political science from Harvard University. She holds master's degrees in Education Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and in Public Policy from the UT Austin LBJ School of Public Affairs.

Carvalho’s research focuses on the politics of refugee inclusion and exclusion in Africa with particular attention to the education sector. She uses mixed methods to study when and how practices of inclusion differ from official policies and examines the impacts of policy reforms for refugees and hosting communities. Her research is informed by more than a decade of professional experience in education and international development.

2025- 2026 Academic Year | Postdoctoral Scholar Research Grant

Measuring the impact of financial shocks on refugee integration in education

In 2023, the World Food Program began reducing the aid that refugee households in Uganda receive based on a household vulnerability score. Early evidence from these initial cuts suggests that aid reductions decreased enrollment in school and increased child labor. In 2025, over 1 million refugees in Uganda lost aid entirely and broader development aid was cut for the education sector following the collapse of USAID. In this project, I plan to study how the interaction between supply- and demand-side financial shocks shape refugee education and child labor in Uganda following substantial aid cuts to both households and school systems using a combination of administrative and original data collection.