Sigrid Weber

Sigrid Weber was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University, working in the lab’s Migration and Development Initiative. Weber works on conflict and migration, predominantly in the Middle East and East Africa. She has received a PhD in Political Science at the Department of Political Science, University College London (UCL) in 2023 and has previously worked as a consultant for the World Bank-UNHCR Joint Data Center on Forced Displacement. Before her doctoral studies, she completed a MSc in Security Studies at UCL and a BA in Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz, Germany.

King Center Supported Research

2024 - 2025 Academic Year | Global Development Research Funding Grant

Statelessness in Kenya: a panel study of the socioeconomic conditions of previous and current stateless populations

What is the socio-economic impact of statelessness and how does the acquisition of citizenship help populations without a nationality to improve their conditions? This project in collaboration with UNHCR will survey stateless and previously stateless populations in the coastal area of Kenya to learn how their acquisition of Kenyan citizenship over the past decade (Makonde people), the past 3 years (Pemba people), and their statelessness (Rundi people) affects their socio-economic conditions. The three wave full population panel will compare stateless populations to a representative sample of Kenyans and will provide the first ever quantitative panel data on statelessness. The evidence from this study will speak to literatures on statelessness, the naturalization of migrants and state legibility and will open up a broader research agenda on vulnerable populations at the margin of societies in developing countries.

2023 - 2024 Academic Year | Global Development Research Funding

The mental load and women's political participation: a measurement study in Zambia 

We conduct the first study to measure the "mental load" (the cognitive labor required in a household) in a developing country. Evidence from the US shows that high mental loads reduce political engagement for women but no research has compared mental loads in developing and developed economies although poverty, household shocks, lacking care services and complex family structures suggest that mental loads are particularly high in the Global South. We conduct a quantitative survey in Zambia with 750 households to measure the gendered mental load, to explore determinants, and to estimate the effect of the mental load on political participation.