American University of Beirut
Alexandra Irani is a socio-economic researcher whose work is focused on the measurement of human well-being, vulnerability and inequality among youth, refugees and other marginalized populations to inform data-driven decision making in public policy. She is the Research Manager of the Applied Economics and Development Research Group at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Alexandra is currently managing the AUB component of a DfID-funded project that aims to assess the impact of multi-purpose cash assistance on the welfare of Syrian refugees in Lebanon through a 2-year panel data exercise.
In recent years she managed research projects focusing on the assessment of child, youth and refugee well-being and deprivation in collaboration with various UN organizations and public entities. This includes the development of a multi-dimensional measure of vulnerability among Lebanese, Palestinian refugee and Syrian refugee youth, and the development of a joint UNHCR-WFP poverty targeting approach for food and multipurpose cash assistance to Syrian Refugees in Lebanon and Central African Refugees in Cameroon. She worked on the UNICEF Multiple Deprivation Overlapping Analysis (MODA) for children living in Lebanon and studied multidimensional inequality faced by the various Lebanese and refugee subpopulations living in Lebanon on an Oxfam-funded project.
Alexandra 's work also concentrated on national household surveys such as the Rapid Poverty Assessment for Lebanon held jointly with the Ministry of Social Affairs, UNDP, UNICEF and WFP and the AUB-UNRWA Socio-economic Survey of Palestine Refugees in Lebanon.
Prior to her research positions, Alexandra worked at the ILO 's Regional Office in Beirut on the implementation of various entrepreneurship and small and medium enterprises development projects and on the improvement of working conditions in Lebanon, Jordan and Yemen between 2009 and 2014.
She was part of a team who won the first prize at the first UNDP Arab data visualization hackathon for the SDGs in 2017 for their Supermilk breastfeeding campaign, and was part of the core team of the 2016 UNDP Arab Human Development Report. She holds a Master of Science in Agricultural Economics and Development (2015) and a Bachelor in Economics (2009) from AUB.