Associate Professor Alison Andrew has been awarded a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant to support new research into how people in low- and middle-income countries support themselves in later life.
The highly competitive ERC Starting Grants support exceptional early-career researchers in developing ambitious research programmes, building their own teams and establishing their independence as research leaders.
Each grant provides €1.5 million in funding for up to five years. In 2026, the scheme received a record 4,807 applications, of which just 421 – 8.8% – were successful. Alison is one of five University of Oxford researchers to receive an award this year.
Alison, an Associate Professor in the Department and Tutorial Fellow at Trinity College, is a development and labour economist whose research interests include the economics of gender, marriage and education.
Populations in low- and middle-income countries are ageing rapidly, yet access to substantial pensions remains limited. Alison’s ERC-funded project will explore how people support themselves in later life, examining the roles of work and savings, financial support and care from family members, and government programmes, as well as how these different sources of support interact.
The project combines detailed data on households across eleven countries with a large-scale field experiment built around the rollout of a new pension scheme for informal workers in rural Uganda. The findings will speak to the design of pension and social policies that protect older people while taking into account impacts on families.
Reflecting on the award, Alison said:
“The ERC grant will give me the time, freedom and resources to explore questions that I think are both hugely important and really interesting. It will allow me to build a team to study how people in low- and middle-income countries support themselves in old age — how family support, savings, work and public pensions fit together — and what this means for designing policy as these countries age rapidly.”
Congratulations to Alison on this outstanding achievement.
