Ali receives NU Vincentian Award

Web Exclusive, June 8, 2006

Abdiweli Ali, Ph.D., assistant professor of economics at Niagara University, has received the Vincentian Award for the summer of 2006. The award from the university’s research council will help fund his project, “Foreign Aid, Poverty and Growth.”

The Vincentian Award, named after St. Vincent de Paul, is awarded annually to fund research relating to poverty, its causes and ways to alleviate it. Funding comes from the Provincial Office of the Vincentian Community in Philadelphia.

Ali’s research is assessing whether foreign aid can help recipient countries break out of the poverty trap by testing if aid increases a government’s effort in achieving “growth-promoting, poverty-reducing developmental goals.”

Ali received a bachelor of arts degree in economics from Somali National University in 1985 and a master’s degree in economics from Vanderbilt University in 1988. He received a master’s degree in public administration in 1999 from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a Ph.D. from George Mason University in 2000.

Ali lives with his wife and four children in Amherst.