Anna Custers was appointed Professor of Poverty Interventions in April 2022. She is an economist who has in recent years worked for the World Bank in Washington DC and in Afghanistan. There she worked on improving tax systems and conducted research into citizens’ attitudes to taxation and their trust in their governments. She received her PhD from Oxford University on a study of debt problems in deprived neighbourhoods in London.

Anna previously worked at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab in Paris and India, where she specialised in randomised controlled trials. She holds an MSc in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and studied international economics at Maastricht University.

Anna's work focuses on better understanding poverty and debt problems in their various manifestations. A third of Dutch households regularly struggle to make ends meet and around 8 per cent have debt problems. This problem’s main question is how can this be possible in such a prosperous country as the Netherlands and above all, what can be done to reduce this problem? Anna together with her research group investigates which type of poverty interventions are effective and for which citizens. Her research is practice-based, its methods researched and developed together with social workers and people in poverty themselves.