Busara’s BRACE team partners with local and international academics and researchers to carry out behavioral studies and experiments. We advance behavioral science by partnering with researchers to produce cutting-edge rigorous research, test behaviorally informed interventions, and co-generate knowledge about human behavior under poverty conditions. We apply behavioral science by partnering with Busara’s advisory teams to bring accumulated research knowledge and tools to the different sectoral projects that they carry out with practitioners and policymakers.

BRACE also manages Busara’s behavioral labs. Busara has one of the first and largest behavioral lab facilities in the Global South. A lab experiment’s key function is to understand behavioral mechanisms and conduct foundational scientific research on human behavior as well as enable researchers and policymakers to design and test behaviorally informed interventions in a controlled environment before heading out to the field and scaling up. In addition to our standing lab facility in Nairobi, Kenya, Busara also has the capacity to set up labs in the field and mobile (moving) labs in most parts of the world and in remote areas to allow for studying human behavior in real-world contexts and in hard-to-reach locations generating policy-relevant insights. 

Finally, we believe in empowering local organizations to take the lead in determining the direction of research and the type of questions that need to be investigated and are most suitable to their contexts. That is why BRACE partners with organizations and governments to help build their own capacities in running behavioral experiments, testing interventions, and setting up their own in-house behavioral labs.