ARCED International
Body of work
Recognised
- 2025Data Science NPO of the YearBusiness Excellence Awards 2025 (Acquisition International), awarded to ARCED Foundation.
- 2024Invited speaker, Bay of Bengal ConversationDhaka, alongside a Nobel laureate and heads of state.
- 2020The People Behind the DataFeatured by Innovations for Poverty Action.
- 2018NCD Talent, Youth Innovation LabOne of 20 selected worldwide; organised by WHO and the World Diabetes Foundation.
- 2017SDG Talent, UNLEASH Innovation LabOne of 1,000 selected from more than 100 countries; organised by the United Nations.
- Member, Water Supply & Sanitation Collaborative CouncilWSSCC.
In the media
- Vox, 2026One of America's best foreign aid programs is back from the dead
- BreatheLife 2030 (WHO & UNEP), 2025Improved brick kilns crucial for just transition in Bangladesh
- The Business Standard, 2024Action has been taken against 458 illegal brick kilns
- The Business Standard, 2024Govt to use Brick Kiln Tracker to detect polluters
- NYU Global TIES for ChildrenFather engagement program shows promise in Rohingya camps
- International Growth CentreBrick Kiln Tracker, built with the Department of Environment
About
Mehrab Ali (published as ARM Mehrab Ali) is a Bangladeshi data scientist and development researcher who has spent more than 17 years designing, running and analysing field research, and building the organisations and software that make it work.
He founded ARCED Foundation in Dhaka in 2013 and has led it since, building a team that has delivered more than 80 major research assignments for the World Bank, ADB, USAID and universities from Stanford to NUS. He went on to found Solutions of Things Lab (SoTLab) in 2019 and ARCED International, which he runs as executive lead.
Across his career he has managed more than 60 large-scale research projects, including randomised controlled trials, lab-in-the-field experiments, impact evaluations and household surveys, for international agencies, NGOs, governments and leading universities including Yale, MIT, Harvard and Stanford. He spent more than a decade at Innovations for Poverty Action, rising from Research Manager to Regional Technical Manager for Asia and then Global Technical Solutions Lead.
He also founded and built SurveyLoopr, FolderManifest and InstantHowTo.dev, and leads the ARCED Foundation team behind more than 15 open-source research tools.
- Roles
- Founder & Executive Lead, ARCED International
- Founder & Executive Director, ARCED Foundation
- Founder, Solutions of Things Lab (SoTLab)
- Fields
- Development economics, public health, impact evaluation, survey methodology, data science
- Education
- MS in Economics, North South University
- BSS in Economics, East West University
- Based in
- Dhaka, Bangladesh
- ORCID
- 0000-0001-5442-7147
Field research leadership
Runs large, multi-year studies end to end, from sampling, recruiting and training field teams, supervision and quality control through to analysis and reporting, in Bangladesh and in multi-country programmes across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
- 60+ research projects
- Public health
- WASH
- Education
- Climate & air quality
- Labour & migration
- Humanitarian
Rigorous methods
Designs studies that hold up to scrutiny, from randomised controlled trials, lab-in-the-field experiments and impact evaluations to longitudinal panels, with careful questionnaire design, high-frequency checks and reproducible analysis.
- RCTs
- Lab-in-the-field experiments
- Impact evaluation
- Longitudinal panels
- CAPI & CATI
- Mixed methods
- Statistical analysis
Technical depth
Builds the systems himself, from AI to field tools: satellite-imagery machine learning, as in ARCED's Brick Kiln Tracker now used by Bangladesh's Department of Environment; LLM applications with RAG and agents; production platforms such as SurveyLoopr, FolderManifest and the ReHub AI research hub; data-quality systems including IEHFC with the World Bank's DIME team and IPA's high-frequency-check automation; Stata packages on SSC; and SurveyCTO plug-ins used by IPA and J-PAL teams.
- AI & machine learning
- LLMs & RAG
- Geospatial ML
- Stata
- R & Shiny
- Python
- TypeScript & React
- PostgreSQL & MySQL
- ODK, SurveyCTO & KoBo
- CSPro
- ArcGIS & QGIS
- AWS & Docker
- Power BI & Tableau
Worked with
Universities
- Yale
- MIT
- Harvard
- Stanford
- Princeton
- Columbia
- Georgetown
- NYU
- UC San Diego
- University of Colorado
- University of Minnesota
- National University of Singapore
- University of Bremen
- Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
- LMU Munich
- University of Konstanz
- Institute of Development Studies
- BRAC University
Organisations
- World Bank
- IFPRI
- IFAD
- USAID
- ADB
- UNDP
- UNICEF
- ILO
- ODI
- Innovations for Poverty Action
- International Growth Centre
- Evidence Action
- Save the Children
- Plan International
- Oxfam
- International Rescue Committee
- LEGO Foundation
- Sesame Workshop
- GAIN
- Management Sciences for Health
- UN Foundation
- ActionAid
- Dalberg
- Helvetas
- BRAC
- a2i
- Government of Bangladesh
Career
Early career
Researcher
BRAC Research and Evaluation Division
2011 - 2019
Research Manager
Innovations for Poverty Action
2013 - now
Founder & Executive Director
ARCED Foundation
2019 - 2021
Regional Technical Manager, Asia
Innovations for Poverty Action
2021 - 2022
Global Technical Solutions Lead
Innovations for Poverty Action
2025 - now
Founder & Executive Lead
ARCED International
Built
Products and open-source tools built by Mehrab and the ARCED Foundation team he leads, each one started as a problem in the field.
Open-source tools
- odksplit
Labels and splits ODK / SurveyCTO multiple-response variables (SSC).
- catigen
Generates a SurveyCTO CATI form from a CAPI form.
- odkmerge
Merges parent variables into ODK repeat-group files.
- arceddataflow
A Stata-based system for survey data flow.
- meaning
Looks up the meaning of a word or phrase from Stata (SSC).
- SurveyCTO plug-ins
Coin flip, conjoint table, slot lottery and dynamic placeholders.
Key publications
- publications
- 50+
- citations
- 957
- h-index
- 16
Citation counts from Google Scholar, October 2026. Full list on Google Scholar and ORCID.
Elsewhere
Profile updated .
Next step