start Date:4/1/2006

Beginning April 2006, Mr. Sakari Saaritsa is working at the ESRF as an intern in a research project on inter-household private income transfers and poverty in Tanzania. He is a doctoral candidate at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy (http://www.iue.it). Finnish by nationality, he graduated Master of Social Sciences from the University of Helsinki in 2001, where he studied economic and social history, economics and social anthropology. His PhD thesis concerns private income transfers between households as informal social security in early 20th century Finland.

His fields of interest include household risk management, social safety nets, social exclusion, and economic and social history from a development perspective. He has published historical articles on the logic of private income transfers, social networks as informal insurance, begging as a social security system, and the methodology of network analysis. He also has experience in research on injecting drug use and HIV in Delhi, India at the NGO “Sharan ­ Society for Service to Urban Poverty”. Sakari Saaritsa can be contacted at sakari.saaritsa@iue.it .