Biography

Kweku Opoku-Agyemang is an economist and computer scientist in Toronto, Canada. He is the founder and CEO of Machine Learning X Doing and Development Economics X. Kweku was recently recognized as a ‘Black African Economist of Influence’ by the University of Toronto Economics Department.

Kweku is an honorary research affiliate with the International Growth Centre, which is co-run by the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford.

Kweku is a former honorary research fellow with the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group and the Center for Effective Global Action, both at UC Berkeley.  Kweku was also a Postdoctoral Associate with Cornell Tech and a Global Poverty and Practice Fellow and faculty lecturer with the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley. An avid believer in monitoring, evaluation and impact mentorship, he has also mentored Big Ideas and other student entrepreneurs; judged a campus business plan competition; and performed other service roles at UC Berkeley. He has also independently presented his research to leading technology companies and organizations.

Kweku does academic research in digital economics, development economics, behavioral economics, econometrics, and other fields. He has given invited talks to audiences at Stanford University, London School of Economics, University of Oxford, the Econometric Society, the American Economic Association, the Canadian Economics Association, the World Bank and others.

Kweku was on the 2021 and 2020 Program Committees for the ACM SIGCAS Computing and Sustainable Societies conferences. He was Chair of the Canadian Development Economics Study Group session on Credit Markets at the Canadian Economics Association Annual Conference in 2012; a co-organizer of the 2016 State of the Science: Science of Scaling Conference on Building Evidence to Advance Anti-Poverty Innovations.

Kweku has previously been a Visiting Scholar with the Berkeley Emergent Space Tensegrities Lab at UC Berkeley,  and an affiliate of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. He is a recipient of an inaugural Development Impact Lab Fellowship and Global Poverty and Practice Fellowship; as well as an MEO Fellowship; the William Thiesenhusen Memorial Award;  the Scott Kloeck-Jensen Fellowship; the Raymond J. Penn Fellowship; the A. Eugene Havens Award;  and others. He previously taught UC Berkeley courses in poverty and development; the ethics of global poverty and program evaluations; and on gender and economic development.

Kweku’s research has been covered by media outlets such as The Economist, The Discovery Channel, The Huffington Post, and many others.