Polly Hill (economist) facts for kids

Polly Hill (born June 14, 1914, died August 21, 2005) was a British expert who studied how people live and organize their societies, especially in West Africa. She was also a respected senior member at Clare Hall, Cambridge University.

Polly Hill's Life and Work

Polly Hill came from a very smart family. Her father, A. V. Hill, won a Nobel Prize for his work in science. Her uncle was the famous economist John Maynard Keynes.

She studied Economics at Newnham College, Cambridge University, graduating in 1933. In 1938, she worked for the Fabian Society, a group that studies social issues. She even wrote a book about unemployment in Britain.

Polly then worked for eleven years (1940–1951) as a government employee in London. She was in the statistics department of the Colonial Office, which dealt with Britain's colonies. After that, she worked as a journalist for a short time (1951–1953) for a newspaper called West Africa.

Studying in Ghana

From 1954 to 1965, Polly spent nearly eleven years as a researcher at the University of Ghana. During this time, she wrote her most important book, The Migrant Cocoa-Farmers of Southern Ghana, in 1963. This book showed how clever local business people in Ghana developed a complex system for growing cocoa. This system was so good that the colonial government couldn't even provide it.

She left Ghana in 1965 and moved back to Cambridge. She continued her research there. From 1965 to 1973, she did fieldwork in Northern Nigeria, studying the Hausa people.

Later Studies and Books

In 1967, Polly earned her PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Her PhD was based on her important work about the cocoa farmers.

She later wrote many other influential books. One famous book was Development Economics on Trial (1986). In this book, she looked at how rich countries gave money to developing nations. She argued that this money often helped the countries giving the aid more than the countries receiving it.

In her later years, Polly wrote two books about her own family and the people living in the Fens area of England. She passed away in 2005 at her daughter's home in Isleham, Cambridgeshire. She had three grandchildren: William, Matilda, and Florence Burn.

Honours

• She received an honorary doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in 1996.