A piece of advice I would offer relates to writing. Writing is hard. Write something about your research straight away.
 

Hi, my name is David Debenham and I am in my second year of a part-time PhD with The Open University.

I have always been interested in the reasons why people get themselves into personal debt which is unmanageable, placing stress on themselves and their households. My parents rarely took out loans and never owned a credit card and I wondered why others did.

Through my research I hope to discover the reasons why debt happens at household level and characterise the households vulnerable to problematic debt, through traditional routes such as banks and also through unrecorded debt, family or friends. The effects of COVID-19 are not yet fully researched, and this gives me an opportunity to look into the lasting effects of the measures that governments, businesses and individuals took in the recent past, during lockdown and beyond.

I hope to be able to influence policy decisions through my research and identify key areas that financial education could address for future generations. This matters because without policy change and without a financially literate population, problematic debt could grow the way it did up to the Global Financial Crisis, condemning many to hardship and poverty.

I completed my MSc at The Open University. As a student and as an associate lecturer, I have been treated well. I like engaging with a university that is truly open and influential globally.

A piece of advice I would offer relates to writing. Writing is hard. Write something about your research straight away. What does it mean, what do you want to do and why? If you start writing, you start reflecting and refining your focus. At some point someone will ask you about it and it is good to have a sound response.

Studying with the OU has provided me with tools to investigate socio-economic phenomena from a radically empowering perspective.

Hi, my name is Francis Garikayi and I am a second year full-time PhD student in Economics at The Open University.

My PhD is on the political economy of Zimbabwe's (under) development. Zimbabwe is a lower middle-income country in Southern Africa plagued by food poverty and communicable disease epidemics. The country captivated the world when it became the first country to record hyperinflation in the 21st century. The upshot was the issuance of a 100 trillion dollar bill in early 2009. These outcomes have mainly been interpreted as a result of corruption, mismanagement and state failure.

Studying with the OU has provided me with tools to investigate socio-economic phenomena from a radically empowering perspective.

My research is a question and subject I've been fascinated by since I was in school. I want to know what explains the characteristics of development in my home country. Simply saying that corruption and mismanagement has shaped economic development in Zimbabwe leaves a lot of open questions. For this reason, I am trying to understand historical and current economic development in Zimbabwe using a different lens.

There are three broad strands to my research. To begin with, I will put forward a theoretical framework that rejects mainstream conceptions of economic development in Zimbabwe. Secondly, I will make use of input-output analysis to describe the structure and functioning of the Zimbabwean economy. After this, I will relate the functioning and structure of the economy to processes of industrialisation, money and the financial system.

The fundamental question that I am trying to address is such a big one. To be sure, I am under no illusion that I might not answer it in a conclusive way. But it is rekindling a radical political economy agenda which I intend to pursue after finishing my thesis.