BERKELEY Inspire

As an undergraduate at Harvard College, Jonathan Weigel was fortunate enough to study with — and then later work for — Paul Farmer, a public health luminary whose work in some of the world’s poorest countries brought new awareness to the relationship between social issues and disease. While Weigel shifted away from medicine toward political economy, his own practices reflect those of his mentor: Collaborating with local governments to address their issues, rather than imposing outside ideas upon them, and believing that fragile states lacking capable governments will have a hard time achieving peace and prosperity.

Weigel, an assistant professor of business and public policy at the Haas School of Business, is working in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) today. His research aims to answer a challenging question: How does a fragile state beset by extreme poverty and conflict build its capacity to better serve its citizens? He has been selected to receive the 2025 Philomathia Prize.

The prize is presented annually to an early-career UC Berkeley faculty member who shows great distinction and promise in their field. Established through a generous endowment gift from the Philomathia Foundation, it includes $200,000, which Weigel can use at his discretion. The Philomathia Prize will be presented on Oct. 15, 2025, at Philomathia Day, a public event featuring presentations by leading development and political economists.

The support could not have come at a better time, said Weigel, who has lost federal funding under the current U.S. administration. “It’s going to be transformational as we try to move from securing smaller grants on individual projects to scaling up,” he said. “This large amount will help me be bolder and aim for greater impact. It elevates the agenda.”

Building capacity in a fragile state

Frequent conflict and the long shadow of colonialism make it difficult for fragile states like the DRC to ensure security, settle disputes, and provide basic public infrastructure. “These states desperately need revenue,” said Weigel, “but few citizens trust their governments enough to pay their taxes, catching them in a trap of low revenue and low performance.”

Weigel founded a nonprofit research organization, ODEKA, that now employs 50 Congolese staffers and 40 contractors. It has partnered with a provincial government in the DRC to embed randomized controlled trials in its programs and policies and test new approaches to raising revenue and accountability. In Kananga, for example, a campaign to collect property taxes door-to-door increased compliance by 10 percent, as well as political engagement. Citizens in taxed neighborhoods showed up more at town hall meetings, demanding better public goods such as garbage collection and paved streets.

The DRC government currently lacks information on property values on which to levy a tax rate. To address this, Weigel launched his most ambitious project to date — employing drone imagery, AI-based roof detection, and surveys to record the characteristics of every structure in Kananga in order to assess its nearly 136,000 properties. Building on this progress, the government is currently rolling out a progressive tax system that has the potential, said Weigel, to both collect more revenue and improve the perceived fairness of taxation.

Weigel plans to use the Philomathia Prize to help scale up this approach to property taxation in Kananga and beyond. The immediate challenge is sustaining the reform. “We can initially help with something like printing out tax bills, for example, but then the government in Kananga has to really take ownership over every tiny detail and process,” he said. “Success means putting ourselves out of a job as partners.”

Simultaneously, Kinshasa, a megacity of 17 million, is considering adopting a digital property tax system like Kananga’s. Weigel plans to initiate a pilot study in the wealthiest part of the city to demonstrate its effectiveness in improving equity and eliminating collusion. “If you help the government raise money, and they steal it or spend it wastefully, that’s doing no one any good,” he said. “What I love about this tax system is it builds in transparency and accountability that is necessary for the emergence of a social contract.”

“Professor Weigel has shown perseverance and courage in the face of many obstacles,” said Wilfred Chung, philanthropist and president of the Philomathia Foundation. “His innovative fieldwork combining rigorous methodology with real-world impact is redefining what it means to be a business school researcher.”

“Quite simply, Dr. Weigel is a star. His research provides insights on critical global development challenges, as well as actionable, policy-relevant solutions,” said Jennifer Chatman, dean of the Haas School of Business. “He is also an exemplary citizen of our school and campus community.”

The Philomathia Prize, established in 2021, is open to tenure-track assistant professors and recently tenured associate professors in any field. A committee of tenured Berkeley faculty selects the recipients, who alternate each year between a STEM discipline and a social sciences or humanities discipline. The recipients have been Kwabena Bediako (chemistry, 2024), Jennifer Redfearn (journalism, 2023), and Markita del Carpio Landry (chemical and biomolecular engineering, 2022). The 2026 nomination process will open in October.

Dedicated to bettering humankind through the support of education and research, the Philomathia Foundation has been a generous philanthropic partner with UC Berkeley for more than two decades. It has provided significant gifts to build the East Asian Library and Tien Center for East Asian Studies and to establish the Berkeley Energy and Climate Institute and the Advanced Bioimaging Center. It also supports graduate students in the environmental sciences and a professor and postdoctoral fellows in alternative energy.

Read more about Weigel’s research in an article published in Berkeley Haas magazine.