Three US-based economists won the 2019 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty” – efforts that have helped millions of children around the world.

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Michael Kremer of Harvard University have often worked together.

Duflo, 46, the youngest person ever and only the second woman to receive the economics prize, said it was “incredibly humbling” to be a Nobel laureate. The first was Elinor Ostrom in 2009.

The French-American said the profession is not always a welcoming one for women.

“Showing that it is possible for a woman to succeed and be recognized for success I hope is going to inspire many, many other women to continue working and many other men to give them the respect that they deserve like every single human being,” Duflo said.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the three economists created new ways to combat poverty by focusing on smaller, more manageable issues like education or child health.

They said Kremer showed the power of that approach in the mid-1990s during field work in Kenya.

The academy said that as a direct result of the three economists’ studies, 5 million Indian children benefited from remedial tutoring in schools.

Through their research center, the Poverty Action Lab, Banerjee, Duflo and others created tools to improve educational outcomes.

“This is huge for us,” Shobhini Mukerji, the South Asia branch’s executive director, said from New Delhi. “India is where the seeds were sown for their research.”

Banerjee’s mother, Nirmala Banerjee, also an economist, told NDTV in India that the prize was unexpected.

“He has been trying to get economics away from the theoretical part, but using theory to understand the world as it is,” she said from her home in Kolkata. “The way it works, the way poverty is, the way people handle poverty.”

Banerjee has advised India’s opposition party, the Congress, ahead of national elections in May about offering financial aid to the poor.

He has also assailed the Modi government about alleged political interference in statistical data and over a program to take cash out of the economy.

While the United Nations estimates that global poverty has been slashed by more than half since 2000, it says one in 10 people in developing regions still live on less than $1.90 a day, according to Reuters. In sub-Saharan Africa, that proportion rises to 42 percent.

Officially known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, the award wasn’t created by the prize founder, but is considered to be part of the Nobel awards.

It was created by Riksbanken, the Swedish central bank, in 1968, and the first winner was selected a year later.

With the glory comes a $918,000 cash award, a gold medal and a diploma.