Author: blum

By Sean Burns

There are places in the world where, if you are born into a tradition of subsistence farming and you are determined to preserve that tradition, you risk being murdered. The resource rich, Urabá region of northwestern Colombia is one such place. The reasons for this extreme danger are many and complicated, and recent UC Berkeley graduate Kaya Allan Sugerman is learning them first hand or, perhaps more precisely, hand-to-hand.

Allan Sugerman is a “human rights accompanier” for a number of marginalized villages in different parts of Colombia, the most well known of which is called La Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó (Peace Community of San José de Apartadó). In 1997, campesinos from several villages declared themselves a Peace Community in an effort to advance their right for political and economic autonomy in a region plagued by violence. The communities face fierce, multi-actor warfare largely fueled through contestation over land that is ideal for drug trafficking routes.  Urabá is adjacent to the border with Panama, and therefore lies at a geographical doorway to the markets of Latin and North America. The Colombian Army, state-affiliated paramilitary groups, and guerilla factions—the best known of which is the FARC—have fought for decades in this area. Civilian causality numbers are horrific. Since 1997, in the small villages of Peace Community alone, there have been 210 killings. The unprecedented 2013 report “Enough Already,” produced by Colombia’s National Center of Historical Memory, puts these numbers in an alarming national context—over 200,000 civilian casualties since 1958, most of these since the 1980s.

To compound this terror, public and private corporations seek profits through extracting the abundant, diverse natural resources of this area and other regions throughout Colombia. Water, mineral deposits, and land for corporate banana farming are at the top of the list.  Corporate quests for these resources have historically resulted in mass displacement of indigenous, afro-descendent and campesino communities—an act referred to by human rights lawyers as “involuntary resettlement.” Against these multiple threats to their survival, the Peace Community, for 18 years now, has committed to a non-violent project of autonomy. From the beginning, they knew they could not walk forward alone.

This is where individuals like 25-year-old Kaya Allan Sugerman come into the picture. Allan Sugerman is a member of the international human rights organization Fellowship of Reconciliation Peace Presence (FOR Peace Presence). Its mission is to provide “physical safety, political visibility and solidarity by accompanying communities and organizations that embrace active nonviolence to defend life, land and dignity.” Very importantly, the organization’s commitment to accompany must begin with an invitation.

In 2001, shortly after two massacres in the region, the Peace Community in Colombia, which numbers around 1,500 residents, requested that FOR Peace Presence consider establishing human rights accompaniers in their villages. Human rights accompaniment is a preventative tactic increasingly used by threatened communities in many parts of the world, to diminish violence by having international volunteers physically present amidst their communities.

The tactic works for a simple yet disconcerting reason. When poor and vulnerable communities are accompanied, or observed, by people from around the world —then the perpetrators of violence are less likely to commit atrocities for fear of retribution. Thus, human accompaniment works through the power of witnessing—a certain kind of witnessing. Its efficacy reminds us that in our world, some lives are worth more than others. Allan Sugerman, a U.S. citizen, and her fellow FOR Peace Presence members provide protection to campesinos, because they physically embody the potential of diplomatic and economic intervention by powerful, outside states. In this respect, as others have explored, the tactic is inextricably bound up with dynamics of nation, race, and class privilege.

Allan Sugerman’s path toward human rights accompaniment runs right through her experiences in the Blum Center’s Global Poverty & Practice minor at UC Berkeley. “I first got interested in indigenous communities struggling to maintain their land during my practice experience for the Minor,” recounts Allan Sugerman. “I traveled to Malaysia as part of a research team with Professor Gurdial Singh Nijar to assist rural communities in their defense of traditional plants and coveted, traditional medical knowledge.” When Allan Sugerman returned from the field and enrolled in her capstone GPP minor course, she was challenged to reflect on what she had learned in Malaysia and how this learning might translate into her future choices after graduation.  A year after getting her diploma, Allan Sugerman was on a plane to Colombia for her first training with FOR Peace Presence.

“GPP taught me that specific injustices are rooted in larger systems of injustice,” says Allan Sugerman. “My biggest reason for signing up for the minor—and doing my work in Malaysia and Colombia—has been my concern for the historic influence of the U.S. government in fostering militarization abroad and fueling conflicts such as that in Colombia, in an effort to advance its own economic interests.”

She adds that the work of accompaniment has enabled her to carry out her commitment both to combating the immediacy of injustice—protecting people’s lives—and to understanding and changing the larger structures that produce and reproduce inequities. That is because human rights accompaniment requires two kinds of work. First, the strategic act of being physically present in the right places at the right time requires enormous amounts of research, planning, and communication. Second, for accompaniment to be successful, all of the relevant actors facing potential violence must be aware of the presence of FOR Peace Presence members. As the social landscape of struggle can often shift, this requires studying who is a threat to the community at any given time and effectively communicating with various kinds of state diplomats to ensure maximum visibility for accompanied communities. Visibility is paramount for accompaniment, and, despite it being an explicit gesture of solidarity, human rights organizations such as FOR Peace Presence must maintain an unwavering commitment to political neutrality. They are present as observers. They bring no material aid and no political opinions.

To carry out these roles, Allan Sugerman splits her time between a variety of rural villages (some coastal, some in mining-intensive areas around Cesar and Magdalena, and some in the North) and the capital city of Bogotá, population 7 million plus.  This rotation enables her to conduct research and carry out vital communication in the capital, and then return to different villages three times a month with fellow accompaniers and partner organizations.

While the work of FOR Peace Presence specifically focuses on accompaniment, the broader vision for nonviolence motivates employees and volunteers to collaborate with other NGOs—some of which explicitly advance social justice advocacy work.  In the fall of 2014, Allan Sugerman helped coordinate an educational speaking tour to multiple U.S. cities—including Berkeley—with partner organization Tierra Digna.  The tour, entitled People, Profits and the Planet: Prospects in the Face of Corporate Supremacy, enabled Tierra Digna human rights lawyer Johana Rocha to build awareness in the U.S. around the extractive industries and large-scale development projects affecting rural Colombian areas such as Urabá. Kaya travelled with the tour as a translator and representative of FOR Peace Presence.

Having worked with FOR Peace Presence for a year and a half, Allan Sugerman has reflected intensely on the meaning and practice of accompaniment.  She emphasizes that the most salient characteristic of her relationship with the people of the Peace Community is “the feeling of mutual respect—treating each other as equals.” She says, “My day-to-day interactions feel like an intercambio, a knowledge exchange.” As Allan Sugerman relays these impressions to me, I am struck by how aligned they are with a current, public conversation on the term “accompaniment” as a promising orientation for carrying out social justice work in variety of contexts.

While FOR Peace Presence and other human rights organizations use the term to reference a specific set of protective tactics, other activists broaden its meaning to different kinds of solidarity work. In 2012, for example, U.S. labor and prisoner rights lawyer Staughton Lynd wrote an impassioned book—part memoir, part treatise—entitled Accompanying: Pathways To Social Justice. His central claim is that accompaniment, with its emphasis on humans collaborating as equals, provides an urgently needed corrective to long prevalent notions of “organizing” in North American social justice traditions. Lynd opens his book with an analysis of Dr. Paul Farmer’s well circulated 2011 commencement address at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government—“Accompaniment as Policy”—wherein Farmer, the world-renowned founder of Partners in Health, describes his understanding of the term. Farmer’s insights stems from decades of observing development projects, some of which have failed miserably, worsening people’s lives through “unintended consequences of social action.”

For Farmer, accompaniment is an inspiring corrective because it demands a certain kind of accountability defined both by its endurance and its humility. “I’ll go with you and support you on your journey wherever it leads,” he says of the practice. “I’ll keep you company and share your fate for a while. And by ‘a while,’ I don’t mean a little while. Accompaniment is much more often about sticking with a task until it’s deemed completed by the person or people being accompanied, rather than by the accompagnateur.” This last line foregrounds how accompaniment, as a mode of comporting oneself in social justice work, compels a specific approach to evaluating the success of our actions: those who seek to help should not serve as the measurer or the measurement tool for what is working.

As I sit in my UC Berkeley office, listening intently over Skype to Kaya Allan Sugerman share her stories from northern Colombia, thinking about their relationship to the ideas of Lynd and Farmer, I am struck by the relevance of accompaniment to the challenge of social justice.

At its most elemental level, the yearning for a more socially just world presents two problems: what and how? What is the particular vision of social justice? How to go about working toward that vision? Answers to these questions dramatically affected world events throughout the 20^th century, and any current effort to advance struggles for social justice should grapple with these complex legacies and sustain these questions. Accompaniment offers a particular way into and a particular way forward for both the what and the how of social justice.

Listening, walking hand-in-hand, these are the practice.

I thank Kaya Allan Sugerman ‘12 for speaking with me; any errors in understanding or analysis are mine alone. The Global Poverty & Practice minor at UC Berkeley creates an educational community for student scholar-activists committed to exploring the difficult ethical and political questions necessary for building social justice in the 21^st century. 

By Tamara Straus

Temina Madon is executive director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), whose mission is to improve lives through innovative research that drives effective policy and development programming. Madon also serves as the managing director of UC Berkeley’s Development Impact Lab, which CEGA and the Blum Center co-administer. She has worked as a science policy advisor for the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health and as a Science and Technology Policy Fellow for the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. She holds a PhD from UC Berkeley in visual neuroscience and a BS in chemical engineering and biomedical engineering from MIT. The Blum Center sat down with Madon to gather her views on impact evaluation, technology for development, and the changing intersections of development economics, engineering, and social science.

Impact evaluation has become extremely important to the field of international development, but many complain that funding is still difficult to come by. What do you think about this disconnect?

Temina Madon: William Savedoff of the Center for Global Development and Ruth Levine from the Hewlett Foundation recently wrote that approximately $130 billion is spent each year in official overseas development assistance, compared to about $50 million for evidence—i.e., for rigorous evaluation of programs. That’s less than one percent. Would any private sector company that is serious about its products spend that little on R&D? If you look at Google, Intel, and the companies that deliver the services we use everyday to enhance productivity, they are spending 15 to 20 percent of their revenue on product development. I’m not saying that government operates in the same way as the private sector, nor should it. But you would think that for the delivery of essential public services that safeguard people’s health, livelihoods, and basic security, more than 1 percent would be spent on product development and evaluation.

What would it take to get the pace of investment in evidence to where it should be?

Temina Madon: I think it would take a wholesale shift in the attitude of governments away from process and consensus, toward performance—toward delivery of services that actually improve people’s health, their security, and their workforce readiness and education. Bureaucrats need to be incentivized to deliver outcomes, not programs.

What do you say to people who don’t understand impact evaluation or the cost of rigorous program evaluation?

Temina Madon: First, some programs are actually harmful, just as some drugs tested in clinical trials prove to be harmful. For example, there are programs that try to put money and empowerment into the hands of women, but sometimes they can drive negative outcomes, related to domestic violence and inter-household conflict. These kinds of programs, while very much intending to empower women, can put them at greater risk, if not implemented appropriately. You want research, evidence, and careful design of services to ensure they are implemented in ways that do no harm.

There are also many programs that have no impact. So there is an imperative to allocate money to high performance programs. We like to say that the public has, in some ways, a relatively unenforceable contract with government. We vote for politicians—essentially entering into a contract with our leaders to deliver services that keep our society functioning. But that contract cannot be enforced on a regular basis, because we vote only once in four to five years. A good government, ideally, is accountable day-to-day for the performance of public services. So it is a breach of contract when elected officials allocate resources to harmful or low-impact programs. If you have limited resources, you are supposed to invest in proven, evidence-based policies or programs. This is how you fulfill your contract with the people. Of course, we need a way to identify the highest performing programs—and that’s where rigorous evaluation is needed.

To what extent can international development efforts in the U.S. be separated from U.S. foreign policy interests?

Temina Madon: I honestly don’t know the answer to this question. But I know that USAID has tried to pivot under the current administration, away from implementing programs that are “business as usual” and more toward knowledge generation. In other words, how do we contribute knowledge that helps governments in poor countries perform more efficiently? Knowledge can be in the form of scientific advances and technologies, evidence that governments can use, and even capacity building. It is a pivot away from providing commodities for consumption, like surplus grain (during famine) or condoms to prevent HIV. We are starting to equip governments and communities to increase their resilience, improve their public service delivery, and adopt new technology. I don’t know if you can ever separate foreign assistance from foreign policy objectives. USAID reports to the Department of State. But under this administration, there has been a movement toward more knowledge sharing, technology transfer, technology development, and investment in product and service design.

Is that the right way to go? Intrinsically, as an American citizen, I prefer that we give the best that our country has to offer. U.S. overseas assistance should not be a channel for dumping surplus. As a citizen, I’d prefer that we contribute our innovation, our knowledge and management skills. We have this rich human capital; I love the idea of helping Americans to do good in the world, by connecting with opportunities to transform economies.

CEGA is among a handful of university centers experimenting with wireless sensors, mobile data, and analytics to evaluate poverty-alleviating programs. Do you do see a time when one or more of these approaches will become primary or replace randomized control trials in impact evaluation?  

Temina Madon: We see these innovations as tools for measurement in impact evaluation. Rigorous evaluations just expose the causal links between programs and outcomes. We’ll always need this approach. But how you measure your outcomes, in large part, determines the cost of an impact evaluation.

Often, evaluations are expensive, because you are doing thousands of pen-and-paper surveys. You may have to hire hundreds of enumerators to carry out two-to-three hour interviews with representative households across multiple villages, districts, and regions. You have to pay fuel and housing costs for the enumerators when they travel. If you’re measuring biometric outcomes, your surveyors need to be well trained. They may even need to be certified health workers; it depends on the tests you’re administering. You may have to pay for the rapid transport of diagnostic tests to a laboratory. This is where the high cost comes from.

If we can shift toward mobile phone surveys and wireless sensors, the costs could drop dramatically. We just need to know that newer methods are as reliable and accurate as door-to-door surveys.

Again, impact evaluations just compare the outcomes—of people, or communities, or markets—in the presence and absence of a program. But they’re also a way to give a voice to poor and vulnerable households, to allow them to express whether or not a program has worked for them. If we capture this input using sensors, mobile technology, satellites—it is still impact evaluation. We’ll still be looking for causal link between the intervention and its impact, but the technologies reduce the cost of gathering the data. They make it easier to understand the lives, outcomes, and aspirations of the people we care about.

Give me an example from either UC Berkeley or another university of where new technologies are effectively helping to evaluate development programs?

Temina Madon: One of the projects supported by the Development Impact Lab (DIL) is trying to expose use of improved cookstoves by women in Ethiopia. The stoves reduce biomass consumption and, with it, health risks from pollution. The question is what kind of educational or marketing interventions could get women to use the stoves. This project started with simple pen-and-paper interviews with women to ask about their stove use—a method that is costly and quite unreliable and biased. If you ask me whether I use your excellent new stove, I’ll probably say, “Yes!”

DIL supported a group of researchers to put temperature sensors on the stoves, in order to gather reliable, high frequency data on stove use. Sensors could lower the cost of evaluation significantly, given the amount of data and the quality of data being captured. The team started to use tablet-based surveys running ODK (Open Data Kit), and then benchmarked their survey data against the sensors, to understand the reliability of each approach. There is an upfront cost for benchmarking a new technology, and you are going to see that with all these emerging measurement technologies.

CEGA is funding another project that is looking at crop yields among smallholder farmers in Kenya and Uganda. Currently, when you send enumerators out to measure crop yields in a region, you take a random strip of a farm plot, cut or harvest the produce in that strip, and then estimate what the rest of the plot will yield. This is incredibly costly. We are trying to do that now with microsatellite data. Very soon, microsatellite operators expect to get optical images, updated daily, of landmass for practically the entire planet. We think we can infer crop yields on very small plots using this high resolution, high frequency data that give time slices throughout the harvest cycle. Crop yields in the context of agriculture are something development economists really care about, because we think they generate increases in income for poor households.

Another new measurement approach is crowdsourcing. Premise is a tech company in San Francisco that CEGA is working with. Premise maintains a network of community members equipped with smartphones, all over the world. The company pushes customized tasks to the smartphone user, such as: identify where there is scarcity in consumable water in your neighborhood; or take a picture of houses that lack connection to the grid within 2 kilometers of your house. Premise gets the images, which are location- and time-stamped, and pays the contributors for every accepted observation. Premise is then able to produce real-time aggregate information. They can create consumer price indexes by capturing, for example, food prices from 60 markets across a district. To spur development, we can then intervene in half of those markets, and see how market prices change. This is an impact evaluation—a randomized trial control trial. But instead of sending enumerators out to measure outcomes, we are doing low-cost data collection using a new technology.

This is why we see the measurement agenda as essential, but also complementary, to surveys. You’re not ever going to want to get rid of surveys wholesale, because even if they introduce bias, you’re gaining beneficiaries’ perceptions. What beneficiaries tell you may not be the actual reflection of their behavior—but you may want to know what they think and say. Also, with satellites and sensors, you may not be able to capture as much information as you would with a survey. So we see these technologies as complementary and as tools that could be embedded within an impact evaluation.

What is the skill set for people going into economic development?

Temina Madon: The bottom line is that very few people have all the skills needed, and this is why we are taking a “team science” approach. We are helping to create a new discipline, development engineering. In this new field, you can’t be an economist working alone. You might need a computer scientist, an electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer, and other social scientists to work with you on the measurement component of your research. There is a fertile territory for measurement advances that engineers can contribute to and get credit for, because real innovation is required to sense physical properties or to observe trends in the field.

There are a few people who have been able to cross disciplines. In fact, this is where we got the idea for the development engineering as a PhD minor. Joshua Blumenstock was a Cal PhD student in computer science who is now an assistant professor at University of Washington. He got his PhD in the Information School, but he also did a master’s in development economics. He took the core econ courses, because he was interested. So he has the engineering insights to build systems for “big data” analytics, but he also understands econometrics and he can tease out the causal linkages between interventions and their impacts. He can leverage new measurement tools, like the call detail records (CDRs) that are generated by mobile network operators. Right now, there is another UC Berkeley student in the I-School, Robert On, who is building this same hybrid skill set.

What other skills might students gain if development engineering were to blossom?

Temina Madon: There are a lot of people with a lot of opinions on this question. But the whole idea for “development engineering” came up in a discussion with Eric Brewer and Ted Miguel. We were saying: Josh Blumenstock has these unique abilities, and can tackle unique problems, because of the methods he has been exposed to. How could we create more students like him, who will know how to work with someone from a different academic tradition? We started thinking that the obvious first step is knowing what you don’t know—understanding enough development and economic theory to know that there is a body of statistical and data collection techniques that you could tap into, through collaboration. That is one piece.

The other piece is knowing how to do fieldwork. Eric Brewer’s concern was that while engineers have become “interventionists” in the ICTD [information and communication technologies for development] community, they don’t understand how to access representative, population-level data to inform their work. They are doing focus groups. But when your technology’s design is informed by a small number of focus groups, the technology is designed for that population. It’s not necessarily scalable, or representative of something that could scale. So we need to teach people how to do field experiments, impact evaluations. We need to teach about the political economy of technology, the regulatory institutions that play a role in scale-up, and how to bundle those into the design of a technology intervention.

The flip side is that for an economist, you need to know the body of technologies that exist. You may not have the modeling or hardware skills to build sensors, deploy a network, and then analyze the data. But you should at least know about the toolkit that is emerging, so that you can think more creatively about measuring outcomes in the field. So again, knowledge about new approaches outside your own discipline is so important.

What do you make of the conversations in the popular press about women in science, both in higher education and industry?

Temina Madon: I have been fortunate to grow up in a household where women are expected to be scientists and engineers. Yet I did not become a faculty member, because I did not have that desire in the discipline in which I was trained: visual neuroscience. A lot of people say women tend to seek work that has more social impact or social relevance. I don’t know if that is true or not. But it is true for me,  personally. It was a big pivot in my career to move toward work that was more applied. I think “development engineering” gives an avenue for women in quantitative sciences and engineering—fields where they tend to be underrepresented—to find social impact in their research. We think development engineering is promising in that regard. But honestly, if you look at economics and engineering, the lack female role models at the level of faculty is a pervasive problem. It is even harder for women in developing countries. A lot of our collaborators in developing countries are male, because those are the people who have risen in their universities. We have very few female research partners in developing countries.

Can you tell me a little more about your upbringing? Did you come from academics?

Temina Madon: I grew up in California. My parents are chemists; my mom ended up going into medicine, but my dad was in the “biotech revolution.” It is funny to me that I ended up working with a bunch of social scientists. CEGA is interdisciplinary, but 40 percent of our affiliates are economists and social scientists. We say we are trying to be a Bell Labs for development. I find it strange that I have migrated toward social sciences, because my family is biased towards science and engineering. My grandfather was an electronics engineer. He is Indian, and worked after Independence on building India’s engineering capacity, bringing radar into the country. He initially started in the military, and then went into the energy sector, but he was constantly pushing tech transfer, seeing the transformation of the country through its adoption of technology and infrastructure. He brought a real focus on technology as a driver of development into our family’s values.

Neuroscience and mental health are among your areas of expertise. Would you talk about your interest in those disciplines?

Temina Madon: My background was in neuroscience and that was an intellectual interest. When I was a grad student, my partner died from suicide—and that, in large ways, pivoted me toward mental health policy. I used my background in neuroscience to understand and explore the biological mechanisms responsible for depression, bipolar disorder, suicidality. I looked at the prevention tools we have. It turns out, there are very few. There is relatively little rigorous public health research on mental illness prevention, or even treatment. There are very few randomized trials. There is a lot of observational work and demonstration projects, but there is very little evaluation of community interventions to prevent suicide, or even innovation in how to measure suicide.

What trends in your field make you most hopeful?

Temina Madon: In his annual letter two years ago, Bill Gates talked about measurement. He said you can’t fix something until you have measured the problem; and you can’t even perceive something as a problem or an opportunity until you’ve measured it. I, too, am excited about the measurement agenda. I feel like so many things in our lives today are instrumented—from the web browsers we use, to our mobile phones, the GPS on our phones, the Fitbits we are wearing, and the sensors in our cars and homes. There is so much being measured, and it has created such a rich data environment. Yet much of the rest of the world is still invisible. There is very little measurement in poor communities. If you can’t record someone’s existence, if you can’t capture their life and death, their aspirations or communities’ needs—then you can’t know how to approach shared challenges with ingenuity, innovation, and intervention.

I feel like there will be a real blossoming in economic and social development with better ability to measure outcomes. But again, benchmarking is going to be important. If you are going to use new kinds of information, measurement, and data for policy intervention or program design, or to monitor and keep governments accountable, there is a lot of work to prove to ourselves that our new measurement tools are as reliable as the current gold standard.

By Tamara Straus

James Bernard is senior director of global strategic partnerships for the education group at Microsoft, where his team builds multilateral partnerships in more than 130 countries. The core focus of these partnerships is ensuring that technology serves as an accelerator of effective school management, innovative teaching practice, and students’ acquisition of 21^st-century skills. The Blum Center talked with Bernard in advance of his two-week fellowship supported by UC Berkeley’s Development Impact Lab.

What have been some of the takeaways from your time at Microsoft bringing technology to developing countries?

James Bernard: One of the key takeaways has been that there is no single answer to this question. There are so many local contexts that are relevant and so many stakeholders, that every situation needs to be approached differently. Nonetheless, I offer three key takeaways:

1. Ensure that the government is included in and feels ownership of all technology decisions. At Microsoft, we see the government as a major stakeholder that needs buy-in and ownership to create long-term sustainable change. But to be successful, the public sector needs the help of many other players, including civil society, the private sector, donors, and other nongovernmental players. In education, many governments make the mistake of thinking that technology—and in particular, the devices they want to give students—will solve all the problems in their education systems. The reality is that technology is only a platform and will never be successful without the right supports, including teacher training, content and curriculum, and assessment of outcomes. Not to mention that the government also needs the necessary buy-in from stakeholders that might be against technology, such as teacher unions or parent-teacher groups. So we work with ministries of education to develop a long-term strategy to bring in the right technologies for the context of that country. We do this through a series of policy-level discussions facilitated by a third party like UNESCO or British Council, but led by the ministry of education, and involving all key stakeholders. This should lead to an ICT [information, communication and technology] strategy before the government goes to tender on devices, and will hopefully ensure that the right choices are made.
2. Ensure that the right technology is being used in the right context and even whether technology is the right solution. Will it create more access or more of a divide between the haves and the have-nots in a community? Will it withstand the rigors or a harsh physical environment? Will people know how to use it? How does it get replaced? Can a mobile solution be used or is a laptop/tablet right?
3. There is tremendous creativity and innovation happening on the ground in many developing countries. Don’t assume that something that worked in the West is going to work in Africa, or something that works in Africa will work in Latin America. Find local solutions to local problems, and local enterprises to solve those problems. M-Pesa would never have worked in the U.S., but it was timed perfectly for Africa. It is a great example of a locally created solution.

How can NGOs be most effective in promoting economic development in poor countries and regions?

James Bernard: NGOs have two things that many multinational, private sector organizations sometimes lack: credibility and reach. In many cases, these organizations have worked for years or decades in developing countries and have deep relationships with local communities and/or governments. They bring a credible, non-biased opinion that the government trusts. By partnering with such organizations, private sector companies—which often want the same outcomes as other stakeholders—can overcome the perception that they are simply vendors to the government. Second, NGOs have reach into local communities that the private sector will never have. For example, in Ghana, a country with a $38 billion GDP, Microsoft has two to three people in the country, covering all segments across the entire country. One of our NGO partners, Plan International, is active in 500+ communities in Ghana alone. 
NGOs may be mission-driven, but ultimately many see the investments of funding and human capital as a way to build a more productive society that will help alleviate poverty.

How can higher educational institutions like UC Berkeley advance international development goals?

James Bernard: Higher education institutions play a critical role, because they can provide research and development in the space that has been lacking in the past, particularly in the area of technology. Most technology companies are optimizing their R&D resources for markets where they see the greatest growth in the near- to mid-term. Unfortunately, this means many companies are focused on technologies that are relevant for the West. (I think, however, that there is great opportunity for market growth in technology is in developing countries, where most technology users are net-new versus in the West, where technology is essentially a renewal business.) NGOs don’t have R&D budgets for the most part—although a few, like PATH, do some R&D, but they are the exception not the norm. So universities can play a critical role in pushing change in development by working with both NGOs and private sector companies. Additionally, universities can provide agnostic research into successful strategies and implementations.

What are the biggest changes you have seen in the intersection of development, education, and technology during your career?

James Bernard: First, I see a greater willingness for different stakeholders to come together to solve some of the big issues facing education: ensuring students have access; driving a greater focus on student learning outcomes; ensuring teachers have time on task; keeping girls in school and out of dangerous situations. Additionally, we are seeing some critical technology trends that increase digital access:

1. The evolution of the User Interface. Touch screens are now almost ubiquitous on most devices. This allows technology to be used in both online and tactile learning environments. Nothing can replace good teaching, but when teachers are supported by interesting content that takes advantage of the UI, magical things can happen. We are seeing many companies now reinventing what it means to serve educational content. For example, one company created an app that allows students to see a forest, drill into an individual tree, then a leaf, then the cell and the molecular structure of the leaf. They can spin the elements around, and can pull in data from other sources. It changes the way we perceive of educational content.
2. The role of the device. Device form factors have changed drastically in the last 10 years. We now have more computing power in a mobile phone than many early mainframe computers had. In addition, the cost of devices has reduced significantly, to the point where it’ll soon be possible to have a high-end device for less than $100 a unit. The danger here is that governments begin to focus on the device rather than supporting it in the right ways. So it’s critical that funds, which would have been used for devices in the past, be used for content, assessment, and teacher training. No matter what, a device cannot replace a teacher, so teachers need to understand how to use devices as a part of their teaching practice.
3. Universal access. It’s continuously getting easier for people to get online, even in some of the more remote areas of the world. More can be done with 3G and 4G wireless connections, and we’re seeing a number of new technologies becoming more ubiquitous, including TV White Spaces, which use unused TV band spectrum (essentially unused channels) to deliver long-range Wi-Fi that can cover up to 100 square kilometers, and does not require line-of-site access. We’re already piloting this technology in a number of countries, and believe that with effective cooperation among wireless providers, regulators, and other players, TV White Spaces can be a game changer in providing last-mile digital access. If we have better access, you can easily imagine kids living in a community without a fulltime teacher being able to learn from a trained teacher elsewhere using Skype.
4. The move to the cloud. With greater access to high-speed connections, comes a greater opportunity for education systems to take advantage of cloud services. This unlocks a number of opportunities—from new ways to finance technology (reducing device costs through services models), to better collection and distribution of data, to providing richer, more individualized content for learners, based on where they are in their learning journey. Many of our partners are working on adaptive learning algorithms that allow teachers to identify where a student is, and the system will provide content based on their level of learning.

What areas are being overlooked in the intersection of development, education, and technology?


James Bernard: As I said earlier, too many education decision-makers still view the device as the answer. And this isn’t just a developing world problem. Look at what happened in LA last year with their iPad rollout. It’s a well-documented failure, because the devices were not well supported. Or the One Laptop Per Child program in Chile or Rwanda. These examples prove that if the devices aren’t supported with teacher training, content, assessment, etc., they will fail in education. In many parts of the world, school or system-wide policy does not account for technology’s role in driving 21^st-century skills or student learning outcomes. A study we did in 2011 in seven countries (including developed and developing countries) showed that teachers who used innovative practice—allowing students to learn inside and outside the classroom, allowing students to learn at their own pace, and using appropriate technology—increased the acquisition of 21^st-century skills that ultimately will make students more employable. But many schools don’t even allow students to use cell phones in class, and are geared more toward teaching methodologies that were relevant 100 years ago.

If you could make one magic technological fix in the world today, what would it be?

James Bernard: Low-cost solar base stations that could tap into the unused wireless spectrum, and regulations that support this kind of access. Access is the key to all other technologies being used effectively, and gives students the power to find the knowledge that we take for granted every day.

James Bernard will be speaking at a Development Impact Lab panel on “Tech Innovation and Partnerships for Education in Africa” on April 10, 2015, 3-5 pm. For more information and to RSVP, click here.

By Tamara Straus

Among the global health reports that keep Daniel Zoughbie up at night is a World Economic Forum and Harvard School of Public Health study, which predicts that over the next two decades the global economy will lose $47 trillion to noncommunicable diseases, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

“Yet a very modest intervention that tries to make small changes in people’s behavior can have an enormous impact in terms of prolonging lives and saving under-resourced communities millions upon millions, even billions, of dollars,” says Zoughbie.

The modest intervention to which Zoughbie refers is a social network for “contagious health” behavior, basically a small group of family or friends who support each other to eat healthy and exercise regularly. Zoughbie has obsessively backed this social network idea since 2005, when he founded Microclinic International, using personal scholarships and startup funds from the BigIdeas@Berkeley competition. The UC Berkeley and Blum Center-seeded nonprofit has since gone on on to affect more 1 million people through the establishment of “microclinics,” community initiatives, and media campaigns across four continents.

The idea of positive peer behavior leading to positive health results may seem obvious, and that’s because it is. Microclinic International’s social network approach is based on old notions of community and self-help, says Zoughbie.

The idea also comes from a personal loss. As a junior in college, Zoughbie reflected on the premature death of his grandmother in the West Bank due to diabetes and had two intertwining epiphanies: 1) his grandmother did not have the public health information she needed to help her manage her disease; and 2) if she had been given basic preventative information and found a supportive network, she would have changed her diet and health regiment and lived much longer.

“She simply was not able to access a basic level of quality healthcare and education,” says Zoughbie, who was born and raised in the Bay Area.

Under the mentorship of UC Berkeley Professor Ananya Roy, an expert in urban studies and international development, Zoughbie began investigating how lower income communities organize themselves from the bottom up in the absence of effective or existent services. He travelled to Palestine and observed that community, not individual or institutional, ties are dominant—and that health behaviors are often social or cultural in nature.

In Palestine, for example, he observed one family with a diabetic father who passed around chocolate when entertaining a guest. Zoughbie remembers the daughter, who had learned about the dangers of diabetes from a Microclinic International program, admonishing her father for reaching for one of the chocolates.

“The daughter told her father that under no circumstances was he to eat that chocolate,” remembers Zoughbie. “In Middle East culture, this is a bit taboo: to tell your father what to eat or not to eat in front of guests. But the daughter cared more about saving her father’s life than causing some societal embarrassment.

“From these and other interactions, I realized that positive health behaviors could be just as contagious as negative health behaviors.”

Zoughbie was named a Strauss Scholar and a Haas Scholar in his junior year. He studied social anthropology at Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship, and completed his doctorate in international relations there as a Weidenfeld Scholar. Yet he was not a traditional student. All the while, he used his university honors and credentials to travel, conduct research, and network on behalf of Microclinic International.

“While I was a Marshall Scholar, I went to South Africa and was on a bus, where I met somebody who introduced me to somebody else,” remembers Zoughbie. “One thing led to another, and I put in an application to the World Diabetes Foundation. We applied for almost $100,000 and, to my great surprise, Microclinic International got it.”

Stephen Shortell, UC Berkeley’s Blue Cross of California Distinguished Professor of Health Policy and Management, remembers Zoughbie as a young man easy to support. “He came up to me at a Blum Center function and asked whether we could meet and talk,” recalls Shortell. “He was attacking a very big problem—diabetes in developing countries—and I could see his concept was both promising and low-cost. I made some introductions.”

Zoughbie, now 30, has spent much of the past decade hustling to scale up his nonprofit. The key ingredient, he explains, has been persistence and endurance, “talking to lots and lots of people, and bluntly saying, ‘Hey, I have this idea, which has been piloted; it’s pretty simple and inexpensive to scale, and could save a lot of lives in under-resourced communities.’”

This kind of persistence led in December 2006 to the formulation of a Microclinic International pilot in Jordan, with support from Queen Rania’s Royal Health Awareness Society, the Jordanian Ministry of Health, and a former British Ambassador to Jordan. With support from A. W. Clausen, a former president of the World Bank and Bank of America, Zoughbie was able to establish Clausen Fellowships, hire really bright people, and take a more quantitative approach to understanding the effectiveness of the organization’s work and refine its model.

Microclinic’s diabetes social network model is based on four key strategies, or “4 Ms”—Meals, Movement, Medication, and Monitoring—and is intended not just to alter dangerous health behaviors but, more importantly, to sustain positive ones in groups of family and friends. As principal investigator for Microclinic International, Zoughbie has initiated several major trials, including a two-year, Jordan-based study published in Lancet Global Health, which found that for most patients, improvements in blood sugar control were sustained for two years after signing up.

Microclinic International also has achieved evidence of impact on the other side of the globe, in Bell County, Kentucky. There, it partnered with the health insurance company Humana to conduct a randomized control trial of 552 participants from five neighborhoods in rural Appalachia, where obesity and diabetes are widespread. Again, clusters of two-to-eight friends and family voluntarily came together to establish and spread healthy norms, such as regularly checking weight and blood sugar, exercising, watching calories, and eating fresh fruits and vegetables.  A 16-month follow up of the cohort, published in a 2015 study in American Heart Association journal Circulation, found that a substantial majority of the TeamUp4Health patients experienced and maintained decreased in weight, waist size, and blood pressure.

“Leveraging the social network and peer influences and social networks for support may be important for fighting obesity,” said Harvard School of Public Health Scientist Eric Ding, who served with Zoughbie as co-lead author of the Circulation study and is director of epidemiology at Microclinic International. “We need to focus on more than the individual obese patient in isolation, and look to family and friend networks and the communities where people live.”

Zoughbie, whose PhD is in international relations—and who also serves as a political science scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (his recent book Indecision Points: George W. Bush and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict was published recently by MIT Press)— views public health as fundamental to regional and international security.

“When a community is falling apart,” he says, “health problems often create a vicious cycle, in which people are poor because they’re unhealthy and they become more unhealthy because they’re poor. This cyclical nature of poor health creates the seeds for social unrest. It creates disaffected young people who don’t see any hope for the future.”

This connection between public health and societal stability is what drives Zoughbie to replicate the Microclinic International model in as many insecure places as possible. Backed by the Centers for Disease Control, Google, the International Diabetes Federation, Humana, Mulago Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Zoughbie’s nonprofit is in expansion mode, working with over 260 people. Currently, the United Nations is partnering with Microclinic International to train 1,000 healthcare workers to reach hundreds of thousands of Middle East refugees through social networks by spreading health behaviors and thwarting preventable diseases and their complications.

“I see our model as helping repair the broken fabric of society,” says Zoughbie. “Groups of people helping each other to get healthier is a first step for broken communities to rebuild a future. There’s an old Arab proverb I like to quote: ‘When there’s health, there’s hope. And when there’s hope, there’s everything.’”

By Sybil Lewis

When Sarvottam Salvi came to UC Berkeley in 2011, he was intent on double majoring in chemical engineering and economics and “interested in making some money.” By his third year at Cal, however, he had crossed chemical engineer off the career list, kept economist on it with an emphasis on development finance, and declared a minor in Global Poverty & Practice.

Born and raised largely in Illinois, Salvi said the year he lived in Pune, India during eighth grade exposed him “to issues of inequality and poverty and remained a backdrop in my mind.”

During his first year at UC Berkeley, he recalls a meeting of the student club Engineers Without Borders. There, Blum Center Professor Khalid Kadir pushed the group to think about the political and cultural implications of implementing engineering projects, causing Salvi to want to learn more.

“Kadir was poking at us to look at the power and cultural dynamics [of engineering projects], and I could tell that my engineering buddies were not really understanding what was going on, which is why I went looking for courses in development and poverty issues.”

Salvi enrolled in Global Poverty & Practice 115 taught by Professor Ananya Roy, which focuses on social and political models to alleviate poverty. Salvi said he found the course intellectually stimulating, but what he really craved was an understanding of the practical side of development work.

That sense came from a 2013 student-run Decal course on the Peace Corps, where he met returned volunteers who shared their experiences working around the world. “The Decal allowed me to relate the personal aspect of development to what I had learnt in GPP 115 and that’s when I made a U-turn,” he said. “I thought to myself—I’m done with consulting and finance. I will focus my economic course load on development.”

Salvi declared a minor in Global Poverty & Practice and during the summer of 2014 traveled to Mumbai, India to intern with Svasti Microfinance, as part of the minor’s “practice experience.”

He said he was initially skeptical about whether microfinance—a financial service that provides small loans to people who lack access to traditional banking—was a successful development tool. In GPP 115, Salvi learned of the failures of microfinance due to predatory lending and rigid repayment structures of some firms. And he was aware that in 2010 more than 200 residents in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India killed themselves after being overwhelmed by microloan debt and pressured by the microfinance firms to repay.

Yet in Mumbai, Salvi saw that Svasti had a strong lending model, granting small loans to people who were financially stable enough to make payments. At Svasti, he was also able to do hands-on work. He used his economics knowledge to build a tool for the company estimating loan affordability for clients—something that is tricky because many potential loan takers work in the “informal” economy, as street food venders and jewelry-makers. Thus their income is harder to track and model by the government or lending agencies like Svasti.

“People in lower socioeconomic brackets also need financial services like everyone else, not charity,” said Salvi. “Microfinance is not just about giving people money, but realizing that sometimes without these loans the opportunities available to people are very limited.”

In modeling people’s varying and unofficial incomes, Salvi said what he found most useful was not the economic and statistical analysis skills he learnt in school, but intuition and on-the-job-training.

He also thought that his Indian language skills and cultural background—his family is from the state of Maharashtra, where Mumbai is located—would spare him some of the challenges that his non-Indian peers faced. But he quickly realized that there was a lot of “cultural weight” in how people perceived and reacted to him. “Whenever I went with the workers from Svasti, they would always introduce me as the ‘Sir from America,’ which was weird because they were older than me and better at the work,” said Salvi.

Conducting surveys and interviews throughout Mumbai’s largest slums, Salvi noted the strong sense of community despite acute levels of poverty. “Money was not related to respect in that setting—people respected each other because of their relationship to each other,” said Salvi. “I was struck by the community aspect, which seemed more powerful than whatever money they did or didn’t have.”

After the two months in India, Salvi said his assumptions about microfinance and his possible role in development work changed drastically. “When I was doing the surveys and talking to people I thought, ‘Oh, I am doing development now,’” said Salvi. But he soon realized his skills are better suited for economic modeling and evaluation.

“I think it is necessary to do fieldwork,” he explained, “but I don’t think that I need to be the one doing it. I think that the best way for me to make an impact in issues of development is to use my education in economics.”

Salvi has taken several courses in impact evaluation at UC Berkeley, such as Professor Edward Miguel’s Economics 172 (Case Studies in Economic Development), and is currently working as a research assistant on a project by Associate Professor Federico Finan, a development economist.

Salvi, who graduates in May, is applying for jobs at organizations that specialize in research related-development in the areas of poverty, health, and financial inclusion.

By Tamara Straus

For the creators of the UC Berkeley course Eat.Think.Design, two things are certain. First, the United States is facing a food and nutrition crisis, with rocketing rates of diabetes, hunger, and health disparity. Second, graduate students today—from fields as different as public health, business, information technology, and engineering—want their education to be more hands-on, more interdisciplinary, and more “impactful” to society at large. In the case of the Eat.Think.Design course, they want to spend class time not just learning about food and nutrition problems, they want to devise actual food and nutrition solutions.

This may sound grand, but for the course’s three instructors— Jaspal Sandhu, a UC Berkeley lecturer in design and innovation; Nap Hosang, a longtime Kaiser Permanente medical doctor and UC Berkeley School of Public Health instructor; and Kristine Madsen, an associate professor in the Joint Medical Program and Public Health Nutrition at Cal’s School of Public Health—there is nothing grand or inappropriate about letting students attempt societal solutions while in school.

“The reason we emphasize experiential learning is because it has proved to be more effective,” says Sandhu, who is also a partner at the Gobee Group, a consulting firm he runs with two other multilingual Fulbright scholars with UC Berkeley roots. Sandhu speaks Punjabi, Spanish, Mongolian, and English, and prior to Gobee worked with the Mongolian Ministry of Health designing mobile health information systems.

Sandhu emphasizes that his students’ backgrounds demand more than lecturing. Among the 25 people enrolled in Eat.Think.Design this spring, many have relevant work experience. At least three have started their own companies, several have worked for big companies like IBM, Deloitte, and Eli Lilly, and most have about five years under their belts working for government agencies or large nonprofits. “To keep the attention of such students,” says Sandhu, “we need to give them actual problems to focus on.”

Working in interdisciplinary teams of three under an instructor, Eat.Think.Design students spend the bulk of the semester on one project, conducting ethnographic and market research, investigating models, and constantly devising and then revising potential solutions. Members of last year’s class, for example, streamlined SNAP federal nutrition benefits payments at San Francisco’s Heart of the City Farmer’s Market, worked with the Kossoye Development Program in Ethiopia on strategies to make home gardening more accessible, and built a pilot program with Partners In Health: Navajo Nation to test a pop-up grocery store in areas that are one hour’s drive from fresh food. Although the project in the Navajo Nation helped COPE to receive a three-year, $3 million REACH grant from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention to pursue healthy eating programs in the vast American Indian territory—Hosang argues that the course is not designed to incubate social innovations per se.

“Our goal is to incubate innovative people—people who can be influencers in the public health sector,” he says. Hosang, who has served as head of the interdisciplinary online MPH degree program for the past 15 years and executive director of the Interdisciplinary MPH degree program since 2010, is not subtle in his criticism of public health teaching. “Most academics are in a silo,” he said, “and their silo has driven them more and more into their specialist thinking.” Yet this specialist thinking, Hosang argues, is running counter to the view that public health is enmeshed in almost every field—from architecture and transportation, to product design and education. “We need to change the way public health professionals approach problems,” said Hosang, “and we need them to be in touch with people from other disciplines to inform their problem-solving processes.”

Hosang and Sandhu started working on their public health course in October 2010, after Hosang read Sandhu’s dissertation on public health design research in rural Mongolia and was impressed by the combination of grassroots and trial-and-error learning. In the spring of 2011, they launched their course, with financial support from the Blum Center for Developing Economies, which seeds interdisciplinary, social impact courses on campus. Madsen joined the course in 2014 when the focus narrowed from designing innovative public health solutions to designing innovative food solutions. In a March 2015 article in the American Journal of Public Health titled “Solutions That Stick: Activating Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration in a Graduate-Level Public Health Innovations Course at the University of California,” the three instructors describe how their approach is part of a much-needed pedagogical shift. They write:

“A Lancet Commission, convened to discuss the education of health professionals in the 21st century, argued that educational transformation is critical to meet the public health problems we face in this century. Specifically, the commission called for a higher level of learning, moving beyond informative learning, which transmits knowledge to create experts, to transformative learning, which transmits leadership attributes to create agents who can successfully implement change.”

Sandhu explained that when he and Hosang came up with the idea for the course, not only was this “change agent” approach novel but no one was applying design thinking or human-centered design approaches at the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. (He describes those approaches as ones that enable teams to systematically develop novel, effective solutions to complex problems.) Yet Sandhu says it is clear there’s a demand for this kind of problem solving.

Sandhu’s proof is the continual over-enrollment in and rave reviews of his course. This year, 60 students applied for 25 spots. And for the past four years, 40 percent of students indicated it was the “best course” they took at UC Berkeley, with the other 40 percent stating it was in the “top 10 percent” and the remained saying it was in the “top 25 percent.”

Christine Hamann, a MBA/MPH candidate who took Eat.Think.Design in 2014, confirmed that “the teaching team is phenomenal—both in terms of the academic leadership and the mentoring of graduate students.” She also confirmed that she and her fellow students want “practical challenges in graduate school,” adding “we are tired of theory.”

Hamann is one of the many students who has brought past work into the classroom. Before grad school, she worked for seven years at Partners In Health, most recently on the nonprofit’s COPE Project in the Navajo Nation. She said the course forced her to look at Navajo Nation residents’ consumer needs around food and nutrition—and to see food less as a supply issue and more of a demand issue. “Traditional public health approaches focus on supply, but that is why you see programs that don’t meet the needs of the community,” she said.

Hamann and the three other graduate students opted not to focus on the best truck routes to bring fresh produce into the 27,000 square mile territory—and instead focused on seeing what citizens there want to consume and what can last in what is a food (and actual) desert. During the summer of 2014, with funding from the Blum Center, Hamann created pop-up grocery stores in Navajo, to determine which food items were most in demand and could help reduce chronic diseases like diabetes, which affects 20 percent of residents. This exploration helped lead to the aforementioned $3 million CDC grant for COPE.

As to why so many Cal students are so focused on food and nutrition, Hamann has this to say: “From a public health perspective, I think we’re seeing the ramifications of the American diet play out in really scary chronic disease indicators.” She also noted that there is a general heightened awareness of food systems—“of where food is coming from, the corporations that own it, and the detrimental effects those relationships can have on both health outcomes and business models.” Third, Hamann said a growing number of students want to see tech innovation applied to less wealthy and less urban populations—“the people,” she said, “who need it.”

Then, there are the galling statistics: Americans throw out an estimated 40 percent of food grown per year. An estimated 50 million Americans do not have access to enough food. As of 2012, about half of all adults—117 million people—have one or more chronic health conditions, such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, obesity, and arthritis. And childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents in the past 30 years.

Sandhu is aware that a course on food innovation is well timed at UC Berkeley. In 2013, UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources, the Goldman School of Public Policy, the Graduate School of Journalism, Berkeley Law, and the School of Public Health joined forces to create the Berkeley Food Institute to improve food systems locally and globally. A year later, UC President Janet Napolitano launched the UC Global Food Initiative—to prompt all 10 campuses, UC’s Division of Agricultural and Natural Resources, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and a consortium of faculty, researchers, and students to address food security, nutrition, and sustainability issues. Even BigIdeas@Berkeley, the annual student innovation prize, has a contest category on food systems innovation.

“Our timing is either well forecasted or extremely lucky,” said Sandhu.

Eat.Think.Design may be a popular course—and may inspire copycats—but both students and instructors are quick to point out that the course cannot serve as a model for every class. “It is difficult to take more than one experiential class per semester,” said Hamann. “The time commitment with fellow students and with our client is just too big.” Amy Regan, who took the course in 2013 and now works with the San Francisco Unified School District’s Future Dining Experience program, agrees that “compromising and agreeing on the best approach among a group takes time.”

For instructors, Professor Madsen estimates the course requires one and a half to two times more time than an average School of Public Health offering, because she, Sandhu, and Hosang each mentor three student groups during and after class time. The three instructors also spend time cultivating their connections to bring in student projects from nonprofits and government agencies. During the class on Feb. 4. 2015, 16 pitches were made by representatives of various organizations, including California Farm to Fork, San Quentin State Prison, and Project Open Hand. “Much more work goes into creating the class because of all the connections to be made,” said Madsen.

And very little is scripted. This gives the course the feeling of a kind of pedagogical startup, exciting but uncertain. Madsen said this atmosphere comes with a distinct disadvantage for professors. “You have to admit you don’t know as much,” she said. “If your identity is wrapped up in being an academic expert, this won’t work; you’ll always default to the more narrow but comfortable path.”

For Sandhu and Hosang, who are adjuncts, there is less face to lose. “I think over the last seven years, since the start of the Great Recession, there’s been a transformative energy happening in higher education,” said Hosang. “It’s coming from the younger generation who see the world has changed and who no longer see college as a ticket to success. That’s where this move toward an interdisciplinary, hands-on approach is coming from.”

By Sybil Lewis

As part of a 10-day program on “Leadership in the Digital Economy,” co-sponsored by the National Democratic Institute, the Institute for Representative Government and the House Democracy Partnership of the U.S. House of Representatives, with support from the U.S. State Department and USAID, 20 members of parliament from 11 countries attended a panel discussion with UC Berkeley researchers at the Blum Center on Feb. 17.

The event was hosted by the Blum Center for Developing Economies in partnership with the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS)—and the focus of the discussion was how technology can be used to promote open government, civic technology, and the development of a digital economy.

Parliamentary members from 11 countries—Columbia, Georgia, Ghana, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Kosovo, Nepal, Peru, Serbia, and Tunisia—met with Blum Center-affiliated faculty and postdoctoral fellows, who are conducting research on the impact of digital technology on civic engagement, corruption, and public service delivery.

“The work being done by Blum Center-affiliated scholars is enriched by interactions with elected government members who can take up new ideas and enact them,” said Sophi Martin, director of partnerships at the Blum Center. “It was truly exciting to have this distinguished delegation here, exchanging ideas and talking with us about the real implications of technology on government and citizens.”

Among the presenters was Jennifer Bussell, assistant professor of Public Policy and Political Science at UC Berkeley. Bussell researches public services in India, Brazil, and South Africa. Her recent book, Corruption and Reform in India, investigated how digital technologies may be used to facilitate citizens’ access to the state and thwart corruption. Bussell is currently working on a Development Impact Lab-sponsored project to examine opportunities for crowd sourcing information on government performance in India.

Isha Ray, associate professor of UC Berkeley’s Energy & Resources group, also presented to the delegation. Ray’s research projects focus on access to water and san­i­ta­tion for the rural and urban poor, and on the role of tech­nol­ogy in improv­ing liveli­hoods. She has been among the faculty leaders of a BigIdeas@Berkeley startup called NextDrop, which uses cell phones and SMS messages to alert people in low-income urban neighborhoods in India when they will receive water. Ray described how in India and other Asian countries, intermittent water supplies greatly inconvenience people, forcing many to wait at home for the taps to start running. The NextDrop team has been training water valve operators in the twin cities of Hubli-Dharwad to send text messages to neighborhoods receiving water. The project is currently rolling out in Bangalore as well.

The third Blum Center scholar to present was Kweku Opoku-Agyemang, a postdoctoral fellow at the Development Impact Lab. Opoku-Agyemang works on the political economy of development—on how both economic and political factors affect social change, with an emphasis on technological innovations. He has been using voice message surveys to understand changes in civic engagement with local governance in Ghana.

In the discussion, members of parliament expressed enthusiasm about the potential cost-effectiveness and ease of using technology to address governance and democratic process, particularly for historically marginalized groups.

Udaya Shumsher Rana, a member of Constituent Assembly for the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, asked how politicians can adjust incentive structures to avoid corruption among bureaucrats in charge of government projects.

“We need to think of how formal and informal structures of government are set up, and figure out how to adjust those structures to produce incentives that encourage better behavior,” Bussell responded.

Ray provided examples from her fieldwork in India, where she studied incentives to the people who operate the water valves. She noted operators are often bribed into changing water paths or leaving water on longer in one neighborhood over another. She said that the valve men themselves come from low-income backgrounds and there may be other incentives besides money to get them to operate the valves fairly.

Johnson Arthur Sakaja, a member of the National Assembly of the Republic of Kenya, asked whether the panelists viewed technology as a tool for government officials or as a means of transforming governance itself.

Opoku-Agyemang responded by way of example. He said the surveys he conducted in rural Ghana were no “silver bullet” for understanding citizen views or for improving governance. “At the end of the day,” he said, “technology tools will only be as useful as the trust communities foster in government”—in other words, citizens who respond via mobiles or other technological means to government projects and measures must feel that their input is translating into real policy change.

Ray added: “In general, I feel that information and technology can empower people, but it won’t always lead to power. Yet keeping knowledge and information from people does lead to powerlessness. So to the extent that I do believe in these technologies, I believe in their ability to widen the stroke of democratic participation, but it cannot guarantee it by any means.”

During its Bay Area tour, the international government delegation also met with elected government officials from San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Vallejo and with technology industry representatives from Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies.

—

Delegation on Leadership in the Digital Economy

Republic of Colombia:
Hon. Angelica Lozano, Member, Congress

Georgia:
Hon. Tinatin Khidasheli, Member, Parliament
Hon. Chiora Taktakishvili, Member, Parliament

Ghana:
Hon. Emmanuel Bedzrah, Member, Parliament
Hon. Ama Pomaa Boateng Andoh, Member, Parliament

Republic of Indonesia:
Hon. Ledia Hanifa, Member, People’s Representative Council
Hon. Diah Pitaloka, Member, People’s Representative Council

Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan:
Hon. Najah AlAzzeh, Member, House of Deputies
Hon. Assaf AlShawabkeh, Member, House of Deputies

Republic of Kenya:
Hon. Jessica Mbalu, Member, National Assembly
Hon. Johnson Arthur Sakaja, Member, National Assembly

Republic of Kosovo:
Hon. Zenun Pajaziti, Member, Assembly
Hon. Donika Kadaj-Bujupi, Member, Assembly

Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal:
Hon. Udaya Shumsher Rana, Member, Constituent Assembly

Republic of Peru:
Hon. Macias Guevara Amasifuen, Member, Congress
Hon. Julia Teves Quispe, Member, Congress

Republic of Serbia:
Hon. Gordana Comic, Member, National Assembly
Hon. Dubravka Filipovski, Member, National Assembly

Republic of Tunisia:
Hon. Sabrine Ghoubantini, Member, Constituent Assembly
Hon. Hayat Omri, Member, Constituent Assembly

By Andrea Guzman

In spring 2013 Ashley Tsai, a UC Berkeley Bioengineering and Material Science major and Global Poverty & Practice minor, enrolled in Public Health 112, which examines health at the individual and community level through multiple factors.  Among the draws to the course were its regular guest speakers, including Dr. Peter Jay Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

Hotez is one of the most influential experts in raising awareness about tropical disease research and control, particularly neglected diseases such as hookworm infection, schistosomiasis, and leishmaniasis—which are among the most common infections of the world’s poorest people.

“He was really passionate and inspiring,” said Tsai. “I decided I wanted to learn more about these diseases.”

After Hotez’s lecture, Tsai searched online for laboratories that conduct neglected tropical disease research and found Kohn Kaen University in Thailand, which welcomed foreign students. The research sparked her interest and the laboratory was fortunately English speaking. Through a GPP minor fellowship, she headed to northern Thailand for the summer of 2014.

Tsai soon learned that much of the laboratory’s research was focused on liver fluke infections, which affect the rural poor in more than 50 countries. “Not a lot of people know about these infections,” said Tsai, “and there is not much research or investment in finding out more.”

The transmission cycle for liver fluke goes from infected humans, to snails through human feces, to fish that share habitats with the infected snails, and finally back to humans, who consume undercooked fish that carry the parasite. Infections may range from asymptomatic to presenting symptoms, such as abdominal pain, fever, jaundice, and gallstones. Perhaps most seriously, Southeast Asian liver fluke, the type Tsai studied, is classified as a carcinogen and strongly implicated in cancer of the bile duct. Tsai’s primary job was to compare the snail proteins and the fluke proteins for further research.

Tsai said she was glad to find that very good research is happening at universities in developing countries. “I realized that it’s important to collaborate instead of [universities in wealthy countries] always taking the lead,” she said. “Local laboratories working with local diseases probably have more insight than labs at places like UC Berkeley, because the former know the culture and customs a lot better.”

She also described how the Kohn Kaen lab took a holistic approach in eradicating diseases. Its efforts involved not just documenting disease transmission but focusing on how to stop transmission by collaborating with other universities and with government agencies and community organizations focused on public education and sanitation.

“This approach showed me that technology and science by themselves are like Band-Aids,” said Tsai. “For real change to happen, it has to come from public policy and the local community.”

Tsai said liver fluke is easily treated with a drug, but that the drug does not prevent infection from occurring again. In one of the areas where she and Kohn Kaen University researchers were studying, the problem largely derived from a cultural component: people ate raw fish. Thus to be successful in eradicating the disease there, researchers had to create an education campaign about the dangers of consuming fish that was not cooked.

Sean Burns, the Blum Center’s director of student programs, said Tsai’s field experience allowed her to engage in the kind of interdisciplinary problem solving that is increasingly valued in the fields of development, public health, and poverty alleviation.

“During her practice experience, Ashley began to see that complex development challenges needs complex solutions,” Burns said. “She and her fellow researchers are envisioning solutions that bring together breakthrough lab science with grounded insights into culture, politics, and social behavior. It’s at this intersection, of what we have begun to call “development engineering,” that we will see important contributions to poverty alleviation in the 21^st century.”

Tsai’s GPP practice experience at Kohn Kaen University has altered her career plans. “The practice experience taught me that I can live very well on much less material possessions, and that important and fulfilling work is being done in many organizations all over the world,” she wrote after the trip. “As a result, I am now strongly considering a career in the academic or nonprofit sector.”

Tsai plans to attend a masters program in chemical biology with a focus on neglected tropical diseases and health issues that affect the global poor.

“The GPP minor made me want to look into a field of global health, and taught me that policy change is very important as well as working with the community itself,” said Tsai. “Being isolated in a lab and working with science itself is no longer enough.”

Anh-Thi Le joined the Blum Center in September 2013 as a program coordinator for the Development Impact Lab after graduating from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Political Science and a Minor in Global Poverty & Practice. As part of an ongoing series with Blum Center faculty, students, and staff, we asked her about her work in poverty action and education.

Q: What compelled you to focus on public service and poverty alleviation?

Anh-Thi Le: I have always been interested in public service, but it wasn’t until I came to UC Berkeley that it became a career choice. Inspired by Professor Robert Reich’s class on income inequality in the United States, I spent my first two years as an undergrad working with domestic-focused nonprofits—advocating for Asian Pacific American issues in Washington, D.C., developing re-entry services for ex-offenders in Philadelphia, and providing cancer education and awareness on campus. While my work experiences varied, the one constant was a curiosity about how to effectively address and alleviate poverty, not just domestically but internationally as well. I found myself wondering: How can policies be more effective and have greater impact in resource-poor communities? How can we build better bridges between policymakers and community members to ensure that policies reflect the needs of a community? These were some of the questions that motivated me to enroll in Global Poverty & Practice 115 class taught by Professor Ananya Roy, who, by the way, never provided neat answers. Her class inspired me to enroll in the Global Poverty & Practice Minor, to continue engaging in discussions about global poverty and inequality.

Q: What is particular or unusual about the Global Poverty & Practice Minor?

Anh-Thi Le: Being part of the minor is extremely challenging and thought provoking. It exposed me to the international development space, which allowed me to align my public service interests with my international political science studies. Perhaps most important, the minor connected me to people who are equally passionate and committed to social justice and from various academic and cultural backgrounds. I met students majoring in business, physics, chemistry, social welfare, sociology, and environmental sciences—students whom I otherwise would not have met. Together, we discussed the ethics and methods of poverty alleviation; we framed our perspectives about development (through power, privilege, and sustainability, to name a few); we challenged each other (and sometimes our professors); and we spent hours yelling, critiquing, and discussing the frustrations that came with participating in three-month practice experiences. The Global Poverty & Practice Minor provided a trans-disciplinary ecosystem that allowed for holistic discussion, learning, and practice of development issues. This approach is what makes it and the Blum Center so unique.

Q: How did you come to work at a Blum Center project?

Anh-Thi Le: When I was in India in June 2012, conducting my GPP practice experience with Nest, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization committed to empowering women through market access and capacity building initiatives, my minor advisor notified me about a student position available with CellScope, a UC Berkeley lab, funded partly by the Blum Center and led by Professor Dan Fletcher, which was focused on turning a cellphone into a mobile microscope for disease diagnosis in low-resource regions. A one-year study of the CellScope device was to be conducted in Vietnam, and Fletcher’s group was looking for a Vietnamese-speaking student assistant to help support the project. Luckily, my parents, who came to the U.S. in 1975 following the Viet Nam war, had put me through six years of Vietnamese language classes in California and I got the job. While I was extremely excited to work on a global health initiative, I also remember feeling nervous about my qualifications. On the one hand, how could a political science student with little background in global health technology work in a bioengineering lab? On the other hand, the opportunity allowed me to align my passion in the social and economic development of South and Southeast Asia, with an interest in learning more about the role of technology in international development. The first few weeks in the lab were certainly challenging. The CellScope integrates standard microscope options with the visual interface and wireless data capabilities of a mobile phone. With its durable construction, battery power, and ability to digitally record and wirelessly transmit test results, CellScope allows for screening of patients in rural health centers that previous lacked the tools to diagnose TB. For someone who has fairly little technical expertise in this area, the support I received from the CellScope team made the learning curve that much easier.

Q: How did you use your Vietnamese language skills for the CellScope project?

Anh-Thi Le: Neil Switz, then a postdoc with the Fletcher Lab and now a faculty member at Evergreen State College, and I conducted weekly Skype calls late at night with Dr. Ha Phan, UCSF’s in-country representative in Vietnam, to troubleshoot any problems with the device. We spent hours replicating, testing, and solving errors when problems arose with the software and hardware, reviewed hundreds of images to conduct quality control, and created countless manuals and instruction guidelines on everything from computer usage to reading sputum slides to support Dr. Ha and the Vietnam National Tuberculosis Program staff. While my Vietnamese skills may have allowed the CellScope team to overcome any language barriers, I must note that Dr. Ha spoke English fluently, had professional public health experience in both Vietnam and the U.S., and ultimately served as a tremendous asset and collaborator for the project.

Q: How did you come to work as a program coordinator at the Development Impact Lab, and what do you do there?

Anh-Thi Le: I began working as a program coordinator for the Blum Center’s Development Impact Lab in September 2013. I had recently graduated from UC Berkeley and knew I wanted to continue working in the global development space. After spending a year with CellScope, I became increasingly interested in the role of technology and university-based innovations in international development. Working for DIL and the Blum Center seemed like a natural fit. In my role as a program coordinator, I support DIL’s student engagement programs and organize various programs, including the DIL Salons, DIL Workshops, and Practitioners in Residence.

By Sybil Lewis

When Karen Andrade, a PhD student in the School of Environmental Science, Policy & Management, came to UC Berkeley in 2009, she was surprised to discover how challenging it was for outside organizations to partner with students and faculty on research projects.

Although local government agencies, like the San Francisco Department of the Environment, where she worked previously, had countless research topics in need of investigation, Andrade saw “there was no formal, institutionalized way for outside organizations to pose their research questions to the university.”

To address what she called this “discrepancy of power,” Andrade and other students applied for and won a BigIdeas@Berkeley award in Spring 2013 to start the UC Berkeley Science Shop, a publicly accessible entity within Cal that connects small nonprofits, local government agencies, small businesses, and other civic organizations with undergraduate and graduate student researchers.

Science Shop is housed in the College of Natural Resources (CNR). Rachel Morello-Frosch, a professor in Environmental Science, Policy & Management, said that’s an ideal place because a commitment to community participatory research already exists. CNR is home to the Cooperative Extension program, where specialists from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, and UC Riverside conduct research and host public outreach activities to help transfer scientific discoveries from the laboratory to the public.

In its first two years, Science Shop has completed research projects with Nature Village, a sustainability group in UC Berkeley’s University Village residencies, and with Salmon Creek Watershed Council in Sonoma County. Science Shop has provided administrative, financial, and project management support to the researchers and free research to the community organizations.

Kareem Hammoud, an undergraduate in the School of Environmental Science, Policy & Management, contacted Andrade after she presented the Nature Village project to his senior thesis class. Nature Village wanted an assessment of the monetary value and sustainability of new shower valves to control and regulate water flow. Hammoud, who planned to write his thesis on the environmental impact of human behavior change, was eager to get involved—and expanded the assessment into a larger social impact project.

From March 2013 to May 2014, he worked with Science Shop and Nature Village to evaluate the effectiveness of education campaigns on sustainability and give feedback on the water saving potential of the valves. Hammoud recruited 100 households in University Village residencies; half received a low-flow valve and the other half did not. In addition to the valves, some households received workshops and handouts on drought, climate change, and water use.

At the end of the one-year project, Hammoud found that those who used the valves experienced savings of 4 percent, compared to households not using the valves—and that the sustainability education increased savings more than 10 percent. Impressed, University Village administrators did more analysis and determined that if they gave each household a shower valve, the residencies would save an estimated $22,500 to $67,600 per year. University Village is currently planning to install more low-flow valves throughout the residencies.

Andrade argues that experiences like Hammoud’s show that Science Shop can challenge students and enable them to interact directly with the people their research is affecting. But this process requires oversight. For that reason, Science Shop assigns graduate student mentors to undergraduate researchers to provide guidance and ensure quality results.

“It is hard to do research for the first time, if you have never done it before,” Andrade said. “Science Shop provides students with as much support as we can, while also giving students ownership over the project and allowing for an empowering research experience.”

Likewise, Science Shop team members have benefitted from guidance and support from the Blum Center for Developing Economies through drop-in advising hours and workshops. Lina Nilsson, innovation director at the Blum Center and Andrade’s mentor, was especially helpful in launching Science Shop by offering expertise in designing and implementing university innovation projects.

In January 2014, the Salmon Creek Watershed Council connected with Science Shop to understand and map out the relationship between the decline and ultimate disappearance of salmon and the residential development along the Sonoma County creek. Daisy Gonzalez, a UC Berkeley senior majoring in Integrative Biology, was doing research for Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, a PhD student in the Energy & Resources Group, who had worked with the Council for his dissertation and connected Gonzalez to Science Shop and the Sonoma nonprofit.

The Council wanted to understand how water use had changed since the 1800s. Gonzalez spent a six months locating maps of Salmon Creek from the Bancroft Library Archives to generate an analysis of how land use affected water usage. Gonzalez noted that the biggest challenge was transforming the Council’s initial concern into a viable research question.

“I had done research on water before,” said Gonzalez, “but the most difficult aspect of this project was getting out of my comfort zone to find and ask for the resources that I needed.”

Noel Bouck, secretary of the Council, said her organization has displayed Gonzalez’s water usage maps at a local farmer’s market, allowing residents to follow their property as far back to the 1800s. “Working with Daisy has been wonderful, and people can’t resist the maps,” said Bouck, who noted the maps have drawn dozens of people to engage with the Council about the correlations among water usage, land development, and salmon depletion.

Another outcome of the project, said Bouck, is that her organization is connected with new researchers and resources. “One of the most beneficial parts of Science Shop was that it got us access to the UC and all their resources,” she said. “We would never have found the maps or had access to them on our own.”

In addition to aiding local organizations and providing hands-on research experiences to students, Science Shop hopes to increase student retention in the science fields. “People know science is beneficial, but when you are doing it and you write all those papers, you wonder if it will ever reach someone and go out to the world,” Andrade said.

For Gonzalez, who now works for an environmental justice nonprofit in her hometown of Salinas Valley, California, the project with the Council reaffirmed her desire to “serve as a resource to a community.”

Science Shop also operates on the idea that community expertise must be tapped and harnessed. The Watershed Council is case in point; community members there had longtime knowledge of water usage and the creek’s salmon population, and some were former research professors themselves. Since the project with Science Shop began, council members have provided the university with water samples from different aquifers, information which might have future use.

Science Shop is currently working on another project with University Village and Andrade has received over 20 research queries—more than enough to keep the rotating voluntary staff of 10 busy. The main challenge now is to secure more funding and staff to implement more projects. Science Shop recently applied for a two-year, $300,000 National Science Foundation grant to allow the organization become institutionalized in the university, eventually expanding beyond the environmental sciences to other disciplines

“Science Shop is extremely beneficial for people in my field and for scientists in general,” said Morello-Frosch, who guided the organization in applying for the NSF grant. “It’s important to collaborate with communities on scientific projects that require community involvement to both collect data and solve problems.”

By Tamara Straus

Laura Stachel never meant to be a social innovator. She never imagined working in developing countries. And if you told her 10 years ago, that she and her husband, Hal Aronson, would come to focus on energy poverty in healthcare—and that they would deliver their 1000^th “Solar Suitcase” to provide electricity to health clinics trying to recover from the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, she would have looked at you with undisguised amusement.

But this, in an overly simplified way, is what has happened to Stachel over the last five years. In 2008, after a back injury ended her career as an obstetrician, she enrolled at University of California, Berkeley, to earn a master’s degree in public health. An invitation to observe the maternity ward at a state hospital in northern Nigeria came from Daniel Perlman, a medical anthropologist at the university’s Bixby Center for Population, Health & Sustainability. Stachel leapt at the chance to connect her expertise in maternal health to her current studies, and headed to Abuja.

At the Nigerian hospital, as she writes in an essay in the 2013 book The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator, “I was immediately struck by the grim conditions. The labor room had four bare metal delivery tables, a limited collection of obstetric instruments, a newborn incubator that hadn’t worked in years, a broken lamp, two newborn scales in poor condition, and little else. There were no mattresses, sheets, bright lights or monitors characteristic of an American hospital. Most striking were the frequent power outages that left the hospital in darkness, creating an immense barrier to care.”

Stachel was deeply disturbed that the hospital’s frequent power outages meant emergency patient care was delayed, disrupted, or just impossible. And suddenly a statistic—that half a million women die each year in childbirth, 99 percent of them in developing countries—was understandable. She described the desperate hospital conditions in an email to her husband. Aronson, who taught solar energy technology in California, decided the sun could provide electricity to the hospital during outages. And when Stachel returned, they embarked on what could become a lifelong journey to provide portable solar energy solutions to places like the state hospital in Zaria, Nigeria.

Stachel credits UC Berkeley and the Blum Center for Developing Economies as among the main forces that enabled her and Aronson to pursue their ideas and then implement them. “This project has always been part of the university,” she said on a typically busy morning of staff, student interns, and masses of email in her Blum Center office. “We’ve been able to tap into the university’s amazing human resources—faculty advisers in the School of Public Health, the School of Engineering, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Haas School of Business, and students from across campus. I would never even have been put into a position to see the problems I saw without having the university context of people doing research in Nigeria and exploring maternal mortality through hospital ethnography.”

The Blum Center has provided crucial support from the beginning. When Stachel returned home from Nigeria in April 2008, Aronson worked with her to sketch a design for a stand-alone solar electric system for the Nigerian hospital’s maternity ward, labor and operating rooms, and lab. The problem was how to pay for it. Stachel noticed that the campus-wide innovation contest Big Ideas @ Berkeley, now run by the Blum Center, was advertising a $12,500 prize for a social good technology. But the deadline was less than two weeks away.

Stachel, Aronson, and two students from the School of Information and the Energy & Resources Group, Melissa Ho and Christain Casillas, applied anyway and won a $1,000 honorable mention, not enough to fund the project. Then, a few hours after the winners were announced, Thomas Kalil, a university technology policy advisor who had created Big Ideas, called. “You should have won,” he said. “How much do you need?” Three weeks later, Kalil secured more funding through the Blum Center, whose mission is to alleviate global poverty through education and innovation.

The first year of We Care Solar, as Stachel dubbed the nonprofit, was devoted to developing the solar electric system for the state hospital in Zaria. To prepare for a trip in which hospital workers would give feedback, Aronson placed demonstration solar equipment in a large suitcase for his wife to carry. After she unpacked the suitcase and got the components to work, not only did the head of hospital give approval for the full installation six months hence—an operating room technician by the name of Aminu Abdullahi, said: “You must leave your suitcase here. This will help us save lives now.” The idea for a portable solar system in a suitcase was born.

When Stachel returned to Nigeria in April 2009 to oversee the larger hospital installation, she saw the fruits of her husband’s work: midwives could perform obstetric procedures throughout the night, doctors and nurses could be summoned quickly through solar-powered walkie-talkies, and patients were no longer turned away for lack of power.

Word spread quickly of We Care Solar’s innovation. After a chance meeting in April 2009 with Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist wrote about Stachel’s successful solar power installation, and the former obstetrician was inundated with requests for similar systems in maternity wards throughout Africa and Asia. “That’s when I realized the need extended far beyond Nigeria,” she said, “and that we needed an intervention that could scale.” Stachel, Aronson, and their small team of volunteers began making portable systems from their Berkeley home, while applying for all manner of fellowships and social innovator contests to make ends meet.

We Care Solar has since won multiple awards from UC Berkeley, including CITRIS’ Big Ideas Award, a Global Social Venture Competition Award, and the Chancellor’s Award for Civic Engagement—as well off-campus recognition from the United Nations Global Citizen Award, the Department of Energy and MIT C3E Award for Advancements in the Developing World, the CBS Jefferson Award for Public Service, and the 2013 CNN Top Ten Heroes Award, among others.  Additional support has come from UC Berkeley’s Development Impact Lab, which is funded by the United States Agency for International Development. USAID’s Administrator Raj Shah has cited Solar Suitcases as a lead example of high-impact university innovation.

“We Care Solar is one of UC Berkeley’s social innovation jewels,” said Maryanne McCormick, executive director of the Blum Center. “It rose out of a student innovation contest at Cal and has been nurtured by a constellation of faculty, staff, students, and programs. It’s been an education to see it grow.”

To date, We Care Solar’s staff of six has equipped off-grid medical clinics with power in 17 African countries, 10 Asian countries, and in Mexico, Nicaragua, and Haiti. Solar Suitcases are being used not just to provide medical and surgical lighting in blackouts, but to power cell phones and essential medical devices. In addition to installations in clinics and hospitals, Solar Suitcases also have been used for emergency and humanitarian relief. When the 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, emergency medical providers contacted We Care Solar and Aronson managed to retrofit the suitcase design for the country’s energy needs. After Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines in 2013, We Care Solar received funding from the MacArthur Foundation to bring in 100 Suitcases for emergency workers and maternal health centers. In 2014, as Ebola swept through Sierra Leone and Liberia, World Health Organization and ministry of health officials reached out to Stachel for additional Solar Suitcases to power Ebola checkpoint centers and health clinics. Eventually, though a partnership with Direct Relief and three in-country NGOs, We Care Solar sent 15 Solar Suitcases to Liberia and 70 Solar Suitcases to Sierra Leone. Among them, was the 1,000^th that We Care Solar manufactured and distributed.

Of course, 1,000 portable solar energy systems is a far cry from the estimated 300,000 that are needed in low-resource clinics and hospitals. On this point, Stachel is not exactly sanguine. “Our goal is to try to get to 5,000 in a few years,” she said, “but I have to say that we had that goal a few years ago. It’s been really humbling to work in foreign countries and to see what’s involved in logistics.”

Stachel continues: “There are people who say, ‘Why aren’t you making 10,000 of these and just sending them out?’ My answer is: We are really sensitive to the fact that the developing world is replete with broken technologies. Training is really important—and training takes time and cultural awareness.”

Stachel used to hand deliver every Solar Suitcase, but that was not scalable. So the nonprofit has been training solar technicians, called “Solar Ambassadors,” to train hospital workers and ministry of health technicians in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Philippines. “The most challenging thing is not the training,” said Stachel, “but sustaining the technology. How do you make sure it will work five years from now? By definition, these government health clinics are terribly under-resourced.” Stachel recounts a recent trip to Malawi, where one clinic lacked paper on which nurses could write patient notes. “How is that clinic going to have batteries, when a replacement is needed in two years or five years?”

Like many nonprofits working in poor countries, We Care Solar is obsessed with identifying best practices. Stachel and her team are using their Blum Center funding—and Stachel’s position there as a staff researcher—to explore models for how to get more Solar Suitcases sustainably into the field. The answer, so far, seems to be partnerships. Over the years, graduate students from the Haas School’s International Business Development Program have helped We Care Solar identify international and nation-based healthcare organizations who can share costs and logistics and whose staff can serve as Solar Ambassadors. Current partners include UNICEF, Save the Children, Pathfinder International, World Health Organization, Stiftung Solarenergie Foundation, and many ministries of health—and, due to these associations, the number of installations has been expanding dramatically.

“Right now, we are trying to show a model of what is possible,” said Stachel. “On the one hand, there is no reason that every health center shouldn’t be electrified. We have the technology. On the other hand, priming the ecosystems to accept, install, and be educated on how to use the technology and have a system of maintenance for it, is crucial. If we get enough funding to scale to 300,000 suitcases, we want an ecosystem in place and we want that ecosystem to work.”

An occasional series with Blum Center affiliated faculty

By Tamara Straus

On January 3, 2014, Edward Miguel, the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics and faculty director of the Center for Effective Global Action at U.C. Berkeley, published an article in Science advocating for increased transparency in social science research. The article built on years of inquiry in which Miguel has focused on African economic development, rigorous evaluation methods to test humanitarian interventions, and the interactions between health, education, environment, and productivity for the poor.

In the Science article, Miguel and his co-authors summarized how researchers can improve the quality, credibility, and impact of their work. They also wrote: “Commentators point to a dysfunctional reward structure in which statistically significant, novel, and theoretically tidy results are published more easily than null, replication, or perplexing results. Social science journals do not mandate adherence to reporting standards or study registration, and few require data sharing.”

Miguel is not following this trend.  Among the research projects he has pursued over the last decade, and with provision of all data, is the untidy link between climate change and human conflict. In an August 2013 Science article, Miguel and co-authors Solomon Hsiang, a climate economist in the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, and Marshall Burke, an environmental economist from Stanford, quantified the influence of higher temperatures on conflict, bringing together the results of 50 previous studies on the topic.

The reaction was divided. Some social scientists commended their analysis, which found “strong causal evidence linking climatic events to human conflict across a range of spatial and temporal scales and across all major regions of the world.” Others argued the link had considerable shortcomings—even though the authors made clear that rarely is climate change the only factor in increased rates of violence.

Criticism and debate have not stop the three scholars from continuing their analysis. In October 2014, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) published their follow-up study “Climate and Conflict,” which added several more studies to the meta-analysis, confirmed previous findings, and detailed a few more, notably that “temperature has the largest average effect by far, with each 1σ [1 standard deviation] increase toward warmer temperatures increasing the frequency of interpersonal conflict by 2.4% and of intergroup conflict by 11.3%” and that “the 2-period cumulative effect of rainfall on intergroup conflict is also substantial (3.5%/σ).” To better understand the new study as well as how it is affecting social science research, the Blum Center asked Professor Miguel the following questions.

Q: What compelled you and your co-authors to undertake the analysis in the first place?

Edward Miguel: I had been working on this issue of extreme climate and violence since 2002/2003. I wrote papers on large-scale civil war and crime, and a few years after, when I was a visiting scholar at Stanford, I joined forces with Marshall Burke. Sol Hsiang was a grad student at Columbia at the time, working on related things. I think it was Marshall and Sol’s idea to aggregate the studies and say what is the common effect.

It took us about a year to complete the Science paper, with the three of us and a bunch of researchers. And then it was another few months of work for the NBER follow up. When there are a lot of data sets floating around, it takes a lot of effort to keep everything straight. You need to standardize everything, normalize everything. The NBER paper is more current—not just because it includes more studies, but because we break things down into current effects and lagged effects, temperature effects and precipitation effects. So we went deeper into what we were already doing.

Q: What were the biggest surprises?

Edward Miguel: I think it’s interesting that the evidence continues to accumulate from different parts of the world, with different types of violence, yet the patterns remain the same. That’s really the point of putting this together. There really is a striking pattern—and not just in the overall effect of extreme climate on violence, but in that temperature effects seem to be stronger than precipitation effects. Even in rich countries like the U.S., we found that when you have higher than normal temperatures, you have more violent crime.

We feel there’s a pretty strong relationship at this point linking climate and conflict, and there’s an increasing among data to support that link. There have been critiques—people saying, “You guys are lumping together lots of types of violence” [such as domestic violence, road rage, assault, murder, and rape for “interpersonal violence” and riots, ethnic violence, land invasions, gang violence, civil war and other forms of political instability, such as coups, for “intergroup conflict”]. We acknowledge that and we understand that. That’s why we make a distinction between crime and interpersonal violence on the one hand versus more large-scale violence on the other. I do think that it’s striking that whether you’re looking at land invasions in Brazil, or civil war in Africa, or Hindu-Muslim riots in India, you get these similar patterns. There is something deeper going on.

Q: Do you expect scholarship on the link between climate and conflict to grow—and, if so, in what discipline?

Edward Miguel: It’s always been an interdisciplinary effort. The first published paper I wrote on this in 2004 in Journal of Political Economy was with two political scientists. Even Sol and Marshall, my coauthors, in addition to their economics training, have a lot of climate science training—so there’s this intersection of different types social scientists in this area.

The scholarship is certainly increasing. And in the year and a half since the Science paper came out, that paper has been cited about 170 times. That’s because people are looking at it as a benchmark in the literature. To do a meta-study, we had to make a lot of the decisions about how to normalize data and standardize climate variables. Now, all these papers are coming out adopting our approach to normalization and standardization. We are having an effect on the development of the literature, because we’ve made it easier for the different studies across disciplines to speak to each other.

Q: What does the standardization involve?

Edward Miguel: It’s pretty simple. We’re looking at the local distribution of climate variation and then standardizing it. We look at the effect of what’s called the “one standard deviation change” in local climate. For example, Northern California’s climate is very different from the climate of the East Coast, which is very different from the climate of tropical Africa. Year-to-year, we actually have much greater temperature variation here in northern California than in West Africa. Yes, they have high temperatures, but year-to-year they don’t have that much variation in temperature. The more northern latitudes have greater temperature variation.

We take that into account and say, a shift of a few degrees Celsius up in Canada is not a big deal; they’re used to it or have adapted to it. But a shift of three degrees Celsius in West Africa—for the crops that they grow, for their economic activity—is a huge effect. So we allow a certain degree Celsius shift to have a big effect in the places where it is significant and a small effect where it isn’t. This is kind of sensible, but no one had said, “Hey, we can combine all this data by making this assumption.”

Q: What are the policy implications of the climate and conflict meta-study?

Edward Miguel: We certainly want policy makers to react. In the 2014 IPPC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] Report, two of the chapters cite the Science paper and the authors frame some of their results around it. So I feel our voice is being heard. In terms of what we want people do, we don’t really have a solution. No one really has the answer, because it’s been so hard to adapt to climate change. But what we want is for policymakers to begin the process of figuring out what the right adaptations are.

It’s striking that even the U.S. is not adapting to changing climate. We’re such a rich country, we’ve got great technology, but year to year, especially in a hot year, agricultural production does fall—and we’ve not been able to deal with it. So what are folks in the Sahel region, in West Africa, supposed to do? They don’t have our resources, our technology, and there’s been very little political will. There’s all this discussion of rich countries creating a massive fund to help poor countries adapt to climate change, but it’s mainly talk. So we don’t have the answer, but we hope the research encourages policymakers to seriously try to find a solution.

By Jordan Kellerstrass

For most of its history, international development has been an inexact science. Validation of development interventions to improve health or economic outcomes was generally unfounded. With the increasing reliance on data to prove that a program is effective, however, the field is entering a new era. Data-centric evidence is becoming the lead arbiter of whether an intervention is renewed or scaled.

The continual improvement of technology and the digitization of vast amounts of survey, sensor, network, and other numeric and textual data are promising more reliable, timely information for development actors. At the same time, the ability to use this data well is hampered by the lack of consistency in tools and methodologies for end-to-end data management. The Mezuri team — which includes researchers from UC Berkeley’s Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) group, University of Washington, University of Michigan, and Portland State University — are addressing this issue. Together, they are building a cloud-based data management platform to support the entire pipeline — from raw data collection to meaningful, actionable results in the form of visualizations and statistics.

Eric Brewer is a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, where he leads the TIER group and is Mezuri’s principal investigator; he is also vice president of infrastructure at Google. To provide a deeper sense of the story behind the development of the Mezuri Data Platform, we asked him the following questions.

1. What inspired the idea for Mezuri?

The economic development space has a checkered history, which has led to more intensive efforts to “prove” that an intervention is effective and thus should be scaled up — these broadly fall under the phrase “measurement and evaluation,” or M&E for short.  This has led to techniques like randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that really aim to meet this bar of proof. However, such an approach implies a significant data management problem: How do you collect, manage, and protect the data you need?

The tools have been rudimentary, typically just laptops and Excel. The consequences are that it is easy to lose data, hard to share it, and even hard to know what exactly was done to the data since you got it.

Making data management and analysis easy and accurate is the essence of Mezuri.

2. How does your background help guide Mezuri development?

A key aspect of Mezuri is leveraging Cloud computing, which is an area of long-time interest for me (and roughly what I do at Google). The Cloud brings reliable data storage with access control, unlimited processing power, and the ability to share not only data but also best practices. Finally, done well, it provides ease of use, as users only need web access to participate and not their own servers or even data centers.

3. Who all is developing Mezuri? How did they come together?

I tried to pull together the best groups I could from around the country to form the whole solution. University of Washington has done a great job with Open Data Kit, which is the basis for the survey aspects of Mezuri. Evan Thomas at Portland State has done the most work with real users (e.g., economists and NGOs) and real data with his SweetSense data collection system; his field experience is particularly valuable.  Colleagues at University of Michigan [Lab11] are experts in novel sensors and high-volume, real-time data collection. Bringing these elements together is not easy, but I love the team we have.

4. Why is this possible now? How is this project part of the story of computer science?

The two big enablers for us are the Cloud for scalable data storage and computing, and the rise of mobile phones, especially smart phones, which enable high-quality surveys and data collection pretty much anywhere in the world. These two together will change not only the practice of “development” but are also one of the greatest shifts not only in computing, but in the history of the world. The impact of phones has already been remarkable, but I think the Cloud will be bigger (unless they are viewed as one transition in the end).

5. What is Docker and what role does it play?

Docker, at its core, is a change in the level of abstraction of Cloud computing. Traditionally, the basic unit of abstraction was the “virtual machine” — it is as though you have a raw server and you need to install an OS and applications, and then maintain the OS. This is a high burden, even for computer scientists. The new abstraction is the “container,” which is a bundle of applications that fit together well and that can be created once and then reused easily by many. The details of the machine and OS matter less, and users can pick containers that have the software they need (and already know how to use).

6. Who will benefit from a system like Mezuri?

The immediate target audience is social scientists and economists that need to manage data well as part of their research. This should lead initially to better data management and later to more aggressive evaluations that include more kinds of data and that mix surveys and sensors well. However, the real goal is to benefit those in developing regions, by making better investment decisions due to better data.

7. How does Mezuri enable or encourage data sharing?

First, just having data safely in the Cloud is a good start — that is the easiest path to sharing, similar in spirit to Dropbox and Google Docs. Because some of this data has important privacy risks, the key to sharing is actually being able to limit the sharing to just those that should have access. We can also share data at different levels of processing and summarization: often we can share the anonymized or aggregated data, but not the raw data. Finally, it is equally important to share the workflows, that is, the template of processing steps necessary to convert raw data into knowledge. Sharing workflows enables formal review of processes, sharing of best practices, and also enables repeatability.

8. What are the short and long term visions for Mezuri?

In the short term, we need to get real users to collect, manage, and analyze data using the system. This will teach us a great deal about what the real requirements are and what we need to do to make the system sufficiently useful in practice. Long term, I hope to see Mezuri emerge as the de facto way to do data management for the social sciences and a key part of better decisions around how to best spend the world’s development money.

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Jordan Kellerstrass is a PhD student in computer science, a researcher in the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) group, and a member of the DIL Idea Team.

By Sybil Lewis

On Dec. 9, Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, UN Undersecretary and Executive Director of UN Women, attended a panel at UC Berkeley’s Blum Center for Developing Economies with leading gender academics to discuss the state of affairs for women and girls around the world.

Titled “Gender for a New Century: Countering Violence and Social Exclusions,” the event served as an opportunity for academics and policymakers to engage in dialogue and marked Mlambo-Ngcuka’s first formal visit to an American university.

“Our knowledge about gender has moved so far in the last 30 years, even though many of the problems remain the same,” said Raka Ray, Professor of Sociology and South and Southeast Asian Studies and an affiliated faculty member of the Blum Center for Developing Economies. “Strangely, there has not been enough sustained conversation between those who produce knowledge about gender and those who create global policies around gender.”

The event was part of a worldwide 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence that started on Nov. 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

Nine distinguished UC Berkeley female faculty members from various departments and centers, ranging from Law to Gender and Women Studies, presented different forms of violence and discrimination against women that reflect the intersectionality and complexity of gender-based problems.

Panelists brought attention to gender problems around the world, including the lack of protection for female migrant workers, the alarmingly high rates of sexual assault against disabled women, and cultural values that normalize violent traditions, such as female genital mutilation. The panel also addressed forms of non-physical violence and discrimination, such as policies that are constructed without recognizing women’s physical needs and others that alienate those that fall outside the gender binary.

“You cannot understand gender in isolation; you also cannot understand class, race, and all the other dimensions of oppression and inequality without understanding how they work in and through one another,” said Gillian Hart, Professor of Geography and Co-Chair of Development Studies. “This is one of the absolutely crucial challenges that we are facing in the world today.”

Mlambo-Ngcuka responded to questions posed by faculty members on the ways that the UN and transnational policy can address violence against women and social exclusion, while also noting challenges and limitations within the UN.

For instance, she shared concerns brought up by Professor of History Tabitha Kanogo about the dangers of universal gender goals and the importance of local variations. “When we want to target differences and not apply a one-size-fits-all solution, we have to allow for differentiation; but there are times when that is not an appropriate stance to take and we have to insist on universality,” said Mlambo-Ngcuka. She mentioned the ways in which national sovereignty arguments are used to avoid implementing human rights legislation. “Nationalism is sometimes a refuge for scoundrels.”

UN Women was created in July 2010 to promote gender equality and the empowerment of women and is the UN’s youngest agency. Thus far, the institution has spearheaded several campaigns, including HeForShe and UNiTE to End Violence Against Women.

Mlambo-Ngcuka and her colleagues’ appearance at UC Berkeley coincided with visits to Silicon Valley technology companies, such as Apple, Mozilla, Twitter, Facebook, and others, to start a dialogue about how technology leaders can promote UN Women’s agenda and goals. Cheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, originated the invitation to Mlambo-Ngcuka, who served as Deputy President of South Africa from 2005 to 2008.

Lopa Banerjee, Chief of UN Women’s Civil Society Section, said the meetings aim to find ways to increase women representation in positions of power and to look at how data can be used to better understand gender issues.

“We need to begin the conversation on how Silicon Valley marginalizes gender,” Banjeree said. “The Internet is mostly defined by the users, but [social media company] owners also have a responsibility to be conscious of the politics of that space.”

Mlambo-Ngcuka identified economic participation, particularly in leadership positions, and violence against women as areas where countries have underperformed the most.

UN Women is preparing for the 59^th session of the Commission on the Status of Women in March and the UN General Assembly in September to discuss post-2015 development goals. Mlambo-Ngcuka stated that UN Women is working to improve and build on goals established in the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Path for Action, whereby member countries agreed to address 12 areas of concern affecting the lives of women and girls.

While the Beijing goals are not perfect, UN Women will not discard them. Rather, the agency seeks to modify the goals, to minimize the risk of them being “chipped” away. “We have relative control of the Beijing goals and need to sell them as a package to the member states,” Mlambo-Ngcuka said.

Mlambo-Ngcuka ended her talk by calling on campuses to mobilize in the fight against gender inequality and violence against women. Specifically, she would like university scholars to provide more research and data about women and girls “to help surmount the trivialization of women’s issues.” Said Mlambo-Ngcuka: “The UN is not going to win the struggle, the people will—and the people will do that in the streets. Therefore, mobilizing is critical and we need students and the intelligentsia to speak much louder.”

Mlambo-Ngcuka called the next 15 years, 2015-2030, a critical period for women’s rights internationally. “I would like us to see this period as the last mile. We are going to intensify the struggle of hundreds of years. We should not, however, see this as an open-ended struggle,” Mlambo-Ngcuka said. “In Portuguese we call it ‘A Luta Continua’ (the struggle continues), but it must end at some point.”

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Full list of panelists:

Aihwa Ong, Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Catherine R. Albiston, Professor of Law and Sociology, University of California, Berkeley; Juana Maria Rodriguez, Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Tabitha Kanogo, Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley; Isha Ray, Associate Professor, Energy and Resources Group and Co-Director of Berkeley Water Center, University of California, Berkeley; Gillian Hart, Professor of Geography and Co-Chair of Development Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Charis Thompson, Chancellor’s Professor and Chair of Gender & Women’s Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Raka Ray, Professor and Chair, Sociology; Professor, South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Marsha Saxton, Research Director, World Institute on Disability; Lecturer, Disability Studies Program at UC Berkeley

By Tamara Straus

In August 2010, while floods from monsoon rains covered a fifth of Pakistan, Syed Imran Ali, an environmental engineering PhD student from University of Guelph, sat in a newly built lecture hall at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras. Ali was in South India to research safe water systems in slums—and, as is typical in academia, a visiting professor had come to give a lecture and graduate students were expected to fill the hall. The lecture, by a Purdue University professor, was on a stochastic method to predict floods, and as Ali sat there, his demeanor, characteristically courteous, attentive, and collegial, started to shift.

“I started to think: I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t think anyone else in this room knows what you’re talking about,” said Ali, now a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley’s Blum Center for Developing Economies. “Moreover, I began to think: I don’t care. Talking about forecasting floods—when there was a flood next door and people were dying in it—was just untenable.”

Ali went back to his office, turned on his computer, and began calling NGOs, government agencies, and UN offices, offering his water and sanitation expertise to help respond to cholera outbreaks in Pakistan displacement camps. He was told he would need to formally apply, and he was told he would need to be interviewed, and he was told he would need to be approved before being sent into the field. He also sowed confusion when he explained his background: a Canadian engineer, of Pakistani origin, working in India, seeking to go to Pakistan, India’s enemy, to help with the flood.

Finally, Ali got hold of the number for the Pakistan headquarters of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF/Doctors Without Borders) and found himself on the phone with the head of mission, an Italian nurse, “who was totally frazzled.” “He asked me,” said Ali, “whether I could work a water treatment unit. I told him I could figure it out. He told me to send him my CV. That evening, I had a phone conversation with MSF in London, and two days later I was flying to Pakistan.”

Ali’s job was to set up a water treatment unit, to supply safe water to one of the many camps for internally displaced persons in Sukkur, Pakistan. Sukkur had been the third largest city of the Sindh province, but by the time Ali arrived in August 2010 the Pakistani army was evacuating 350,000 people from low-lying areas and bringing them to the higher grounds of what would become a refugee city of half million. Ali was told an experienced WASH (water, sanitation, and hygiene) specialist from MSF would supervise his work. But the specialist got held back at another camp with a cholera outbreak, so the 26-year-old had to wing it. “It was sort of like Lego,” said Ali of his experience assembling the MSF equipment entirely from manuals. He worked there for five weeks, treating river water and training local staff to operate the water treatment plant.

Since that time, Ali has grappled with what it means to be a development, or humanitarian, engineer. His dissertation, published in 2012, was not typical of an academic engineer. Instead of focusing only on new techniques for efficient and safe water systems for South Asian slums, he questioned the moral and political complexity of their implementation. Ali advocates a “participatory design” approach, in which technicians like himself collaborate with “users” (in his case, slum residents), to come up with sustainable and contextually appropriate solutions to water and sanitation systems.

The impetus for this has come from deep reading of post-colonial scholars like Frantz Fanon and Paulo Friere. It also has come from the four on-and-off years Ali spent in a slum called Mylai Balaji Nagar on the outskirts of Chennai, India. There, about 10,000 residents continue to rely on highly polluted surface water. Ali first showed up in the ramshackle sprawl of a town in 2009, as part of a University of Guelph-IIT project that he started. His goal was to remove contaminants from the water system, which was drawn from a polluted lake and was pumped, often untreated, into standpipes where it was used for bathing, food preparation, and drinking. But the longer he stayed in Mylai Balaji Nagar, the more Ali learned that the residents’ views of clean water did not necessarily cohere with his or his university colleagues.

Through interviews and focus groups, Ali gleaned a couple of key details: that the residents of Mylai Balaji Nagar had been forcibly moved there in 1995 to make way for the city’s railway expansion; that the government had never consistently supplied adequate or clean water to the area; and that residents considered water and sanitation services to be a government, not a community or individual responsibility. Ali also learned that everything that the community had managed to get in terms of education, health, or housing supports—had come from lobbying the government.

“I came to realize that much of my work in Mylai Balaji Nagar was what University of Toronto Anthropology Professor Tania Li calls ‘rendering technical,’” explained Ali. “Residents viewed the water supply as the responsibility of the government and they demanded water and other rights through collective political mobilization and direct action. Often, they won. But we engineers were focusing on doing water treatment with residents at the household level.

“You see,” continued Ali. “I rendered technical the water supply problem at Mylai Balalji Nagar. And in doing so, I submerged the political economy of water in this community’s history.”

Ali defines rendering technical as stripping a phenomenon of its complex social, political, and economic realities and distilling it to just its technical aspects. He said people in international development do this for two reasons: “One, we are technical experts and see the world through the framework of the solutions we have to offer; and two, it gives us something to do.” Ali adds to this list a third reason: human fallibility, especially in crisis situations.

In September 2012, Ali enlisted for a second humanitarian crisis. He joined an eight-month mission with Doctors Without Borders in South Sudan, where the newly independent country was being overwhelmed with refugees escaping years of violent clashes. Ali’s job was to implement emergency water treatment systems in refugee and transit camps, manage water and sanitation infrastructure and staff in MSF healthcare facilities, and lead camp sanitation building projects. He was witness to a severe health crisis at a camp called Jamam on the Upper Nile state of South Sudan, to which 30,000 people had fled. Jamam, which means “swamp” in Maban, was picked in haste by authorities of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and in part because it was 50 km from the Sudanese border, a UNHCR requirement. The place lived up to its name. When the rainy season hit in May, the camp flooded and diarrheal illnesses and hepatitis E overwhelmed the refugee population.

Ali and his colleagues worked tirelessly. In a Jan. 29, 2013 MSF blog, he wrote: “I’ve stopped thinking. The last time I stopped to think something out, to parse it, to give it a name, was months ago …. [Yet] I had a home that was not this place, this strange, inhospitable, impossible place that is now home for 15,000, 65,000, 115,000 people, who had to run here, and from where it seems like they won’t leave for a long time still, for the abode of war still reigns in their hills.”

Among the reasons that Ali’s brain was functioning only for emergency purposes was because by January he was also working in a nearby refugee camp called Batil, which had become home to 35,000 people and where a third of the camp had no sanitation services. The result was another large hepatitis E outbreak from so many people defecating outside. “There’s a structural problem in the humanitarian system,” said Ali in response to why the story of aid seems often to be one of failure. “There’s no feedback mechanism. No one in the field has the capacity, because they’re always reacting.”

But Ali has found a way to provide feedback. During his time at the Jamam refugee camp, he realized that chlorination levels for camp water systems were based on standards for municipal water systems with sophisticated infrastructure—even though a refugee camp is radically different from a city. To deal with the daily reality of sick and dying people, Ali began to study how free residual chlorine in water behaved in the refugee camp setting. He soon discovered that it was inadequate—that within four to six hours of collection, the chlorine was mostly gone. He set out to correct this oversight.

Ali’s current work at the Blum Center may very well rewrite the UN guidelines for refugee camp water systems, protecting upwards of 50 million people. “This project will help to build the evidential base for safe water practices in humanitarian settings, something which is almost totally lacking at present,” said one of Ali’s mentors, Ed McBean, a professor of engineering at University of Guelph, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Water Supply Security. “The work will improve best practices for safe water supply in emergencies the world over.”

Last summer, in collaboration with UNHCR, Ali collected chlorination level data at the Azraq refugee camp in Jordan, and in 2015 he will do the same at two more sites, in Rwanda and Jordan, and take data during the winter to observe any seasonal effects. By 2016, he expects he will have analyzed and generated a revision document for varying refugee camp conditions, which can feed directly into the UNHCR guidelines. Ali does not expect implementation will be difficult, as his work is “an evidence-driven improvement of existing practices.”

When Ali tells people about his discovery at the Jamam camp, they tend to be shocked. How could humanitarian organizations overlook something so simple as low chlorination levels in water? Isn’t chlorine in water the most well-known and well-used means to ensure water is safe to drink and use? “I think it’s been the accidental engagement of academic researchers like myself in the field that have encouraged this,” said Ali. “People in the field have already always known [about chlorination problems], they just haven’t had the chance to study it and push it.” Ali adds that the negative consequence of higher chlorination levels is poor taste and odor. The balance is to have just enough chlorine to protect the water, but not so much to drive rejection of the water.

When it comes to the larger questions and goals of international development—the eradication of extreme poverty, safe drinking water and sanitation for all, universal access to maternal health—Ali’s humanism and historicism seems to outweigh his optimism. “The 19^th century Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, once remarked, ‘War is the continuation of politics by other means,’” he said. “Since the Marshall Plan and the early years of the Cold War, I believe that development has become the continuation of politics by other means.” Ali does not believe that international development practitioners are doomed to come up with only short-term solutions that avoid the systemic political factors that underlay poverty. But he believes that they, and he, must tread carefully.

“I understand why we’ve moved away from large-scale development,” said Ali. “We’ve been humbled by the technical failures of the 1960s, by the macro level approach. So we’re now looking at development through a micro level. We can’t change the macro conditions of global health, so we create a device that improves healthcare access to rural clinics. In that way, we’re doing a lot of little things and, especially as engineers, we’re doing these things without any real literacy about the sources of the problems.”

Ali hopes a corrective to this problem—to the problem of “rendering technical”—will come through the new field of Development Engineering, which began offering classes to graduate engineering students at UC Berkeley in the fall of 2014. Development Engineering, he argues, is different from traditional engineering in that the field aims to re-center technical issues, like clean water provision, within the larger contexts of political economy and society.

“Introducing non-technical elements in my engineering training was really difficult at first, but I saw it as necessary,” said Ali. “Working with non-engineers was confusing initially, because I didn’t quite understand their language,” he continued, “but there was something important there that I needed to understand. It challenged me to go beyond my own technical lens and learn to see from perspectives of new fields.

“Working across disciplinary divides requires intellectual humility. But it’s given me ideas about how we can use technical solutions to address development challenges in solidarity with the people we aim to help.”