In 2016, as Sarrah Nomanbhoy was starting her MBA at the Haas School of Business, the refugee crisis in Europe was in its second peak year and over a million applicants applied for asylum to the EU.
Nomanbhoy, a native Californian, had been watching the refugee crisis unfold since her undergraduate days at Stanford, where she studied international relations. She understood that the forces behind the crisis were bound to exacerbate the situation and the number of displaced people would only increase. She also began to understand that only 2 percent of refugees have access to voluntary repatriation, resettlement, or local housing solutions; the rest face long-term encampment, urban destitution, or perilous journeys.
At UC Berkeley, Nomanbhoy learned from Law Professor Katerina Linos that many asylum seekers arriving in Europe lack adequate information about how to apply for asylum, particularly how to prepare for the arduous asylum interviews. This motivated her and fellow graduate students Jerry Philip (Haas MBA ’18) and Peter Wasserman (Haas MBA 18) to apply for a Hult Prize focused on the refugee crisis.
The Lemelson Foundation, the world’s leading funder of invention in service of social and economic change, and the Blum Center for Developing Economies are embarking on a yearlong collaboration to enable students participating in the University of California Big Ideas Contest to increase their expertise in developing environmentally responsible inventions and innovations. The initiative exposes students to sustainable practices with the goal of increasing awareness around environmental impact throughout the invention and business model development process–from the materials used to the end of lifecycle implications.
The partnership between The Lemelson Foundation and the Blum Center will enhance the importance of environmental responsibility in the Big Ideas Contest, with special emphasis on the Hardware for Good category. Additionally, there will be an increased focus on engaging students from low-income and underserved backgrounds to participate in the contest.
Since 2006, the Blum Center has hosted the Big Ideas student innovation prize, to provide mentorship, training, and resources for budding social entrepreneurs across the University of California system. Hardware for Good encompasses everything from wearable and assistive technologies and devices to improve agricultural productivity to smart home systems that improve energy efficiency and safety. The 2017-2018 winner in the Hardware for Good category was Innovis Medical, a blood clotting prevention device for civilian and military trauma care that is being tested on cardiac patients at UC Davis Medical with the aim of FDA approval by 2021.
Said Phillip Denny, director of Big Ideas: “Since 2006, over 6,000 students from more than 100 majors have participated in the Big Ideas Contest, raising more than $2.4 million in seed funding that has been invested across 450 ventures. In this age of climate change and resource constraints, we need more students focused on planet-saving big ideas. We are thus immensely grateful to The Lemelson Foundation for making environmental responsibility an explicit element of the competition and for strengthening our outreach to low-income and first-generation college students. Diversity in innovators leads to diversity of innovations.”
With support from The Lemelson Foundation, Big Ideas 2018-2019 activities will include educational programs coupled with outreach to keep environmental responsibility top-of-mind as student inventors and innovators design new devices and ventures. Judging criteria will also be modified to reflect greater emphasis on environmental impact. Among the student education programs will be the “Inventing Green” workshop on October 22 to raise awareness and understanding of environmental responsibility in innovation and entrepreneurship among the University of California’s 240,000 undergraduate and graduate students and participating students from Makerere University in Uganda and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The Lemelson Foundation funding will also support Blum Center practitioners-in-residence who will provide environmentally responsible design expertise to Big Ideas student teams and their projects.
“Students have the passion and drive to make the world better through inventions and entrepreneurship, and the Big Ideas program will better prepare them to ensure the solutions of today don’t become the problems of tomorrow,” said Cindy Cooper, program officer for The Lemelson Foundation. “Thinking holistically about environmental impact early on can also lead to more creative product ideas and put startups on a path to being more competitive and resilient as they grow to scale. We’re excited to see what students come up with.”
Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) is President Clinton’s initiative to engage the next generation of leaders on college campuses around the world. Each year, CGI U hosts a conference where students, youth organizations, and topic experts come together to discuss and develop innovative solutions to pressing global challenges with policy makers, topic experts, philanthropic, and leaders from the public, private, and NGO sectors. Participants attend plenary sessions, workshops, networking events, and a day-long service project. This year CGI U 2018 will take place at the University of Chicago from October 19 to 21.
Each CGI U student must make a “commitment to action”: a specific plan of action that addresses a pressing challenge on campus, in the community, or in a different part of the world. Students can apply within five focus areas: education, environment and climate change, peace and human rights, poverty alleviation, and public health.
This year, 31 UC Berkeley students were accepted to attend CGI U. Their projects are described below.
Summary: Artists in Residents (AiR), is an initiative of the Suitcase Clinic, a weekly student-run organization that has been serving Berkeley’s homeless community for over 30 years. In response to the mental health needs of this population, AiR seeks to provide arts and music programming within clinic spaces while leveraging the Suitcase Clinic’s unique ability to elevate and advocate for unhoused Berkeley residents. The team will partner with local community partners to implement art and music workshops, galleries, and performances. AiR will provide creative outlets for self-expression, promote mental health, and foster self-efficacy and upward mobility. Over one year, AiR will work with 30-50 individuals to provide safe spaces to practice, develop, and showcase their artistic talents. AiR won 1st place in the Art & Social Change category of the 2018 Big Ideas Contest.
Our Campus Kitchen
Students: Lucinda Laurence (Architecture), Sara Tsai (Business), Ibrahim Ramoul (Public Health)
Summary: In the 2018-2019 year, Lucinda Laurence, Sara Tsai, and Ibrahim Ramoul are committed to enact a centralized waste recovery kitchen on UC Berkeley campus. They will establish a closed-loop ecosystem that streams food waste from the dining halls and transforms them into edible meals for students at an accessible sliding-scale price model. The team plans to improve the lives of marginalized students by offering affordable meals while educating more than 35,000 students in food recovery and security. Each semester, they will lead 125 volunteers to make 600 meals daily by transforming 200 pounds of dining hall waste. Their partners include the Berkeley Student Food Collective, Berkeley Food Institute, Copia, Food Pantry, Educational Opportunity Program, University Health Services, and Cal Dining. Our Campus Kitchen won second place in the Food Systems category of the 2018 Big Ideas Contest.
Summary: In 2018, Emily Kearney, Briana Boaz, and Carrie Tribble committed to eradicating sexual harassment/assault from fieldwork in order to create safe spaces off-campus in which everyone could contribute to science effectively. This team will survey the campus community to understand this issue and will use this information to write a code of conduct and create resources to prevent field sexual harassment/assault in partnership with several UC Berkeley campus organizations. These efforts are expected to reach everyone involved in fieldwork and increase the use and awareness of field preparation resources by 50 percent.
Project Air Mask
Students: Anirudh (Rudy) Venguswamy (Economics)
Summary: Rudy Venguswamy has committed to creating an affordable respirator mask to help reduce the number of people who die due to pollution and biomass burning related diseases in India. The team will sustainably produce a waterproof, fashionable, and functional respirator that people can wear while outside or engaged in hazardous activity. Project Air Mask will partner with hospitals to distribute masks first to pregnant women, young children, and at risk populations. The team expects to reduce the cases of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other respiratory infections by 20 percent in 24 months in the states in which this solution is deployed.
Globally, 1.5 billion people depend on small farms, which produce roughly 80 percent of the developing world’s food. Yet smallholder farmers remain some of the world’s most impoverished and food insecure people.
Aukrit Unahalekhaka, a co-founder of Ricult, a 2017 Big Ideas winner, knew this implicitly. He had grown up in a family of farmers in rural Thailand, and had witnessed firsthand his community’s struggles with the land. As a graduate student at MIT, he decided to put his education toward a critical piece of the global hunger challenge: financial inclusion for smallholder farmers.
Together with fellow MIT graduate student Usman Javaid, a native of Pakistan, Unahalekhaka has spent the last three years building a digital platform for smallholder farmers to access credit. The founders have been motivated by the fact that farmers who own less than two hectares are economically stuck; they have no means to invest in their properties or agricultural improvements–and often rely on loan sharks who charge exorbitant interest rates, trapping generations of farmers in cycles of debt and poverty.
Unahalekhaka and Javaid also have understood that access to credit is not the only problem for smallholder farmers. Credit is intertwined with other challenges, such as transportation logistics and precise weather forecasting. They thus designed Ricult to offer an integrated digital platform across the entire value chain, tracking end-to-end data and leveraging learnings to boost agricultural productivity and efficiency for all stakeholders, from farmers to input suppliers and buyers. Ricult is an apt name for their innovation. It underscores the importance of the middle of the agricultural value chain (“ricult” are the middle six letters of the word “agriculture”).
Since March 2017, the agtech startup has been working in Thailand and Pakistan, with plans to expand to neighboring countries. It also recently raised $1.85 million in seed funding, with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as the lead investor. Further, Ricult is collaborating with the Telenor Group’s telecommunications company, DTAC, to expand across Thailand, and has caught the attention of seed investors such as 500 Startups.
Ricult is now taking off, but in the early years developing ideas for an effective platform was a challenge. Another challenge was finding funders. The team spent several years applying to student innovation contests, receiving awards from MIT Ideas and the DOW Sustainability Challenge. The founders turned twice to UC Berkeley’s Big Ideas Contest, to take advantage of its eight months of product development, advising, and mentorship. In 2016, Ricult won third place in the Food Systems category. In 2017, the Ricult team earned second place in the 2017 Scaling Up category.
“The exercise of writing a thorough business plan for the Big Ideas competition proved invaluable,” said Unahalekhaka. “It ensured that everyone on our team was on the same page and helped us think through the key points of running a business. We Skyped with Big Ideas staff and mentors several times and received prompt, detailed feedback that helped us strengthen our business.”
One early idea for the Ricult platform was to harness machine learning and predictive analytics for farmers, input suppliers, food processing companies, and banks alike. To do so, the Ricult team developed local and national partners along the agricultural value chain in Pakistan and Thailand. Services to farmers include: access to agricultural inputs, such as improved seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides that are synchronized with crop cycles and priced at least 30 percent below the market rate; and advanced agronomic analytics and insights, such as soil testing, optimal crop rotation, and microclimate weather analytics. By cutting out unnecessary middlemen and decreasing crop spoilage, Ricult is aiming to transfer cost savings to farmers and increase their profitability.
As important, farmers that work with Ricult are gaining access to formal credit and affordable loans at interest rates at least five times below market rate. Ricult links farmers directly with buyers and guarantees payment within 48 hours, a significant departure from the traditional 60- to 90-day turnaround. Timely compensation allows farmers sufficient time and capital to prepare for the next planting season without being trapped in debt to middlemen.
The model, driven by data analytics technology, has increased farmer productivity by 50 percent, according to Ricult reporting. The company also is selling its land data to banks, said Unahalekhaka: “It functions as a form of collateral, so that farmers can finally access formal loans. Basically, we are solving two problems in one.”
Ricult is one of a growing number of social enterprises in developing countries reaping the benefits of technology. While computational advancements have numerous applications for sustainable development, leveraging machine learning to boost agricultural productivity is among the most promising. Investments in agriculture are widely viewed as the greatest weapon against global hunger and poverty; and growth in the agriculture sector has proven to be two to four times more effective in raising income among the poorest compared to other sectors.
“We are a double bottom line company,” said Unahalekhaka. “We want to prove that you can operate a sustainable business, while also contributing to the social good. This model is rare in Southeast Asia, but it’s proven an attractive idea to Thai investors who are keen to give back to the rural communities they grew up in.”
How do we create enduring prosperity rather than address just the symptoms of poverty?
This is a question that the Chandler Foundation (formerly known as the Cassia Foundation) has been grappling with over the years. On September 5, Leslie Lang Tsai, who serves as the assistant vice president and general counsel of the foundation, spoke at the Blum Center about the challenges of effective philanthropy and the road the Chandler Foundation has taken to achieve it.
As she addressed the packed room, Tsai, who earned a B.A. in Rhetoric and a B.S. in Business Administration from UC Berkeley, noted there are now more opportunities for Cal students to focus on poverty alleviation and social impact. When she graduated in May 2006, the Blum Center was just about to launch itsGlobal Poverty & Practice minor and theBig Ideas student innovation contest. The landscape of poverty alleviation, particularly on the UC Berkeley campus, was shifting toward ideas about how to understand, build, and maintain effective programs, using a mix of history, social science, and technological innovation.
Tsai started her talk with a thought experiment, asking the audience of largely undergraduate and graduate students: If you had one billion dollars, how would you use it to eliminate poverty and create inclusive prosperity?
Answers from the audience ranged from unconditional cash transfers to maternal health investments to comprehensive education programs, allowing Tsai to introduce the audience to the Chandler Foundation’s method for determining how to invest in effective organizations in the field. She recounted that Chandler Foundation Founder and Chairman Richard F. Chandler, who started his philanthropy in 1997, underwent “four seasons” of giving before deciding to apply a “Business House Investment Strategy” based on John D. Rockefeller’s idea that giving is investing.
Richard Chandler and his brother, Christopher Chandler, both successful investors, believed, per Andrew Carnegie’s maxim, “It is more difficult to give money away intelligently than to earn it in the first place.” Their first philanthropic venture, Geneva Global, became the first “philanthropic investment bank,” advising the donor community with the same level of advice they’d expect if they were making an investment.
In subsequent years, Richard Chandler focused on operating social enterprises as well as supporting social justice leaders before he ultimately created the Chandler Foundation. Tsai said its grant-making program is based on three lessons learned from Richard Chandler’s prior social impact ventures: 1) address the root causes of poverty, not the symptoms; 2) “stay in our lane” as investors; and 3) have measurable impact and return on investment.
Tsai shared that the foundation’s model is to work collaboratively through partnerships. The Chandler Foundation is a founding donor of theCo-Impact collaborative, along with the Bill & Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, which aims to address global poverty through systems change solutions. The foundation’s approach also places a significant emphasis on encouraging all those involved to hew to the “values at the heart of property: humility, accountability, and integrity.”
Near the end of the program, a student from the Global Poverty & Practice minor asked Tsai how best to pursue a career in poverty alleviation. Tsai, who has worked in corporate law at Sullivan & Cromwell and in development at Microclinic International and the World Bank after internships at the United Nations, the African Development Bank, the Supreme Court of Rwanda, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone, shared that a typical career path in the social sector is not a straight line. She advised students to gain expertise and marketable skills in technical areas such as law, engineering, and business, or specific sector expertise in health or urban planning–and to not necessarily focus on how the nonprofit industry works.
Ultimately, she advised, “Develop marketable skills while following your passion and purpose.”
The video of Leslie Lang Tsai’s presentation about the Chandler Foundation can be viewed here.
College graduates with interdisciplinary and hands-on skills are in demand in today’s job market. Because they have exposure to more than one discipline and curiosity about the interplay of fields, these graduates are being positioned as necessary to solve societal challenges–from natural disasters and climate change to automation-induced unemployment and epidemics. This shift in academic training is a response to a growing recognition that social, governmental, and business challenges require the collaboration of people with educational training in engineering, law, business, physical science, medicine, agriculture, economics, urban planning, humanities, and computer science–and, most important, the ability to work together interdisciplinarily.
Yet offering curricula that aims to develop students’ interdisciplinary and project-based learning acumen is a challenge for many institutions of higher education. While there is substantial evidence to suggest this educational approach ought to be prioritized, we know little about academic programs that do prioritize education which prepares students to understand and engage with complex real-world problems.
The Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley has begun to address this research gap by examining curricula that converges these two pedagogical approaches. The Blum Center is one of a number of academic programs across the country [see chart below] that offers hands-on learning experiences, which aim to help students understand their future roles outside the university. The center also facilitates interdisciplinary collaborations among students, researchers, and faculty to solve grand challenges in water, energy, education, healthcare, and wireless communications, among other areas.
The Blum Center is home to Development Engineering, an interdisciplinary field at UC Berkeley created in 2014 that integrates engineering, economics, business, natural resource development, and social sciences to create,implement, and evaluate technologies that address the needs of people living in poverty. Development Engineering’s core class, DevEng 200, is organized around three thematic modules: 1) understanding the problem, context, and needs of a community receiving the intervention; 2) creating effective prototype technologies to social problems; and 3) field testing and assessing the impact of these technologies on the receiving communities.
While the prototypes developed in courses like this one foster interdisciplinary understanding, it is still unclear how they cultivate intellectual strengths from one student in, say, mechanical engineering to another student in, say, public health. In other words, how is the sociological understanding of an engineering student or the design/evaluation skill of a public health student cross-cultivated in this course? How do students push themselves to learn skills that lay outside their expertise under the pressure of academic deadlines? And how do faculty assess aptitude of students in these interdisciplinary skills? The Blum Center is working to understand these questions as well as others, as it strives to provide project-based education that is rigorous not just in process, but also in its interdisciplinary content.
Research about project-based learning has mostly concentrated on K-12 education, and little exists on interdisciplinary project-based learning.Thus in our initial stage of inquiry, the Blum Center has reached out to over a dozen U.S. colleges and universities with academic programs similar to the Development Engineering graduate emphasis, to better understand the broader landscape of interdisciplinary project-based learning in higher education. We administered a short survey, and from the responses received have identified several areas in interdisciplinary project-based learning curricula that merit further investigation. They include:
The experience of co-teaching, specifically between engineering and social science faculty, to better understand how co-teachers encourage interdisciplinarity among students from different majors.
The need to identify best practices among faculty who have taught in this space, with complementary input from the participating students about their perceptions of these approaches.
An assessment of the opportunities and challenges involved in interdisciplinary project-based learning, according to faculty and students. Because interdisciplinary project-based learning is not the norm, it is crucial to understand what faculty and students see as the incentive for engaging in this type of learning and what are the challenges in offering it.
Specifically, project-based learning has been credited for appealing to students’ motivations, strengthening their ability to problem-solve, refining their conceptual knowledge, and fortifying their sense of agency. Interdisciplinarity is recognized as fundamental for preparing students for democratic participation and is a growing imperative for U.S. colleges and universities at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
In line with what the literature suggests, the Blum Center sees promise in project-based learning, particularly when taught with an interdisciplinary approach. In the coming months, we will share a report that aims to deepen our understanding and ability to provide meaningful and effective education that not only benefits students, but also enterprises and communities around the world in need of support.
Today, access to water, energy, health care, and financial services remain the greatest challenges to alleviation of extreme poverty, which affects nearly half the world’s population, more than 3 billion people. United Nations officials designed the 2000 Millennial Development Goals and the successor Sustainable Development Goals of 2015 to mobilize resources against the massive challenges. As such, the UN blueprints identify targets for progress in the four crucial areas of water, energy, health care, and wireless, along with the intertwining challenges of hunger, education, global warming, gender equity, environment, and social justice.
In many ways, the Millennial/Sustainable Development Goals are the most pressing problems of development. They are the challenges that must be of actionable focus for years to come. They are the wicked problems, as UC Berkeley Professor Horst Rittel coined them in 1973, “whose social complexity means that it has no determinable stopping point.”
Yet there are new and emerging technologies in our midst that are changing the 40-year dialogue about development interventions and disrupting the very idea of how intertwining problems can be “fixed.” These technologies are responsible for the many digital transformations that are revolutionizing the global economy. From banking and transportation to agriculture and health care, a multi-trillion information technology industry is in motion that is changing how human beings move, work, live, and think. This Information Age, this Third Industrial Revolution is leading over the next decade to an economic system in which more than 70 billion Internet of Things (IoT) sensors will be installed across all sectors to provide unprecedented volumes of data.
Of course, data is not water, energy, health care, or wireless communications access. Yet data can be inexpensively stored and processed, enabling the utilization of computer-intensive machine-learning algorithms that—if correctly directed—can bring down the cost of access to necessary goods and services. In addition, although artificial intelligence is still in its infancy, it is poised to make advances that will affect the development sector as much as the hospitality sector. Indeed, the trifecta of IoT, AI, and cloud computing offers a vision of digital transformation that will alter business models, services, and how every single person on the planet lives.
How might these digital transformations affect the poorest of the poor? How might they improve quality of life and access to goods and services? We at the Blum Center are focusing on how the next 10 years of digital transformation can be harnessed to provide new and sustainable solutions for extreme poverty alleviation. Here are some examples of digital transformations that we have invested in and tested to scale at the Center:
In Energy Access:
REPP Efforts to electrify rural communities in developing countries have been plagued by energy theft, unaffordable connection costs, intermittent supply, and poor maintenance. Despite ambitions of governments and donors to invest in rural electrification, decisions about how to extend electricity access to almost 1 billion people worldwide are being made in the absence of rigorous evidence. The Rural Electric Power Project (REPP) originally sought to address this problem by incorporating new technology, such as village-scale clean energy microgrids, as well as sustainable financing and distribution mechanisms to better serve the rural poor. REPP has been utilizing novel data collection and analysis tools to inform the redesign and refinement of the technology and rigorously measure impacts in the field. Researchers from the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) group, the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), and the Energy Institute at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business have been working with local government and industry partners to generate real-time user data (using “smart” meters) and to collect comprehensive household survey data before and after electricity deployment. Currently, in a partnership with Kenya’s Rural Electrification Authority, the researchers are studying the demand for and impacts of electrification in a large-scale, randomized controlled trial. By offering subsidies of varying amounts to “under grid” households—those located in close proximity to the national grid—the team is measuring people’s willingness to pay for power, and tracking what happens after they connect.
In Health Care Access:
CellScope. In developing regions, where health care infrastructure is limited, there is an urgent need for greater access to reliable diagnostic testing, particularly for infectious diseases. The objective of CellScope, invented by Blum Center Chief Technologist and Bioengineering Professor Dan Fletcher and his lab members, is to establish mobile digital microscopy as a platform for disease diagnosis that can be used by non-expert health workers to in remote settings. The mobile phone-based, easy-to-use platform can rapidly capture images blood, sputum, or other patient samples and wirelessly transmit the data to clinical centers, allowing the patient to be evaluated and treated at the point of care thanks to algorithms running on the phones, with data uploaded wirelessly (when connectivity is available) for epidemiological purposes and quality control monitoring. By using existing communication technology and infrastructure, CellScope moves a major step forward in affordably and innovatively taking clinical microscopy out of specialized laboratories and into field settings for disease screening, diagnoses, and treatment.
In Wireless Access:
Community Cellular Network. Today over one billion people worldwide live beyond the reach of cellular networks. Many live in sparsely populated rural regions, with weak power infrastructure—making it prohibitively expensive for most telecommunication companies to invest. Living outside the network means lack of access to important services like emergency communications, market price information, and job opportunities. To address this challenge, Computer Science Professor Eric Brewer and his lab members, developed the Community Cellular Network (CCN). The CCN is a complete “network in a box,” enabling remote communities to both own and operate their own cellular systems. Designed to be deployed by people with limited technical skills, CNN, which became Endaga under the leadership of Kurt Heimerl, costs less than one tenth the price of traditional cellular equipment, runs solely on solar or micro-hydro power, uses less than 50W average power draw, and can provide kilometers of coverage to rural communities. In 2015, Endaga joined forces with Facebook to scale Internet access to rural communities.
Many who follow these transformations in development are concerned about digital ethics, privacy, and fairness. We need to understand how AI (primarily machine learning and cloud computing) is being used to understand poverty and economic development in urbanization, population density, traffic demand, housing, crop yields, and food security, among other topics.
Questions of particular relevance to development include: Is it fair to be denied a program because the people you talk to on your cell phone make you look less creditworthy or less in need of a service? What rights do people have to privacy in an environment where satellites are photographing their homes, phones are tracking their locations and communications, and their moods are being analyzed on social media? And how much access to this type of data should development researchers have?
The fact is (per the economic concept of competitive equilibrium) if you give up more of your data, you may get lower prices. At the same time (per the Nash theory in economics) decisions about giving up data for individuals can sometimes be terrible for groups, causing users who have high privacy settings to “free-ride” at the expense of those with low privacy settings. Thus, if we want to optimize the utility of the common good around data sharing and AI in development, we may well need to institute societal side payments—means to induce recipients to take part in the transaction that are legitimate and corruption-free, and redress underinvestment in the common good.
This will take as much analysis, debate, and social justice action in development as in every other aspect of digital transformations. It is one of the Blum Center’s stakes in the ground for the 2018-2018 academic year and the years ahead at UC Berkeley.
Shankar Sastry is the Faculty Director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Bioengineering, and Mechanical Engineering.
What does it take to help hard-to-employ people in the Bay Area find steady, decently paying jobs? According to Veronica Barron Villegas ’18, a Global Poverty & Practice graduate who works at The Bread Project, it requires receptive employers, well trained employees, and lots of follow up.
Founded in 2000 by Lucie Buchbinder, a homeless advocate and Holocaust survivor, and Susan Phillips, a social worker involved in affordable housing, The Bread Project is known within employment development circles for its model of targeted persistence, which includes a rigorous bakery training program, extensive workplace readiness coaching, on-the-job experience, employer outreach for job placement, and long-term follow-up support. Eighteen years ago, Buchbinder and Phillips acted on a hunch. They knew that the baking industry paid above minimum wage and offered a career ladder. With this in mind, they approached Michael Suas of the San Francisco Baking Institute, who agreed to train their low-income clients and provided space and equipment for classes at cost.
Since that time, the Berkeley nonprofit has trained 1,800 individuals for the baking sector through dozens of partnerships with Bay Area chefs like Mark Chacon, agencies like the City of Berkeley Office of Economic Development, and employers such as Whole Foods and Semifreddis. Trainings are long by comparative standards: three to four weeks. And follow-up services are beyond the standard: 15 months, which include six rounds of job search assistance and career counseling.
The results for a small nonprofit are extraordinary—averaging an employment rate of 83 percent, a graduation rate of 85 percent, and a job retention rate of 80 percent.
Trent Cooper, The Bread Project’s Program Manager, believes the high employment rates stem from the high-touch training and post-graduation services. “If you see our boot camps, you see how closely we interact with each student. Upon graduation, we provide 15 months of follow-up services, with outreach at one, three, six, nine, 12, and 15 months. This is time consuming and expensive, but we’re able to help participants longer.”
The Bread Project serves people who are the first to get turned down by employers—immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, formerly incarcerated individuals, and people with disabilities as well as those with employment barriers due to language, addiction, unstable housing, and childcare. In 2017-2018, 79 percent of participants relied on public benefits, 21 percent had zero income coming into the program, 100 percent were low income, and the participant pool was 61 percent female and 32 percent male. Most trainees come from Oakland, Berkeley, and Richmond. And many lack independent housing and are dependent on public housing, friends, family, shelters, or transitional lodging.
Foundation grants, individual and corporate donations, and city funding keep The Bread Project afloat as well as a well-honed social enterprise model. Its University Avenue kitchen produces sweet potato buns for the high-end San Francisco restaurant International Smoke and mixes up about 3,000 pounds of cookie dough per week for DOUGHP. There’s also a food business incubator program; The Bread Project focuses on renting out its kitchen to minority-run businesses. All of this pays for the cost of the long boot camps, from which about 120 people graduate annually.
To support nine low-income Berkeley residents pass through the training program, UC Berkeley’s Chancellor’s Community Partnership Fund recently awarded The Bread Project a grant. The project, in collaboration with the Blum Center’s Global Poverty & Practice (GPP) minor, aims to strengthen the university’s ties to the City of Berkeley through employment development opportunities and engages GPP student interns in poverty alleviation work.
Jasmine Tsui, a UC Berkeley global health major and Global Poverty & Practice minor, said her summer internship at The Bread Project has given her a front seat row to the Bay Area’s widening income gap. “I’ve seen what it means to be looking for a job and have no computer to do job research and applications. Employment barriers like those are real, but The Bread Project is surmounting them through a range of supports.”
Global Poverty & Practice Students Jasmine Tsui and Emily Lui at The Bread Project in Berkeley.
Tsui, who has been working closing with Barron Villegas, The Bread Project’s employment and graduate services manager, has been on the phone with graduates for much of her summer internship. “I’ll call graduates five, six times,” said Tsui. “I’ll leave messages, emails, and texts, and once I get them on the phone, I ask them how they are, if they need a job, and make an appointment to come in right there.”
Tsui’s summer internship colleague, Emily Lui, a UC Berkeley economics major and Global Poverty & Practice minor, also has been impressed by the personalized services. “There’s a lot of emphasis on trying to find people who graduate from the program a job—and a job they actually want. Earlier this month, there was a hiring event where different reps from different Whole Foods came in and did onsite interviews.”
Barron Villegas, who like Lui and Tsui got her start at The Bread Project as a GPP intern, said she is currently developing and strengthening employer partnerships with Noah’s Bagels and High Flying Foods.
“The reason The Bread Project has the outcomes it does is because we build relationships with both employers and job seekers,” said Barron. “Our clients walk away with a specific skill set and into a more specific job market. They learn interview skills, resume writing skills, and other job readiness skills. They also earn a ServeSafe certificate from the State of California. Employers want all of that.”
Participants at Enable-Tech’s Make-A-Thon collaborating with “Need-Knowers”
Originally a portmanteau of the words hack and marathon, a hackathon typically occurs over a day or two, bringing together computer programmers and others to solve a puzzle or invent a creative solution. During these 24- to 48-hour periods, participants are encouraged to form groups and collaborate, completing the hackathon with a rough prototype or ideas that can be presented to judges for prize money. Over the years, the adrenaline rush that often drives these competitions have created some famous “hacks”: the messaging app GroupMe and the Facebook “Like” button were both conceived during hackathons.
Although hackathons may feel new, they are nearing their twentieth anniversary. The concept was born in June 1999, when UC Berkeley alumni John Gage challenged attendees of a Sun Microsystems event to write a multi-user Internet program in Java for the Palm V. Almost two decades later, hackathons have been organized to advance all manner of technologies in practically every sector. And increasingly, hackathons have been launched to solve societal challenges, such as natural disaster preparedness and government transparency.
Kyelo Torres and his team proposing ideas for their wearable technology.
But are “hackathons for good” really effective, given that rapid prototyping is rarely a fix for entrenched societal problems? For technologists like Luca Ibota, a former Apple employee who has been active in many hackathons for good, the most important aspect is “identifying the problem you have and the ideal outcome you want.” In fact, said Ibota, the key to a successful hackathon for good is “precisely defining a problem or challenge.”
Kyelo Torres models a design at the Make-A-Thon.
Still, some Cal students are skeptical about hackathons for good. The most cynical argue that incorporating buzz words such as “social impact” and “corporate social responsibility” at hackathons is a smart public relations move for technology companies looking to improve their public standing. Other Cal students insist that incorporating social good goals in hackathons is a testament to Silicon Valley’s aim to think more holistically and ethically about technology’s effects.
For many, UC Berkeley hackathons that take on a social impact lens are seen as a reflecting a student culture that prioritizes hands-on learning and that seeks to solve grand challenges like climate change and food insecurity. For Swetha Prabhakaran, a UC Berkeley sophomore and computer science student, the 21st century requires companies, nonprofits, and individuals to make solutions to intractable problems a priority.
Either way, the number of UC Berkeley hackathons focused on social impact is on the rise. Causes have ranged from building prosthetics for people with disabilities to developing apps that enable students to source fair trade goods. Student-run organizations have championed these hackathons as a way to ethically fill consumer gaps.
In April 2018, a partnership between the Sutardja Dai Center for Entrepreneurship and the UC Regents Chancellor’s Association hosted Cal Innovates, a hackathon aimed to bridge the engineering and business disciplines. Prabhakaran, who organized the event, said attendance was high because engineering and business students have started to “soul search” for meaningful impact. “Berkeley students have a strong entrepreneurial spirit—you can see it everyday,” said Prabhakaran. “But conversations about using business to help others are happening on small scale. The hackathon is a way to help students do this on a bigger scale.”
Students hacking at Cal Innovates
The Cal Innovates hackathon presented no strict problem to solve. It allowed participants—of which 40 to 50 percent were engineering majors and 30 to 40 percent were from the Haas School of Business—to build and plan deployment of prototypes. During the competition, participants listened to speakers or pursued their project with the help of guides. Professionals from SkyDeck, Cal’s startup accelerator, helped students with presentations and judged the finals, while employees of GoDaddy and students from BlockChain at Berkeley helped participants with technical aspects of their designs. Finalists included a project for civil engineers in developing countries to create sustainable bridges.
A student team at work at Cal Innovates.
Another example of a UC Berkeley hackathon geared toward positive social impact was EnableTech’s “Make-A-Thon.” Held in April 2018, it aimed to connect those building prosthetics with those who use them, per the club’s motto: “Build with them, not for them.” Spanning 48 hours, the event allowed participants, formed into groups of six people from different majors, to rank which of EnableTech’s active projects should be improved. Kyelo Torres, a rising senior in mechanical engineering and the event project leader, spoke of the hackathon’s purpose: “As students, we are taught only theories. The second we are asked to do something, we get lost. The idea of hackathons is to practice the real world aspect of things.”
Amy Dinh, programs manager of the Jacobs Institute for Design Management, said she believes the reason for the uptick in hackathons with a social good emphasis is simple: “People seek a challenge, and there’s nothing more challenging than the wicked problems of the world.” Yet she dissuades students from expecting implementable solutions post-hackathon, highlighting instead the importance of the iterative process. “The point of a hackathon is to get creative juices to flow,” she said. “It’s not realistic for the ideas to be polished; rather the point is to kickstart a new team or idea.”
For the Pinoleville Pomo Nation of Ukiah, California, collaboration has not historically been a word used to describe interactions with white Americans. As late as 1950, native people were not permitted to walk on both sides of the street and signs in Ukiah’s storefront windows read, “No dogs or Indians allowed.”
Angela James, vice chair of the Tribal Council for the Pinoleville Pomo Nation, remembered this history was she was approached by David Edmunds, her tribe’s environmental director, about a possible collaboration with UC Berkeley. The goal was to co-design a sustainable housing project for the low-income families of her 300-person nation.
On the one hand, James, a mother of four, was eager to advance the education of young tribe members and teach them to live in two cultures. Yet her mind jangled with stories from her grandfather Smith Williams. He had told her about Ba-lay Ba-lin—the Bloody Run—an 1871 atrocity in which white settlers violently forced Native Americans off their land, turning the Eel River red with their blood. In 2007, when James first stepped onto the UC Berkeley campus to talk with Mechanical Engineering Professor Alice Agogino, now education director of the Blum Center and chair of the graduate group in Development Engineering, and graduate students Ryan Shelby and Yael Perez, she was aware that this was the place where Ishi, the so-called “last wild Indian,” became the research subject of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. She also knew there was an ongoing dispute about the Hearst Museum’s return of 12,000 Native American remains to California tribes.
James’ warm-up to the UC Berkeley engineers was slow. She recounted that because Shelby is African American and Perez is foreign (Israeli), she felt they might be worthy of her community’s trust. She also wanted to believe that “science can cross cultural barriers,” and she observed from Agogino’s classroom that engineering was no longer “just a field for white males.”
At the same time, the interdisciplinary UC Berkeley group called CARES—Community Assessment of Renewable Energy and Sustainability—was seeking to tread new water in the field of development. “As we worked with the nation on the sustainable housing project, our understanding of development changed,” said Perez. “We realized technology, and technological ‘fixes,’ are not enough. We needed to start with what sustainability meant to the tribe. And they had a lot to say about sustainability, because of the way they view their connection to the Earth—resulting in unexpected design decisions around heating, water use, solar power, and the shape and functionality of their homes.”
This insight about collaboration led the CARES group to a development methodology called “co-design.” The term, which builds on human-centered design, user-centered design, design thinking, and participatory design, goes further in empowering stakeholders in the decision making and design process to recognize that users (or locals or recipients of development assistance) are key participants in their own economic, environmental, and sociopolitical advancement, with significant contributions to offer. In essence, CARES, a forerunner of UC Berkeley’s development engineering graduate program, embraced co-design to address the disconnect between the creation of technological innovations by engineers and the needs, preferences, and cultural views of the people who will use them.
Explains Agogino, “The 10-year collaboration with the Pinoleville Pomo Nation shows a number of things: It shows that development projects can and should be local, not just international. And it shows that development solutions can range from how we design to how we publish academic research. The journal articles that have come out of the PPN collaboration have notably been co-authored by PPN members.”
Since 2008, CARES has collaborated with the Pinoleville Pomo Nation on engineering, architecture, and educational projects that have tested the boundaries of development. Co-designed results have included sustainable housing, renewable energy power systems, water restoration and management projects, and most recently science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM) workshops for middle and high school students and a K-12 maker space.
Like past collaborations, the recent educational one was the result of shared interests and available funding. Zhao Qui, project director of the Pomo Youth College and Career Success Project, explains that in October 2016 her organization received a Department of Education grant to fund new cultural and academic enrichment activities for native students; one area of concern was low access and achievement in math and science. At around the same time, the Blum Center received funding from the National Science Foundation to support development engineering students working on InFEWS (Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water Systems) for low-income communities facing extreme challenges. And the CARES team, energized by development engineering graduate students and Global Poverty & Practice (GPP) undergraduate students, was ready for a new collaboration.
The task for the co-design was to integrate native activities and sensibilities into STEM education. Says George Moore, a UC Berkeley mechanical and development engineering graduate student, who taught at the summer workshop, “It became clear in conversations with the PPN that it was hard to get the native students to apply themselves in the STEM disciplines. Institutionally, it just wasn’t structured for them. But these students got really engaged at the workshops and are really good at math and science.”
According to Moore—and other participating UC Berkeley students, including GPP students Dor Chavoinik, Grace Harrison, and Arielle Levin and Elena Duran, a PhD student in Graduate Group in Science and Mathematics Education—what works best is listening and not imposing views on what works in a STEM-based activities. Among the decisions were to teach engineering design through Pomo Pinoleville basket-making techniques and to engage students in 3D printing designs from local art and nature.
Qui says the workshops and maker space are generating excitement among the students to get into STEM fields. “We have a college career counselor coming to the classroom,” she notes. “The students have a sense these are high paying jobs. Yet for native people, we’re not just looking at the pay. We’re looking at how we can use the STEM program to serve our own community around solar power, rain catchment, and other sustainable and environmental solutions.”
For graduate student Pierce Gordon, the co-design approach is crucial for mechanical/development engineers like himself working in poor communities. Gordon says co-design is “de-colonizing,” as it simultaneously aware of the deep history of technological interventions and adamant that everyone be heard, understood, and acknowledged. Continues Gordon, “If we don’t do that, then we’re doing the very similar kind of harm that many people have done over the history of international development and interventionist work as a whole.”
Gordon, who is finishing his PhD dissertation, which includes case studies of co-design efforts in the United States and Botswana, says the first priority of development engineering work is not to get research publications, funding, or material for teaching classes, but to benefit marginalized communities. “It is to figure out what the community wants, because this research moves at the speed of trust. Once you build up that trust, you have the opportunity to build up to collaborations and research outcomes and beneficial activities that you didn’t even know could have existed.”
For Angela James, one very specific outcome of the 10-year collaboration is her children’s interest in STEM. “My daughter has been a participant in CARES since she was four. She’s 14 now. She’s very comfortable leaving Ukiah. She’s looking at a lot of different colleges. All her career interests are science-based. My son is right behind her and just the same.”
James, who was on the UC Berkeley campus on July 13, 2018 with a group of Native American high school students, says the days of cultural and educational isolation can end for her tribe and others in California. “My goal has been to open the minds of our youth and introduce them to college and science, and teach them how to build positive working relationships with people outside their immediate circle,” says James. “It is important that the university has the right individuals involved in a collaboration—people who are willing to advocate for the human approach, get to know the individuals, and ask about background and culture. An important part of this collaboration has been that our voice is finally being heard.”
Research about this collaboration was partially supported by the National Science Foundation’s Research Traineeship in Innovations at the Nexus in Food, Energy, and Water Systems (Award No. 1633740).
An injured soldier is rushed to a field hospital and is bleeding out. A surgeon needs to give the soldier meds to speed up her clotting. But too much or too little will kill her. The doctors rely on lab equipment to determine dosage; however, the large machine was never designed for field use. The surgeon is caught between an educated guess and blind dosing, putting the soldier’s life at risk.
This was the story that Jeffrey Lu and Johnathon Li heard from a U.S. Air Force vascular trauma surgeon. The two old friends, UC Davis graduate students in biomedical engineering and animal science, realized they had possibly stumbled upon a market gap for a mobile blood clotting monitoring device.
After conversations with UC Davis doctors, their hunch was confirmed. Not only did they learn that traumatic injuries which disrupt blood clotting are the second leading cause of preventable death in developed countries, they discovered that mobile blood clotting solution could had worldwide application—from the frontlines of the war in Syria to rural areas in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Lu and Li also learned that with current technologies, an injured soldier may not receive treatment for up to 24 hours; and in civilian hospitals, patient treatment can be delayed three hours. The technicians and surgeons they interviewed said they wanted a device they could use in the operating room, circumventing the time involved in sending samples to the lab. Surgeons especially complained that when they got back lab results, the information was often obsolete because the patient’s condition had changed from further bleeding out.
“Current [blood-clot testing] devices are like using microwaves to cook,” said Lu. “It works if you don’t move it, and occasionally they come out great, but more often than not you’re just going to be disappointed.”
Or as Dr. Joseph M. Galante, the trauma medical director at UC Davis Medical Center, put it: “Undiagnosed coagulopathy [bleeding disorder] in trauma patients is associated with greater transfusion requirements, longer intensive care unit and hospital stays, and greater incidence of multi-organ failure or death. Patients with uncorrected coagulopathy are eight times more likely to die within the first 24 hours following trauma.”
Lu and Li spent part of their graduate school years working on the project they dubbed Innovis Medical. The partners began to understand their competition, their possible business model, and the people they needed to cultivate to make the best possible medical device.
In October 2017, Lu and Li turned to the Blum Center’s Big Ideas student innovation contest, to further shape and fund their idea. Big Ideas is open to undergraduate and graduate students at all 10 UC campuses and had a contest category that fit their invention: Hardware for Good, made possible through the generous support of the Autodesk Foundation. The contest put them through a nine-month project incubation, mentoring, and application process that Lu and Li saw was crucial to their company’s development.
“In entrepreneurship, you’re not selling your idea, you’re selling your network,” said Li. “Big Ideas participants enter Berkeley’s well-oiled machine, and their biggest advantage is their network.”
By meeting new people and potential advisors, the Innovis Medical founders realized they needed to pivot their strategy. Lu and Li decided to prioritize the civilian market instead of battlefield situations and use more layman language to describe their product.
At the 2018 Big Ideas Pitch Day before winning a first place prize, Lu went into the specificities of the device: “Our solution is a portable medical device that uses a solid state sensor to track an electrical property of blood known as bioimpedance as it clots. Our device produces graphs and data similar to the current state of the art device, but without the bulky sensor mechanical components. The sensor itself is a disposable cartridge with no mess to clean up, no chemicals to work with. With a solution designed specifically to mobility, blood clot tests are no longer restricted to laboratories but can be used in a battlefield, operating room and even the comfort of your own home.”
At the pitch, Lu further argued that tests during surgery, which take 30 minutes to receive back from the lab, could be performed in the operating room within four to 10 minutes. Post-surgery patients who previously needed to make a trip to the hospital every few weeks to have their blood thinner dosage checked, could run the tests themselves at home—much like diabetic patients who are able to track their own insulin levels.
In January 2018, Lu and Li joined UC Davis’ Inventopia, a makerspace for startups, where they were able to witness the production of their device’s sensor. The next month, they attended Meet the Experts Night at UC Berkeley, whey they were connected to Rhonda Shrader, director of the Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program, who referred them to contacts throughout the Bay Area.
Innovis Medical estimates significant reach and cost savings. Its market could include an annual 672,000 U.S. military trauma cases, 15 million U.S. civilian cardiac surgeries, and 7 million disaster-related surgeries in the developing world. As for costs savings, Innovis estimates the 15 million annual civilian patients of cardiac surgery could save up to $7,000 per operation. In developing countries, Innovis believes its device could be crucial in setting where reliable energy and technicians may not be available.
Lu and Li recently expanded their business plans through the UC Berkeley Innovation Corps course and were accepted to the national I-Corps incubator for scaling university-based innovations run by the National Science Foundation.
The founders also have launched a collaboration with UC Davis Medical, where civilian and military surgeons are using the Innovis device to directly test human blood from cardiac patients alongside status quo devices. Lu said sensors are being deployed for clinical tests with the aim to iterate the device to address as wide a range of patients and blood types as possible. He and Li hope to get FDA approval by 2021.
Blum Center Education Director Alice Agogino has been named winner of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring, the government’s highest honor for mentors who have worked to expand talent in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
The award was announced June 25 by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation. Agogino, the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley, was one of 41 honorees to receive the award at a ceremony last week in Washington, D.C.
Professor Agogino has had a long and illustrious history of mentoring university students and junior faculty as well as engaging with local schools, museums and organizations to engage K-12 students in STEM topics. To support engineering students at UC Berkeley, she created a tiered mentoring network, in which senior doctoral students advise masters and undergraduate students. Over the years, she has been in high demand as a mentor by those who want to use their STEM educations for positive social impact. She also has built a reputation for designing courses that attract a high percentage of women and under-represented minorities.
At the Blum Center, Professor Agogino has been pivotal in creating the new field of Development Engineering, whose mission is to reframe development and the alleviation of poverty by educating engineering and social science students to create, test, apply and scale technologies for societal benefit. Development Engineering students, she has written, must learn “21st century skills”—interdisciplinary, team-based methods that are oriented to seeing problems from multiple viewpoints (quantitative, qualitative, ethnographic) and applying them through entrepreneurial pathways.
Professor Agogino is not new to awards. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is the previous recipient of an ASME Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Design Educator Award “for tireless efforts in furthering engineering design education.” At UC Berkeley, she has received Chancellor Awards for Public Service, a Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence and a Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring. She was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, has won many best paper awards and has been honored with a National Science Foundation Distinguished Teaching Award and a AAAS Lifetime Mentor Award, the latter for increasing the number of women and African- and Hispanic-American doctorates in mechanical engineering.
Her work in decision-analytic approaches to engineering design led to a whole new field of research, and her research in mass customization became a patent-buster for licenses in database-driven Internet commerce. If that were not enough, Squishy Robotics, Inc., Professor Agogino’s startup company, recently was awarded a National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research grant to conduct research and development work on “Shape-Shifting Robots for Disaster Rescue, Monitoring and Education.”
Professor Agogino has explained that she was inspired to become a mentor due to her own experience at the University of New Mexico, where she was the only female mechanical engineering undergraduate student, and at UC Berkeley, where she became the first woman to receive tenure in her field. Professor Agogino uses a mentoring approach that she calls “designing for diversity.” By emphasizing the social impact of solving research problems, this strategy helps students feel connected to their work and motivated to persist in engineering.
In 2013, the Blum Center and the Center for Effective Global Action founded the Development Impact Lab, to launch the new field of Development Engineering and create a model for university-based poverty action labs. Since that time, the Development Impact Lab, with support from USAID, has tested over 135 innovations and engaged more than 500 students, 400 experts and 375 organizations, involving 16 universities in the United States, India and Uganda.
On June 4, key representatives from the network met at the Blum Center to discuss their five years of findings and outcomes. Temina Madon, executive director of the Center for Effective Global Action, summarized Development Engineering as enabling doctoral students from multiple disciplines to research and test poverty solutions as part of their dissertations. A panel entitled “Institutionalizing the Field of Development Engineering” included UC Berkeley Mechanical Engineering Professor Alice Agogino and Economics Professor Paul Gertler, who attested to the long need for such a PhD minor. Rachel Dzombak and Sophi Martin, who earned their PhDs at Cal and are serving as the Blum Center’s doctoral fellow and innovation director, respectively, also offered anecdotes about rising interest in Development Engineering.
“Thanks to this new field, doctoral students considering international development now have a way to harness this aspect of their academic interests,” said Professor Agogino, who is chair of the Graduate Group in Development Engineering and Education Director of the Blum Center.
Professor Gertler gave an overview of the Development Engineering journal, an open access, interdisciplinary publication that applies engineering and economic research to the problems of poverty. The two-year old journal, he explained, is giving scholars academic credit for novel research that previously had not been widely acknowledged or disseminated.
Katherine Dow, program manager of the Global Development Lab, said that the Development Impact Lab has helped USAID better understand emerging trends in science and technology for development and the role that university professors, researchers and students can play. She also said the UC Berkeley collaboration has helped bring quality data and data methodologies to government decision makers, allowing for a redefinition of problems.
Data gathering around energy reliability in Ghana was a focus of one session. Hana Freymiller and Jeffrey Garnett from the U.S. Government’s Millennium Development Corporation, gave an overview of its $535 million, five-year project in Ghana, which aims to decrease the country’s energy outages by 20 percent by 2021. The Millennium Development Corporation is collaborating with the Development Impact Lab and UC Berkeley’s Lab11 to better understand where and when outages are happening in Ghana—using a mobile app called Gridwatch. GridWatch enables utility customers to automatically report outages through sensor technology on their cell phones. The data collected is more accurate in many cases than what the utility company can gather, and can show a variety of possible solutions for energy investment, energy savings, economic development, and improved quality of life.
“People are worried about the 1.1 billion people who don’t have access to electricity worldwide,” said UC Berkeley Business and Economics Professor Catherine Wolfram, a GridWatch project lead. “But what about those who don’t have reliable access? As urbanization trends move forward, it’s really important to understand reliability and measure how investment changes with reliability.”
The daylong conference also featured presentations by faculty and current and former PhD students associated with the Development Impact Lab.
UC Berkeley Bioengineering Professor Dan Fletcher summarized the progress of CellScope, an invention from his lab that adapts the camera of a mobile phone or tablet computer into a high-quality light microscope for disease detection in low-resource areas. Since 2008, Professor Fletcher has used CellScope to test more than 83,000 patients, analyzing the results in a dozen journal articles—and now is aiming to mass produce 10,000 CellScopes for use in rural areas in Africa. His insight was: “Don’t make technology for development as simple as possible; make it as automated as possible.”
Erin Kelly, a PhD candidate in Agricultural and Resource Economies at UC Berkeley presented a mobile phone application called SmartMatatu, designed to prevent the high incidence of traffic accidents among privately owned minibuses in Nairobi, Kenya. The application uses GPS and other mobile technologies along with affordable, off-the-shelf car sensor devices to collect and send location, ignition, route, distances, speed, acceleration and deceleration information, to show Matatu drivers when, where and how they are driving unsafely. According to a six-month survey of SmartMatatu users, the app has helped drivers raised their profits and reduce repair costs–demonstrating that visibility of data can influence driver behavior and productivity.
Danny Wilson, a Development Engineering alumnus, presented the outcome of his doctoral research: Geocene.com. With Development Impact Lab funding, Geocene has created hardware and apps for data logging and analysis. Wilson talked about findings from a survey of cookstoves users in Sudan in which people over-reported use of their indoor pollution-reducing stoves, making the survey findings unreliable. With Geocene, Wilson aims to create dashboards for monitoring cookstoves across many countries. The goal, he said, is to understand what are the best cookstoves for specific conditions, so people will actually use them. He noted that nearly two million deaths could be prevented annually by replacing cooking fires and inefficient, smoky stoves.
Susanna Berkouwer, a PhD candidate at the UC Berkeley Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics and the Haas School of Business’s Energy Institute, reported on the latest findings from the Development Impact Lab’s Rural Electric Power Project, which is utilizing novel data collection and analysis tools. She explained that Kenya is working on a last-mile connectivity project to power all households by 2020, and is collaborating with her group to better understand how energy access does (or doesn’t) lead to higher consumption, income, health and education. The results, she said, could empower both citizens and governments.
The other presentations included: Niall Keleher, a UC Berkeley School of Information PhD Candidate, presenting the results from Assistant Professor Joshua Blumenstock’s research applying machine learning to high-resolution satellite imagery to measure regional poverty in Africa; Chinmayee Subban presenting Berkeley Lab Water-Energy Resilience Research Institute’s progress on using charge-based salt water removal to clean brackish water; and Dana Hernandez, a Development Engineering student, summarizing UC Berkeley Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Ashok Gadgil’s ongoing research on removing arsenic from groundwater.
“The Development Impact Lab has had a tremendous five years,” said Heather Lofthouse, the Blum Center’s director of special projects. “By partnering with USAID and other governmental and nongovernmental organizations, we have been able not only to generate new ideas—we have been able to implement real-world solutions.”
In February 2018, Big Ideas Contest Director, Phillip Denny, traveled to Kampala, Uganda to explore opportunities for Big Ideas expansion in Africa, in partnership with Makerere University. Makerere—one of Africa’s leading institutions of higher education—has been a key partner of Big Ideas since 2013. Over the last five years Makerere’s involvement in Big Ideas has grown steadily, as has its reputation as a regional leader in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship among students. Big Ideas is working with Makerere to advance the mission of the competition, which challenges students to dream big about how they might change the world, and supports them to execute that vision.
“Like Big Ideas, Makerere provides a supportive ecosystem that helps students, particularly those who are in the early stages of innovation, realize their dream of making a positive impact on society,” said Denny.
This year, over 50 student teams, representing over 150 students, from Makerere University submitted proposals to Big Ideas, and nine teams advanced to the final round—a record for Makerere. During his trip, Denny mentored teams as they worked to complete their final proposals. He was impressed by the creativity of their innovations, as well as the incredible energy and commitment shown by each team.
“What stands out to me in my work with Makerere students is that many of them are from communities that are directly impacted by the challenges the students are seeking to solve,” said Denny. “When you meet with them you immediately grasp their passion and dedication, which is undoubtedly fueled by their personal and first-hand experiences with the issues they’re trying to solve.”
Deborah Naatujuna, Engagement Manager for the Resilient Africa Network, which hosts the Big Ideas Contest at Makerere, noted the many ways Big Ideas has fostered student collaboration and innovation on campus.
“One of the requirements of the contest is to have a strong team, so students who ordinarily work alone have been able to onboard students from other disciplines. For example, engineering students will work with business students. We did not have this interdisciplinary engagement before, but the contest has improved collaboration between students from different disciplines,” said Naatujna.
The contest has also had a significant impact on students’ relationships with faculty members, breaking down barriers and fostering an innovator-mentor relationship that did not exist before.
“Big Ideas has fostered an innovator-mentor relationship that is not intimidating. Students at Makerere are used to working with academic supervisors in an environment that can often be intimidating for the student, but mentorship through Big Ideas is focused on constructive feedback and collaboration. Participating in the contest has helped students work with their professors in a more collegial way and develop close relationships with their mentors.”
When Big Ideas first launched at Makerere five years ago, the majority of proposals submitted were from male teams. Since then, the involvement of female students from Makerere has also grown.“In the beginning, we had very few females taking part in Big Ideas, but now we have more. Some of the teams are led by women while other teams are completely female. When female students worked with their male counterparts [before], the male students would do the majority of the work. Now we are seeing all-female teams as well as mixed teams in which everyone takes part,” said Naatujuna.
Innovations that were developed on Makerere’s campus include Mama-OPE, a cell-phone based lung monitoring device that helps diagnose pneumonia, and PedalTap, which won 3rd place in the highly competitive Global Health category. Mama-Ope was recently featured on CNN/Africa, and in 2017, PedalTap won Johnson & Johnson’s first Africa Innovation Challenge.
Gamechangers. Engineers. Innovators. Researchers. Entrepreneurs. These are just a few of the words that describe the outstanding women of the Blum Center ecosystem. In honor of National Women’s History month, the Blum Center recognizes the outstanding work, achievements, and global impacts of these trailblazing women.
Laura Tyson, Board Chair, Blum Center for Developing Economies Renowned economist, Laura Tyson, has spent a large portion of her career demonstrating how empowering women is morally right and economically smart, and that the economic and human-development costs associated with gender gaps are substantial. As co-author of Leave No One Behind, a “call-to-action” report of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment, Tyson shows how gender equality and women’s economic empowerment are central to the vision of the Sustainable Development Goals, and cautions that progress has been too slow. In the UN report, Tyson identifies concrete actions the international community can take to expand women’s economic opportunities ranging from legal reform to changing business norms.
Erica Stone, Blum Center Founding Trustee, and President, American Himalayan Foundation Over the course of her career, Erica Stone has worn many hats—fifth degree black belt, chef at Chez Panisse, and today, President of the American Himalayan Foundation. As the Foundation’s President, and particularly through the STOP Girl Trafficking initiative, Stone has had a profound impact on the lives of women and girls around the world. Each year, 20,000 girls from the poorest regions of Nepal are trafficked, which Stone attributes to three things: poverty, poverty, and poverty. By focusing on primary education, AHF lays a foundation that lifts girls out of poverty by giving them the skills, confidence, and respect they need to succeed. The STOP Girl Trafficking program started with 54 girls; today, 12,000 girls are safe in 500 schools across Nepal, on the path to a future full of hope. Learn more about STOP Girl Trafficking and the work of AHF here.
Dr. Laura Stachel, Big Ideas Winner and Founder, We Care Solar In 2008, with funding from Big Ideas@Berkeley, Dr. Laura Stachel worked with an interdisciplinary team to design a low-maintenance solar electric system for a Nigerian hospital with a high maternal mortality rate. When surrounding health centers requested solar electricity in their labor rooms, the compact, rugged We Care Solar Suitcase was born. Ten years later, more than 3,000 We Care Solar Suitcases have served 1.4 million mothers and babies in 27 countries. These user-friendly, mobile and nearly maintenance-free suitcases, which take a couple of hours to install, have proved an important innovation in the fight against maternal mortality worldwide. Stachel’s goal is to “Light Every Birth,” working with Ministries of Health to ensure that every health center has reliable clean energy for childbirth. Learn more about Dr. Stachel and the global impact of her work here.
Alice Agogino, UC Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Blum Center Education Director Professor Alice Agogino is a trailblazing mechanical engineer known for her work in bringing women and people of color into engineering, and her groundbreaking research into cutting-edge product design, intelligent learning and robotic systems, and sensor fusion, monitoring and diagnostic networks. As faculty Director at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, Alice has supported the growth of the development engineering program to include over 50% women, and helps build the interdisciplinary skills needed for students to create actionable and impactful research that is transferable from the lab to the field at scale. Watch Alice in action here on development engineering and here in sustainable products and services.
Dr. Sophi Martin, Blum Center Innovation Director, and Dr. Rachel Dzombak, Blum Center Innovation Fellow Many institutions recognize the need to transform their business practices to keep pace with a rapidly evolving technology landscape, but lack the tools needed to unlock the innovation potential of their organization. Dr. Sophi Martin and Dr. Rachel Dzombak are leaders within the Blum Center’s growing education portfolio that supports social enterprises, innovative individuals, and the larger entrepreneurship/innovation community on campus. Through their design- and lean startup-focused teaching and advising, Martin and Dzombak inspire students to take on the great challenge of transforming deep-seated societal problems. Learn more about Martin’s work here, and Dzombak’s work here.
Isha Ray, UC Berkeley Professor and Blum Affiliated Faculty There are few people in the world who know more about the intersection of gender equality and toilets than UC Professor Isha Ray. When UN Women asked Ray to determine whether or not there was greater gender equity in access to sanitation on account of the Millennium Development Goals, Ray didn’t know, but she made it her mission to find out. With her research partners and seed-funding from the USAID Development Impact Lab, Ray launched a new research project (TriSan) to understand the connections among sanitation, gender equality and human dignity. Throughout the course of her research, Ray found that sanitation programs are still being designed without fully acknowledging the social and biological needs of low-income women and girls. She has been advocating for the water and sanitation rights of women and girls globally ever since. In this moving Tedx Talk, Ray breaks down the relationship between dignity, gender, and toilets.
On a typical day in the village of Mihingoni, Kenya, girls emerge at dawn, traveling down red clay paths against a backdrop of palm trees and corn stalk plants. The beauty of Mihingoni stands in contrast to the tough reality of their lives. These girls—some as young as six years old—are not in school. Today, like all days during the dry season, they will spend hours walking in search of that one element none of us can live without: water.
There is a saying in Swahili: “Maji Yaje Kwanza” which means “water is the first of many things”. The people of Mihingoni—most of whom are subsistence farmers—depend largely on rainwater for survival, but climate variability and long dry seasons continue to stunt crop yields. Low agricultural productivity decreases household income, and increases hunger. Lack of proper water, sanitation and hygiene leads to disease, and Kenya continues to have one of the worst under five mortality rates, globally. Families are forced to choose between sending their girls for water or sending them to school, and they choose water first. This limits the prospects for their future, and the cycle of poverty in Mihingoni continues. Until now.
Ashley Miller—an alumnus of the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley—has spent the last five years working with the community of Mihingoni to design solutions that will increase their access to water. Miller first traveled to Mihingoni in 2013 when she and her classmate, Louisa Mwenda, took a seven hour drive from Nairobi to attend a family wedding.
“When I said ‘yes’ to that invitation I had no idea that the course of my life would change forever,” Ashley said. “Once I saw the impact lack of water was having on that community, I knew I had to get involved. I have been working with Louisa, her family, and the community on this issue ever since.”
Miller returned from Kenya, threw herself into fundraising, and one year and $21,000 later she was on a plane heading back to Kenya to implement the Maji Yaje Kwanza project. Determined to build a sustainable, community-led program, Miller and the team collaborated closely with Mihingoni Primary school, and asked local teachers to help her organize a community meeting where they could solicit and hear the thoughts, needs, and ideas of the community first-hand.
“I didn’t want to make any assumptions about what the community needed, or what the solution should be,” Miller said. “The meeting was entirely spoken in KiGiriama, which allowed those most affected by the project to fully express themselves and their needs. We wanted to put the people’s needs at the center of all of our work.”
With just over $20,000, Miller and her team were able to hire 200 people to build and install drip irrigation pipes at the school for a school garden, hand-washing sinks outside of the boys, girls, and teachers’ latrines, two drinking water taps and a water kiosk that serves the entire community. Two 10,000-liter water tanks were provided, ensuring water access even during periods of low rainfall. The crew also created a basin for soapy sink water to be recycled for cleaning latrines. And that wasn’t all.
Maji Yaji Kwanza collaborated with the local municipality to enact a pipeline expansion across 2.5 kilometers, which would build on the work of several World Bank water projects being implemented in the area. But project delays and variable water pressure brought additional challenges, and the provision of water was inconsistent. The community needed to connect a well to existing infrastructure to ensure water provision year-round. By the summer of 2017 the team had hired a geologist, completed a hydrogeological survey, and secured the necessary permits from the Kenyan government to build the well.
“We’ve accomplished so much, learned an incredible amount, and we’re just getting started,” Miller said. “News of our success has spread throughout the region, and that has raised people’s hopes and expectations. We are personally accountable to these communities, and that is what drives us to get this done.”
Maji Yaje Kwanza is currently fundraising with the goal of raising $10,000 to complete construction of the underground well and water pump. Once the project is completed, it will serve roughly 3,000 people.
“I want people to imagine a life where you can’t turn on a tap. Can’t turn on the shower, flush the toilet. A life where you look at your daughter and say, ‘you can’t go to school; we need you to go for water today’. People shouldn’t have to make those types of choices. This is a solvable problem, and we all need to be part of the solution.”
To contribute to Maji Yaje Kwanza through the official UC Berkeley crowdfunding campaign, visit https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/8853 .The current crowdfunding campaign cycle will be live until February 23 at 11:59 p.m. PST. To learn more about how The Blum Center is supporting students to change the world, visit https://blumcenter.berkeley.edu/.
The Blum Center is pleased to announce that three Blum-nominated social innovators and their teams won recognition at UNLEASH, a nine-day-long global development event held in Denmark. Zoe Bezpalko won gold in Urban Sustainability, Jordan Freitas took silver in the Health, while Rachel Voss received bronze in Food. In addition, other outstanding attendees from the Blum Center ecosystem included m-Omulimisa founder Daniel Ninsiima and undergraduate bioengineering student Fanice Nyatigo.
By partnering with UNLEASH, a global non-profit initiative aiming to address the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Blum Center hopes to help its alumni reach greater heights, supporting their efforts to bring their social ventures to fruition.
Meet the cohort
Zoe Bezpalko’s team: Demolition4Design
Ninsiima is a Michigan State graduate who partnered with colleague and fellow MSU alumni Linlin Liang to develop “m-Omulimisa”, a phone-based platform that increases access to extension services for rural Ugandan farmers by providing critical agricultural information via SMS messaging in a local language.
Since 2015, Bezpalko’s role as an Autodesk’s Design Lead remains crucial to The Blum Center’s partnership with the Autodesk Foundation. Bezpalko has helped infuse our programs with a greater focus on impact design and sustainability, specifically to solve social and environmental challenges.
Freitas is a completing a computer science PhD program at Berkeley while working with a research group called Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER). Freitas’ research concentrates on improving methods of impact analysis and sharing data responsibly.
Nyatigo is an bioengineering student interning at Fletcher Labs, which aims to codify and control biological structures in order to develop ways for therapeutic intervention. Specifically, Nyatigo — under the tutelege of a PhD student — works to combine machine learning concepts and other imaging processing techniques to improve the quality of the image of the biological structures.
Before becoming a PhD student at UC Santa Cruz, Voss worked as a Program Coordinator at the UC Berkeley Blum Center. Now Voss is conducting research that focuses on participatory farmer trials in order to boost yields through improved soil and water management in Senegal.
An Experience of a Lifetime
Rachel Voss’ team: HarvestHub
Bezpalko and her team created Demolition4Design, a database that disseminates information to link designers, developers, manufacturers and engineers. The database will spread knowledge on sustainable solutions while diverting landfill wastes to new markets; ultimately, creating lasting impacts for environmental, economic and social development.
Freitas was one of the makers if Afterain, a free toolkit designed to aid displaced individuals experiencing trauma and other mental health issues through art therapy. In addition, Afterain will sell high-quality notebooks locally and overseas to generate revenue to fund rehabilitation camps.
Through HarvestHub, Voss and her fellow innovators wanted to connect farmers in Tanzania to post-harvest services, such as storage, processing, transportation, and networking to markets. This mobile platform will allow farmers to contract services on demand, which will improve their livelihood and reduce food loss.
“I would probably never have applied to UNLEASH if the Blum Center hadn’t put it on my radar. I’ve made so many connections to inspiring, passionate people around the world who are now my friends but also potential partners in my future work. I’ve never done anything like UNLEASH before but I am so grateful I had the chance to attend.” said Voss.
From the East Coast to the Bay Area, several esteemed Global Poverty and Practice Minor program alumni gathered in Blum Hall for a panel hosted by GPP to speak about their experiences after graduation. For the majority of the graduates, the minor was crucial in shaping their career paths and passions — and in some cases, far more impactful than their majors.
Staying true to the nature of GPP, each alumnus had different majors and, after graduation, entered different fields. Although they are all still trying to “figure it out”, these returning students had plenty of advice to give to current program students.
Where are they Now?
Farnaz Malik, a 2011 graduate who has a degree in Integrative Biology, said that the minor had a profound effect on what she did post-graduation. Through GPP coursework, Malik began to foster an interest in epidemiology, a branch of medicine that deals with the incidence, distribution, and possible control of diseases and other factors relating to health. Now, six years and two degrees later, Malik works at Vital Strategies, a global health nonprofit in New York that partners with governments to design public health initiatives and build better health systems — particularly in low and middle income countries. For Malik, the GPP minor has come full circle now that she can further her interests in epidemiology at Vital Strategies.
2015 graduate Shrey Goel is a case manager with Asian Health Services and volunteer at the Berkeley Free Clinic. In his undergraduate years, Goel majored in Environmental Sciences, but recalled how his GPP courses were the ones that interested him the most. He discussed how the clinic is furthering this education through a more hands on approach. After graduation, he landed a job as a research coordinator at UCSF where he learned plenty about clinical research, but where he was also exposed to the ethical dilemmas embedded in research.
“I think the years since I graduated really enriched me in challenging my own role and my own position in the institutions I participate in,” Goel said. “I hope to pursue a career in medicine in a way that is more authentic to what my actual interests are.”
Nikki Brand, a Master’s student in International Policy Studies at Stanford, graduated from Cal in 2013 with a degree in Peace and Conflict Studies and immediately moved to Guatemala to work as a field consultant with Community Empowerment Solutions, supporting women micro-entrepreneurs in marketing and selling products with health and environmental benefits. In 2014, Brand started at USAID as a program assistant, which “was not glamorous” at first, but after a year Brand was promoted to a team tasked with applying digital tools and approaches to support small farmers around the world.
Brand traveled to multiple countries — Ghana, Nepal, and Cambodia, to name a few — conducting workshops and research on ways that digital tools such as mobile money, digitally-enabled extension services, and geospatial analysis can support smallholder farmers. Brand left USAID in August to start a Master’s at Stanford and will be continuing to focus on the use of technology and data in international development.
2011 Graduate Lauren Herman said her story was far from linear. After she graduated with her B.A. in Peace and Conflict Studies, she received the Judith Lee Stronach Baccalaureate Prize and traveled to Nairobi, Kenya to do consumer outreach, which was inspired by her Practice Experience working with a microcredit program. When she didn’t get accepted to a public policy fellowship program she had applied for after she returned from Kenya, Herman said she took some time off to seriously reevaluate her goals and wants. After initially preparing to apply to graduate school, Herman secured a job as the Director of Communication and Training at a consulting and organizational management company where she’s worked for the past four years. But she credits her time off as fundamental to finding her own path.
“What I hope you take away from all this is no one has it set in stone,” said Herman. “ It’s all about taking it day by day and asking others for help.”
Lastly, Areidy Beltran, a Class of 2015 alumna who studied Environmental Earth Sciences, said her first job was an environmental/geotechnical engineer in Oakland. After a year, however, Beltran discovered that she wanted to work on issues of energy and climate change on a broader scale. This led her to return to Cal for a Master’s in Earth and Planetary Science and pursue additional short-term programs focused on computer science and business education. Now in order to meld her interests in business and environmental science, Beltran said she is considering a job in energy consulting.
The Road to Grad School
Many students in the audience wanted to know how these graduates weighed in on the value of graduate school and what were the best strategies to approaching the next step in academia, if they wished to do so.
Brand said she talked to at least 100 people before applying to grad school, which led her to some valuable advice. First, is to have at least two different jobs before entering graduate school in order to get a feel for what one should study. Similarly, Beltran said taking a year off led her to the realization that she did not want to pursue environmental engineering as a career. Second, Brand advised students to pay attention to job descriptions of positions they want to be in 5 years in the future, and noted many of them will require a graduate degree and at least two years of work experience.
“Wait until you at least have a more specific sense of what you want to do in life,” said Brand “Now I have a better sense of what direction I want to go in.”
Change is Okay
When confronted with sobering statistics and facts on global poverty, students of the GPP minor admitted that the work of global social development can often seem overwhelming. The speakers, in turn, recommended ways to deal with “burnout”.
Herman reminded students that the small ways in which the minor engages them to be critical thinkers matter, as well. Although progress is slow, Herman said it is crucial for students to not put too much on themselves and to “slow down and breathe.”
Beltran assured students that it is okay to change your mind, even after graduation. She said that she considers jobs right after graduation as experiences that should lead to self-reflection and change.
Goel believes the issue of scale underlies the struggle to find purpose after graduation for many students, meaning that students may feel pressured to have a large impact on a large scale. He found focusing on concrete skills development helped him find a sense of purpose.
“By really making sure I’m in spaces where I’m learning something very specific and I’m doing something very specific, I can gain an understanding of the connection between output and input,” said Goel. “So I understand what my effort and work is worth and can actually accomplish.”
Through their different experiences, these alumni imparted their knowledge upon the next generation of global development changemakers. The Blum Center is proud to see its graduates contributing to the GPP community and is looking forward to what they will accomplish next.
Last month, the Blum Center hosted a networking reception for its inaugural cohort of Innovation at the Nexus of Food, Energy and Water Systems (InFEWS) doctoral students. InFEWS is a prestigious National Science Foundation-funded graduate research program that uses the Development Engineering (DevEng) methodology to create solutions for challenges that span food, energy and water systems in low-resource settings domestically and abroad.
An exceptional and well traveled-group of 19 fellows, the InFEWS Fall 2017 cohort’s research focuses range from environmental science and policy, economics, engineering to social welfare, all of which will help enhance the program’s collaborative and interdisciplinary process. During the reception, Drs. Alice Agogino and Sophi Martin showcased the wide range of resources available to the Fellows, and students shared their research interests and networked with faculty. Students’ research interests include important topics such as resource recovery in rural settings, international development policy evaluation, and access to safe water.
The DevEng program and the Blum Center are excited to welcome these innovative and highly-motivated individuals to InFEWS. Check out infews.berkeley.edu to learn more about the program and to read about the cohort’s progress.
The problem of poverty is far from a clear-cut issue. In the new age of globalization and technology, future generations must develop the skills needed to critically think about the complexities of inequality in order to overcome the world’s most challenging obstacles.
Since its formation 2007, the Global Poverty and Practice minor at the University of California Berkeley trains students to understand contemporary forms of poverty, wealth, and inequality through invaluable academic coursework and a worthwhile practice experience. GPP has become one of the largest, most popular minors on campus, with about 350 students regularly enrolled in the program.
At the core of the minor lies the “Practice Experience”, a fieldwork opportunity where students apply the theoretical approaches they learned in their coursework to aiding local and international populations by partnering with a non-governmental organization, government agencies, and other poverty or development groups around the world. In addition to utilizing theory in the field, students learn from the organizations on how they approach poverty in action.
GPP invites all students from different majors and backgrounds to gain a critical edge and a unique opportunity to supplement their field of study.
Priya Natarajan, a 4th year linguistics major, completed her Practice Experience in the summer of 2017 with KIVA, an international nonprofit dedicated to alleviating global poverty through microfinancing. According to her, the GPP curriculum allows for a diverse range of students from multiple disciplines to come together, which changes the perspective of each individual student and fosters a more holistic approach to learning about inequality.
“Sometimes you look at a problem and you’re like ‘Ok this is it. Let’s tackle it’, but we fail to consider a lot of different factors that are causing the problem in the first place […] I think GPP really pushes you to explore the different roots of the problem rather than just the surface level problem and I’ve really appreciated that and that’s really helped me in different parts of my life, not just in school,” said Natarajan.
Check out the GPP website to learn more about the minor! If you have any questions about the application process or the program in general, feel free to attend any GPP info sessions. Best of luck to our incoming freshmen and returning students. Go bears!
World Developmentjournal features the research of Evan Mills and the Blum-funded Lumina Project, which cultivates technologies and markets for affordable low-carbon lighting worldwide.
In this podcast, Blum Center affiliated faculty, Clair Brown, speaks about alternative ways of structuring an economy and measuring economic progress, based on the Buddhist values of sustainability, interconnectedness, capability and happiness. Click to listen to the podcast or learn about her book.
Richard Blum looks back across 10 years of the Global Poverty and Practice Minor he created at UC Berkeley. More than 700 students have worked with organizations in 70 countries around the world–and the program is still growing. Read the blog post here.
Global Poverty and Practice student, Marissa Kaye Scott, travels to Malawi to support the program making big impacts in the “warm heart of Africa”. Click here to read more.
In this impassioned TED Talk, Isha Ray, UC Berkeley Energy and Resources professor and Blum Center affiliate, talks gender, dignity, and toilets. Watch the clip here.
UC Berkeley changemakers built a cellphone-turned-microscope that detects parasites in the blood in just 30 seconds—without expensive equipment, a lab, or a clinic. Reporter Laura Ling meets with the team to discuss how the innovation could revolutionize the field of public health. Watch here.
November 6th, 2017 9:00am-3:00pm The Blum Center For Developing Economies, UC Berkeley
Social impact design, referring to the practice of design for creating positive change and lasting impact in low-resource settings, has increasingly gained popularity at universities across the country and indeed globally. From engineers to entrepreneurs, students from diverse disciplines are seeking opportunities in this field. But how can universities better equip students in translating ideas, projects and skills from classrooms and lab benches to the real world?
With support from the Autodesk Foundation, The Blum Center for Developing Economies at the University of California, Berkeley will host the Impact Design Education Summit to bring together educators and practitioners to discuss the state of university-based impact design education. The summit aims to generate and disseminate knowledge about impact design pedagogies, from novel curricula used by universities and design colleges to online approaches targeting lifelong learners. Sessions will highlight best practices and learnings with a focus on how to integrate equity, entrepreneurship training, and 21st century skills into design impact curricula.The summit will also identify ways to build upon educational tools that are working and serve as a platform for seeding new, powerful collaborations. Participants will have the opportunity to share existing strategies used to teach design, compare tactics, and create an agenda for determine the most effective vehicles for imparting impact design skills on future practitioners.
UC Berkeley student Connor Gallaher presents his innovation, PlasMachine, to President Bill Clinton.
By Francesca Munsayac
In October, the Blum Center will send 30 UC Berkeley students to the 2017 Clinton Global Initiative University, an annual meeting sponsored by the Clinton Foundation. Each year, CGI U unites over 1,000 students from around the world to implement innovative solutions for global challenges. Students apply to CGI U with a “Commitment to Action,”—a concrete project that addresses an issue relating to one of CGI U’s five focus areas: education, environment & climate change, poverty alleviation, peace & human rights, and public health. An invitation to CGI U is a highly competitive process for students as their Commitment to Action (COA) must be new, specific and measurable.
CGI U provides support, mentorship, and resources to emerging student innovators, including opportunities for students to pitch their COA at the conference, win prize money, and learn from experts in the field of social entrepreneurship. Eleven of the 30 UC Berkeley students attending were also selected to present at the CGI U Exchange, an exhibition to explore partnerships and network with other participants. In addition, two students were selected for the “CGI U Commitment Challenge” – a crowdsourcing competition to raise money for their COA.
As a CGI U network partner, UC Berkeley has sent 350 UC Berkeley students to CGI U over the event’s ten-year history, and students have gone on to raise thousands of dollars in investment to launch impactful social ventures. This year’s CGI U attendees also include eight participants from Big Ideas@Berkeley; like CGI U, Big Ideas@Berkeley brings together students from multidisciplinary backgrounds who collaborate to develop innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing social and development challenges.
According to CGI U organizers, UC Berkeley has maintained a reputation for consistently sending large cohorts of students who produce high-caliber projects every year. The following UC Berkeley teams are among those that will present at the CGI U in October. Check back on the Blum Center News’ section for updates and to track their progress as the competition unfolds.
Social Innovator Spotlights
Aiding the Refugee Effort in Greece
Thanh Mai Bercher, UC Berkeley’s 2017 Activist of the Year, and Holly Wertman, Chair of the City of Berkeley’s Community Health Commission, joined forces to support The Melissa Network—a Blum Center partner organization that provides critical services to female refugees in Greece. Bercher and Wertman are supporting the Melissa Network to develop a long-term women’s health program, which will be widely publicized through UN-based and local agencies, filling the information gap of where and how female refugees can seek health services.
Maximizing Social Relationships to Improve Women’s Health
Osman Shokoor, former Vice President of UC Berkeley’s Afghan Student Association, is building a comprehensive community-based program that connects Afghan refugee mothers, and uses modeling of positive peer behavior to demonstrate how to achieve positive health outcomes.
Shokoor will coordinate an interactive weekly women’s exercise program that includes reflection sessions, and group seminars that provide a platform for Afghan women to discuss issues related to mental health, PTSD, intergenerational trauma, and common health concerns—such as Type 2 Diabetes and heart disease. To recruit participants and volunteers, Shokoor will partner with the Afghan Coalition, the oldest and most recognized Afghan community organization in the Bay Area.
In rural Uganda, extension services help farmers apply cutting edge technologies and best practices that promote agricultural productivity and improve rural livelihoods.
By Francesca Munsayac and April Young
In rural Uganda, extension services help farmers apply cutting edge technologies and best practices that promote agricultural productivity and improve rural livelihoods. While most African countries have extension programs that arm local farmers with the agricultural information they need to succeed, limited resources often prevent extension workers from visiting more remote areas. Furthermore, the vast majority of technological solutions for agriculture are only offered English, limiting the reach of other IT innovations. To address this challenge, Big Ideas Contest winners, Linlin Liang and Daniel Ninsiima, developed “m-Omulimisa”, a phone-based platform that increases access to extension services for rural Ugandan farmers by providing critical agricultural information via SMS messaging in a local language. Through m-Omulimisa, any farmer in Uganda, regardless of location, can ask agricultural questions in any language via text message, and receive answers from a trained extension officer.
According to Liang, m-Omulimisa, which means “mobile extension officer” in native Luganda, bridges the access and information gap left behind by existing agricultural extension programs. The m-Omulimisa team teaches extension officers how to use the platform, and in turn, these officers train farmers how to submit their questions. The platform currently has over 100 registered extension officers and is being used by nonprofit organizations like World Vision, Sasakawa Global 2000, VEDCO, as well as local district governments, to reach underserved farmers.
“Our product utilizes SMS services as a vehicle to communicate between officers and farmers. We made our decision to use text messaging based on what was available and affordable for farmers. Over 65% of Ugandans own mobile phones, and most of these are basic phones which can be used only for calls and text messaging. Only about 5% of Ugandans own smartphones. Additionally, the cost of text messaging in Uganda is a fraction of the cost of calling or data for the Internet. ” Liang said.
While developing their platform, the team confronted various challenges, including mobile illiteracy in rural areas, lack of motivation on behalf of the officers to answer the farmer’s questions, and limitations in the last-mile distribution of agricultural inputs.
The team tackled the issue of mobile illiteracy by working with extensions services partners to integrate mobile phone literacy into every aspect of farmer training and, in the future, they plan on developing videos in local languages that will instruct users on the basic functions of a mobile phone. Next, they will create a reward system that incentivizes and increases extension officer engagement. Lastly, they plan on building a network of community based “agripreneurs” (agricultural entrepreneurs) that will help farmers get access to products by increasing distribution channels in rural communities.
When asked how Big Ideas contest helped the team translate their ideas into further action, Liang responded, “Before the contest, all we had were ideas, but no resources to change our ideas into action. The Big Ideas award made it possible for us to use our education, passion, and skills to start creating a tangible product to make a positive impact in the lives of smallholder farmers in Uganda. Even during the proposal stage, the training and mentorship from Big Ideas were phenomenal. We had a great mentor, Sean Krepp, who was connected through Big Ideas and helped us to rethink and reimagine the business model, partnership strategy, and product development. His guidance was vital in developing our winning proposal and starting a promising social enterprise.”
When asked if they had any advice for future students participating in Big Ideas, the m-Omulimisa team suggested the following:
(1) Identify the unique positioning of your product or service and how it adds value to prospective partners. In their case, many organizations are already providing agricultural extension services through the traditional face-to-face (in-person) approach, but there are not enough extension officers to serve every farmer. Their platform makes it possible to help more farmers in a timely manner at minimal cost.
(2) Human capital is critical in the early stages of developing your innovation. It is very helpful to have a team member who has extensive connections or experience with stakeholders in the industry or field where operations are taking place. Exploring potential partnerships with other existing products and services is also significantly helpful.
(3) Communicate with your team as regularly as possible. Fluid internal communication is a critical prerequisite for early-stage decision-making. If you are working with team members overseas, take advantage of both formal and informal communication tools (e.g., emails and Facebook). Liang and Ninsiima are currently in the registration process of becoming a social enterprise. According to Liang, they will continue refining their business model to better reach underserved communities. In addition, they are looking to partner with university-based and agricultural researchers in order to build a coalition of experts who can respond to farmer’s questions. With this support, m-Omulimisa believes farmers will become vital actors in the movement to alleviate hunger and poverty in the developing world.
This year two Blum Center student instructors, Sonia Travaglini and Julia Kramer, will receive Berkeley’s Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor award. The women were chosen for their command of the subject area, promotion of problem-based learning, and their ability to motivate students.
Sonia attests that the key to being a successful teacher is putting the students first. “My teaching style is all about supporting students to discover their own approach to learning, and to find their unique voice to communicate their knowledge. My teaching philosophy is student-centered; I help students develop self-motivated learning and apply their strengths to their work,” said Sonia.
Julia also believes in having a hands-on approach. “I work with students one-on-one to talk through what they’re trying to accomplish, and how they might reach those goals,” Julia said. “In the courses I teach, we try to give students a variety of design tools they might use, then we support them in figuring out how to apply those tools in their own work.”
Sonia and Julia will receive certificates of distinction and a $250 stipend in recognition of their achievement.
The Blum Center’s Global Poverty & Practice (GPP) minor is one of the most popular undergraduate minors at UC Berkeley, bringing together students from across disciplines to explore poverty, wealth, and inequity through coursework and practical field experience. As a course requirement, students spend six weeks working with local or international organizations on issues ranging from human rights, to public health, to the environment. This year 78 GPP students will graduate, having completed practice experiences in 15 countries around the world. The Blum Center sat down with three graduates–Andrea Miller, Elise Umansky, and Gustavo Alvarez–to hear more about their experiences and future plans.
Skills Gained and Lessons Learned through GPP
The GPP program is highly experiential, enabling students to take what they’ve learned in the classroom and apply it in real world settings. Students are taught to engage with communities, think critically, exercise patience, and persevere. “The work that many GPP students want to do can be disheartening, and it’s important to be resilient,” student Andrea Miller said.
While the students feel classroom-based coursework is critical, they also attest that the greatest education often comes from direct engagement with communities. “[Gaining] knowledge doesn’t necessarily mean [gaining] education,” Alvarez said. “Listening to people’s narratives can teach the greatest lessons.” Umansky agreed. “I will bring with me the importance of humbly honoring the traditions of any community I’m working with, and letting them guide the work.”
Memorable Moments
For Andrea Miller, the classroom engagement was the most impactful. “The Ethics, Methods, and Pragmatics of Global Practice was my favorite class in all of my Berkeley experience,” she said. “Our Professor (Clare Talkwalker) and GSI (Mary Glenn) were the Superwomen duo. My peers were intelligent, caring, and amazing humans. There was something to learn from [each person], and everyone was so accepting of each other and ready to help.”
For Alvarez, a moment from his practice experience solidified his desire to work in service to others. While working on a water project outside Chiapas, Mexico, he met two poor young boys. “I remember the joy of the two brothers-who were 5 and 6- when they met us. They lived in such humble circumstances, yet their faces were bright with happiness. They showed me their toys, their hammock. The reason I am doing what I am doing is for them. I want to help provide clean, drinking water to this and other families so they don’t have to worry about illnesses.”
Like Alvarez, Umansky’s work was motivated by her practice experience. Working with Nepalese communities after the 2015 earthquake that killed nearly 9,000 and injured 22,000 was an eye opening experience for her. “My first trip to Nepal occurred right after the 2015 earthquake, and much of my time was spent on rebuilding efforts,” Umansky said. “When I returned for my Practice Experience, I had the great fortune of living with the same host family. We had tears in our eyes when we reunited at the Kathmandu airport. I worked with an organization providing mental health services to post-earthquake trauma victims. Experiencing the healing and rebuilding effort was very powerful,” she said.
Future Plans and Parting Advice
The students credit the GPP program for inspiring the future direction of their careers, which include positions in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Following graduation, Umansky will return to Nepal to work with The Centre for Victims of Torture. In the future she plans to pursue a doctoral degree in Global Health with a focus on mental health in Nepal. Andrea Miller will join the Peace Corps in Guatemala, where she will work in the field of public health. Alvarez’s will join Eaton, an energy company, and plans to pursue a PhD in Environmental Engineering “to develop more effective intervention plans to provide clean, drinking water to individuals in Central America.” All had important parting advice for GPP students.
“Keep an open mind, learn to sit in discomfort, and remember that there is never a completely pure path from which to act,” Umansky said. “No approach to social justice and poverty alleviation work is without flaw, but proceed with genuine intention, a critical lens, and a yearning to always learn.”
Alvarez advises, “Remember: we are not the experts. Those whose lives we are attempting to impact are the experts, and we must work together in order to innovate. Our collaborative efforts to design for meaningful impact will propel us to success.”
Miller encourages students to “Take advantage of the GPP community. The program is a family; people will always have your back here. They will also help remind you that you are not alone against this fight of trying to make the world a better place.”
Each year, UC Berkeley bestows its Distinguished Teaching Award, the campus’ highest honor for teaching. This year, Dr. Khalid Kadir is one of five esteemed recipients. Since joining Berkeley in 2010, Professor Kadir has built a reputation for being brilliant, personable, and passionate, gaining recognition from both his students and colleagues for his accomplishments and his service to others.
Professor Kadir currently teaches courses in Global Poverty & Practice (GPP), Political Economy, and the College of Engineering. The Blum Center caught up with Professor Kadir to hear what drives him, and learn more about his experience teaching at Berkeley.
How would you describe your teaching style?
At the root of it, it’s about building a bridge between theory and people’s lived realities. That’s a formal way of saying that I try to make things relatable, relevant, and meaningful to my students. That’s at the core of my teaching.
I am also excited about what I do and I have a lot of energy. Even when I walk into a class tired, I get pumped up as I dive into the material. The ideas excite me, and working through the ideas with my students gives me energy. I try to keep my classes interactive. I’m not interested in listening to myself talk for an hour; I’d rather have a conversation. When I feel that I’m grinding too hard on complex topics, I pull back and ask the students a really simple question just to get them talking. For example, “What’s your favorite color?” Then, I gradually move towards the content I’m trying to cover.
What makes your interaction with students unique?
Sometimes professors operate in an austere, removed, inaccessible way when they talk to students. I don’t have the capacity to consciously perform when I teach, and as a result I think that students in my classes relate to me, and think “Hey, that’s someone I can actually talk to!” There was a student in one of my engineering classes who came into office hours and asked “Did you read my assignment?” I told him yes. He then asked, “Did you write those comments?” I told him “Yes, I did.” Astounded, he said “You’re the first professor who’s ever done that.” I can’t deny that I was a little shocked to hear that. It was a large course, and he was amazed that I took an interest in each student’s assignment. After that, he came to my office hours every week and we developed a great relationship. He is a deeply respectful person and a powerful thinker, and it was great to have the opportunity to get to know him.
How does your background as an engineer impact your teaching in Global Poverty & Practice?
Like many engineers, I was always interested in going out into the world and applying what I learned, and the GPP program is very much oriented that way. The program doesn’t just include theory classes, it also has a Practice Experience where students engage and then reflect upon how ideas and theories manifest in the real world. This allows students to understand those ideas better and iterate upon them. GPP is a place where I can take social science ideas and work with students to apply them to the world.
I’m an engineer who studied social sciences. Often students are looking for hard engineering skills – they want to know how to use this software or do that quantitative method or produce this other kind of product. I’m trained with those skills, but I’ve come to believe that, when you are working with marginalized people, there are a different set of skills that are actually far more important to the success and failure of projects than “hard” engineering skills. Deep thinking and humility is required. It is important to me that students understand that their ability to engage humbly and effectively with communities is one of the most important skills. I think that resonates with students.
Do you bring concepts from your Global Poverty & Practice courses into your Engineering classes?
One challenge I face is that concepts taught in my GPP courses are not always viewed as valid or relevant in technical engineering courses. Nonetheless, I try to squeeze them in every moment I can. For example, in the middle of a lecture about water chemistry, I will try to bring in the politics of measurement in an attempt to really contextualize things for students. It’s great if we can talk about what chemicals are in the water and in what quantity, but it’s important to also talk about who chooses what to measure, when, and where, and who decides what counts as dangerous or not, and for whom. These are absolutely critical questions, and learning to ask those questions is, for me, a crucial part of my students’ education.
What do you value most about being a professor?
At the root of it, I value the people, the students. I value their willingness to be vulnerable and learn. I value getting to be a part of their difficult journey because I get to see their intellectual and personal progression. Being invited to join the journey that students are on is very rewarding. In the GPP program, the kind of relationships that we – the faculty and staff – build with our students are incredible.
I also value the ways teaching holds me accountable. If you’re real with your students and you’re open with them, they’re going to push you. I can understand why some professors might not want this sort of pushback, but I’m open to it, even though I can’t deny that at times it is hard. As much as we may try to push ourselves, it helps to have other people push us too. I really value my students in that sense – they push me – and I appreciate them for that.
How does it feel to receive the Distinguished Teaching Award?
I just want to say that it takes a crew or perhaps a village. GPP is unique in that we bring the curricular and co-curricular together. We are deeply integrated throughout the program in a way that I have not seen anywhere else on this campus. We acknowledge that learning doesn’t just happen in these single-semester boxes inside the classroom, but that it’s a complex process that happens between classes, over breaks, through summers, through office hours, and in peer advising.
GPP and the American Cultures Engaged Scholarship program (ACES) are key programs that I’ve been a part of, and both these programs are pushing against the tide of the factory model of schooling. I worry about the future disappearance of programs like these that reward, encourage, and enable great teaching. The invitation to teach in these programs is what has led to this award, and I am grateful to those who share these spaces with me. Overall, I’m excited about this award. This is a space where teaching gets recognized, and I would like to see good teaching recognized and in fact structurally prioritized across our campus.
Professor Kadir and the other award recipients will be honored at a public ceremony on April 19, 2017 in Sibley Auditorium at 5:00 pm. In addition to the ceremony, Professor Kadir will receive a cash award from the campus, recognition by the Academic Senate, and permanent indication as a Distinguished Teacher in the UC Berkeley catalogue.
Winrock International is a global leader in international development with a focus on social, agricultural, and environmental issues. Named after Winthrop Rockefeller, the organization grew out of the visions of both Winthrop and his brother, John D. Rockefeller III. Today, Winrock International supports US-based and international development projects in 45 countries around the world.
The Blum Center recently sat down with Amit Bando, Senior Director of Winrock’s Clean Energy, Environment, and Water group; Erin Hughes, Director of Regional and Country Planning; andJennifer Holthaus, Program Officer, to discuss their experiences and the new projects on the horizon for Winrock. They also shared with the Blum Center seven ways that students can prepare themselves for a career in the international development sector.
What is the mission of Winrock’s Clean Energy, Environment, and Water group? How does your role contribute to this vision?
Amit Bando: For our group, the mission primarily is to empower those at the bottom of the pyramid. We are very focused on rural and agricultural communities which include people who are typically “off-the-grid,” or not connected to a major energy network. We work domestically in the United States and in 45 countries around the world. The issues we address include access to clean water, access to energy, land use, and protection of forests.
Within Winrock, our role is to focus on the resources mentioned and to work with other branches of the organization to address interrelated issues like gender, trafficking, and youth education.
Erin Hughes: The environment is also seen as a key actor. Our mission is to ensure conservation for the benefit of people, not just conservation for conservation’s sake. We aim to make good use of resources and promote conservation by engaging community members so that they’re benefiting from these practices.
Jennifer Holthaus: Globally, Winrock has about 700 employees in 45 countries. The Clean Energy, Environment, and Water group involves roughly 300 people. Amit’s role is to lead the work for this group and coordinate all the different funders which include US government organizations, private companies, and foundations.
Bando: What makes Winrock International unique is that we work with communities directly and with decision makers spanning the local level (e.g. the provincial and municipal) to the national level. This work requires us to bring in the private sector, local community groups, and NGOs. We want projects to be sustainable after we leave, so we encourage practices such as co-management of resources as well as the creation of job opportunities and business models that allow the initial beneficiaries to continue working and expanding their circles.
Lastly, all of our work is very data driven. We do a lot of analysis on what’s working and what’s not working and take that back to the next round of our projects. That’s why we are excited to work here with UC Berkeley since this same iterative, data-based approach is used.
Which project has impacted you the most during your time at Winrock?
Hughes Education for Income Generation was a five-year project in Nepal which focused on helping marginalized youth increase their income. The project was impactful not only because we provided entrepreneurial literacy, but also because we tied it to income-generating activities like vocational training and market-based agriculture. We provided literacy and numeracy, but also showed them how to be an entrepreneur by teaching them about income, profit/loss, and developing simple business plans.
Education for Income Generation was life-changing for the 74,000 beneficiaries we worked with in midwest Nepal. We were working with extremely marginalized people, such as young women who never had job opportunities because of gender discrimination. Through this program, these women were able to learn to read, send their kids to school, and help their kids with homework.
Bando: It’s important to recognize in a country like Nepal that there is a benefit that goes beyond any specific project. The beneficiaries of the Education for Income Generation program are marginalized people who do not have a lot of equity, so they cannot go to the banks to get money. Since banks are more likely to lend money to cooperatives, Winrock developed a separate project that allowed farmers to work in cooperatives. We then helped these groups receiving funding that they could distribute to their members.
With our wide spread of projects, Winrock International is working in 70 of the 74 districts in Nepal, and we have been able to help 250,000 farmers. The project-level work we’re doing has a huge impact on the sector and the country.
Holthaus The John D. Rockefeller 3RD (JDR 3RD) Scholars Program supports independent policy research. Our program worked with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to fund an independent research team in Myanmar in 2007. At this time, Myanmar was still very much closed to the world. We convinced the Ministry of Livestock, Fisheries, and Rural Development in Myanmar to hold an open grant competition. We were worried that no one would apply, but we received 11 applications.
The winning team of the competition was led by Dr. Ai Thanda Kyaw. Kyaw’s team took 660 household surveys and returned a very clear picture of the impacts on poor households of the government’s practice of aggressively culling chickens to stem the spread of avian influenza. After the report was released, the government went in a different direction regarding their culling practice. Dr. Kyaw is now Winrock’s country director for our USAID-funded program in Myanmar. That’s the kind of policy and research impact we want to have in other countries. We want to see governments consider data, and we aim to use a bottom-up approach to influence change.
Bando For Enhancing Capacity For Low Emission Development Strategies (EC-LEDS) we have been working with municipalities in the Democratic Republic of Georgia. Currently, we are working with 14 different municipalities in Georgia. Georgian officials asked Winrock to show them how to use energy more efficiently in institutions, such as fire stations, schools, supermarkets, and shopping centers. Winrock approached this project with the concept that it makes business sense to improve energy use and use water more efficiently. We wanted to focus on the business side of things first, and then hopefully, that’ll have huge impacts for climate change. Based on our work in the municipalities, the ministry of the national Georgian government asked Winrock to develop a nation-wide policy on climate change which has now become the country’s Low Emissions Development Strategy.
We didn’t do this work top-down, but rather built up the case and showed the government our data-driven analysis to encourage a change in their practices. A lot of the work we do at Winrock follows this model. We generally start at the grassroots level and support capacity-building for individuals, researchers, policymakers, and political actors.
What challenges have you faced in the Clean Energy, Environment, and Water Group, and how did you overcome them?
Holthaus: With the JDR program, something I’ve learned is how long it takes to start something new and get it off the ground. Getting other staff to know what the program is and be on board basically took us ten years. Now, we have nine new research teams being incorporated into five projects. My advice is that it is worth sticking it out and making a long-term commitment. You just have to be careful not to burn out so that you can see it through.
Bando: Because we work internationally and domestically, there are a lot of knowledge transfer opportunities, and typically people think that the knowledge goes from the US out. However, I think there are even more opportunities to transfer knowledge in from other countries. A lot of us who work in this field share this sentiment, and I think there isn’t enough emphasis on that.
Hughes: We had a recent exchange with Cuban Farmers who came to the US. Several years ago we also had a reverse Farmer-to-Farmer–like exchange in our Forestry Project in Russia. Instead of US volunteers sharing their skills or expertise abroad, Russians volunteered to come to the United States to teach Americans about forestry equipment, so that the companies could adjust their machines to withstand cold winters with the hope of selling their product in Russia.
Bando: Funders and the public at large often don’t know how important this transfer of knowledge is. For example, it was complete happenstance that the US Forest Service found out about a Nepalese forest management tactic. In Yosemite, the US Forest Service used to have uncontrolled fires. Nature has a way of starting small fires that die out and clear out the underbrush, but Yosemite didoesn’t allow these small fires. The Forest Service looked to Nepal for a solution. The Nepalese government had been managing the Himalayan forests for a long time with very simple, traditional means. Once a year, the King allows the people to go into the protected forest to collect branches and leaves for their thatch roofing. No one really calls this good forest management, but it has been working effectively for millennia.
Looking forward, what’s in store for Winrock? Are there any new projects that you’re particularly excited about?
Bando: Finance–the ability to finance deals is important to learn. Our focus is on the ultimate beneficiary, which could be, for example, a farmer sitting away from the grid who has little to no access to the market. How can we make it possible for that farmer to borrow $300 for a solar pump or $2500 for two solar panels that to increases their productivity? Their outlook can change and expand dramatically with such a loan.
Holthaus: Winrock sees a lot of work coming down the pike on renewable energy financing. The levels we’re seeking to facilitate and open up options for range from small farmers (micro-finance) to national governments. We want to help accelerate markets for renewable energy technologies which can increase peoples’ incomes. For these kinds of endeavors, a neutral entity like Winrock is often needed to bring the various market players together.
Bando: Another focus is land management issues. There are lots of areas which need protection and better management. Conservation financing can greatly benefit this process, so this is another topical area that would be helpful for students to know if they’re interested in development.
What advice do you have for students interested in entering the energy or water sector? Are there particular subjects you recommend they explore or certain skills that they learn?
Bando, Holthaus, and Hughes:
Writing. People don’t realize how important it is to be a good writer. We often work with people for whom English is a second language. We need someone who can communicate with our ESL field staff without using jargon, but can also communicate clearly with the Rockefeller family members on our board as well as donors. They also have to be able to produce professional, published material.
Monitoring and evaluation, impact evaluation. It’s important that people in this field know how to conduct evaluations. They also should have a firm grasp of the quantitative skills involved with monitoring and evaluation, such as utilizing spreadsheets and basic statistics.
Technical skills. There are a lot of people who are majoring in broad areas like International Relations. If you’re just a generalist, you may not have the rigor of the science or the technical depth. Knowing how to conduct an experiment and having solid science skills is important. You can always add other skills, so don’t be scared of exploring one area in depth. The ideal model for technical knowledge is a T-shape: pick your passion and go deep in that area; then you will have the ability to pick up other skills on a surface-level. The Global Poverty & Practice and Development Engineering minors at UC Berkeley are great examples of academic tracks that allow students to do practical studies grounded in development work. Also keep in mind, that “technical” doesn’t have to mean coding and spreadsheet analysis. Having technical skills is more about having the mind for scientific inquiry and holistic rigor.
Survey work. If you have any chance to do survey work, do it. Our projects have to collect data from the field to see if things are working, so we encourage students to gain survey work experience through internships or courses.
We’re big advocates of a second language. Being bilingual is immensely helpful.
Many of our colleagues in Winrock’s US Office were Peace Corps volunteers. Gaining a similar overseas experience can be beneficial.
Be a good speaker. You can do all this work, but you won’t be able to do anything if your communication skills do not include the ability to speak. Public speaking is a vital method of presenting information.
By Sarah Bernardo, 4th Year English and Legal Studies Double Major, UC Berkeley
According to the official International Women’s Day (IWD) website, IWD was first celebrated on March 19, 1911 in the countries of Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark. Women campaigned for an end to gender discrimination and rallied for increased working, voting, and political rights. In 1913, on the precipice of WWI, March 8 was declared the official date for IWD.
More than 100 years later, International Women’s Day continues to be honored as “a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity.” This year’s theme #BeBoldForChange encourages people around the world to take action to advance gender equality.
The Blum Center for Developing Economies continues to be committed to this vision of gender parity and inclusivity. In honor of International Women’s Day, the Blum Center looks back at our engagement with gender equality over the past five years.
Here’s a snapshot of the numerous ways gender equality is featured in our programs.
Gender Equality is a Key Focus for Our Students
Many of the winners of the Big Ideas@Berkeley contest focused specifically on gender equality.For example, several Big Ideas projects aimed to promote female leadership. 100 Strong, third place winner in the 2013 Global Poverty Alleviation category, combats the lack of female leaders by training a network of female mentors that are matched with middle and high school girls. 100 Strong also empowers young girls to create their own community projects. Empowering Women through Entrepreneurship, the 2016 first place winner of the Financial Inclusion category, fosters economic empowerment in female migrants living in the squatter settlement of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. The organization offers the women information, skills, and low-interest microloans to help develop their small businesses.
Other Big Ideas projects focus on maternal and infant health. WE CARE Solar, winner in the 2008 and 2010 Big Ideas contests, helps meet vital maternity care needs by addressing the issues of unreliable power and communication in health care facilities. The organization developed and distributes compact solar electric systems called “solar suitcases” which power overhead LED lighting, charges cell phones, and provides LED headlamps with rechargeable batteries. Uniting Mother and Child: A Battle Against Postpartum Hemorrhage, third place winner in the 2014 Global Poverty Alleviation category, developed a pressure detecting and reporting device for anti-shock garments. The device aims to improve the ability of existing anti-shock garments to combat postpartum hemorrhage which is the most common cause of maternal mortality in developing countries. Lastly, Que Viva La Mujer: Knights Landing Community Maternal Health Program, second place winner of the 2013 Maternal and Child Health category, proposed opening a maternal care unit with an on-site OB/GYN in the Knights Landing community in Yolo County, California. The unit aims to meet the health care and educational needs of the migrant and undocumented women living in the community.
In addition to these Big Ideas proposals, an amazing group of Development Impact Lab (DIL) projects also directly address gender equality. WE CARE Solar and TriSAN are two such projects.TriSAN, a DIL Pipeline Project, focuses on promoting the interrelated goals of sustainable sanitation and gender equality in India. In particular, TriSAN conducted research to better understand the defecation, urination, and menstrual hygiene management needs of women and girls.
Women are Participating and Leading
Almost 75% of the participants in our undergraduate Global Poverty & Practice (GPP) minor are women. Alumni of GPP include Jessica Praphath who graduated in 2013. Passionate about public health and direct community service, Praphath completed her practice experience at the Community Partnership for Families of San Joaquin, and she went on to work there after graduation. Praphath now works as a Junior Consultant at the public health research and consulting firm, John Snow, Inc.
Similarly to Praphath, Nikki Brand‘s GPP experience has had a deep impact on her career trajectory. Dedicated to conducting development fieldwork addressing poverty, Brand moved to Guatemala shortly after graduating in 2013 to work for Community Enterprise Solutions. Brand now serves as Program Analyst for Feed the Future, a U.S. Global Development Lab at USAID. The initiative focuses on global hunger and food security.
In addition to participating in Blum Center programs, women also lead them. Women led almost 90% of gender equality projects in GPP, 65% of similar projects in Big Ideas, and 57% of gender equality projects in DIL. For example, Katya Cherukumilli led a winning 2015 Big Ideas team. Her team’s proposal was “A Novel Approach to Remediate Groundwater Fluoride Contamination in Nalgonda, India.” Laura Stachel is another outstanding female leader. Stachel co-founded WE CARE Solar in 2006. In addition to the Big Ideas awards, her organization received a DIL grant.
Promoting Gender Equality Beyond UC Berkeley
Faculty, staff, and students associated with the Blum Center have also contributed to the wider pursuit for gender equality beyond campus.
In 2016, Laura Tyson, the Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Blum Center, and Jeni Klugman co-authored the first report for the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment. The report entitled “Leave No One Behind: A Call to Action for Gender Equality and Women’s Economic Empowerment,” begins by explaining the importance of women’s economic empowerment and delivers a decisive call to action. It goes on to describe the pervasive gender gaps in areas such as employment, wages, enterprise ownership, and access to assets. The report then analyzes seven “proven and promising” strategies for expanding women’s economic opportunities which includes tackling adverse social norms and promoting positive role models as well as changing business culture and practice. Lastly, the report closes by detailing a robust agenda for action comprised of seven key principles:
No woman left behind.
Nothing done for women without women.
Equal focus on rights and gains.
Tackle root causes.
State parties must respect international human rights and labour standards.
Partnerships are critical.
Deliver globally.
While Professor Tyson and her team focused on improving gender equality in terms of economic opportunities, Rachel Dzombak and Chloe Gregori released a Blum Center article on January 20 centered on the role of academia in striving for gender parity. In the article, Dzombak and Gregori discus the United Nation’s fifth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 5), “Gender Equality. In response to SDG 5’s call to action, the Blum Center re-examined how academia can promote gender parity in the classroom and beyond. Dzombak and Gregori spoke with staff, faculty, and students in the Blum Center ecosystem. Through their discussions, four insights emerged on how academia can encourage gender equality: provide students (of all genders) opportunities to establish empathy regarding gender discrimination and inequality, support faculty and classes that engage in gender dimensions, connect women students with women mentors, and broaden the innovation ecosystem to encourage interdisciplinary action when tackling issues of gender-based inequality and violence. Based on knowledge developed by partners such as Tyson, Gregori, and Dzombak, the Blum Center will continue to increase our efforts to achieve inclusivity and parity in the classroom, within the lab, and on the field. With all that has been accomplished in the last five years, the Blum Center is hopeful that the next five will yield even greater progress towards gender equality.
The United Nations has long been committed to pursuing gender equality in all areas of society. Most recently, the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals, one of which is to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.” Decreasing barriers while increasing opportunities for women and girls to participate in scientific fields is one key way to advance economic and educational equality.
In recognition of the importance of women in science, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed that February 11 of each year would be the International Day of Women and Girls in Science.
Organizations like the Blum Center of Developing Economies at UC Berkeley endeavor to promote women and girls in science by encouraging and supporting their work at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional level. In honor of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, the Blum Center is proud to spotlight innovative researchers, inventors, students, and faculty involved in our ecosystem.
Kara Bresnahan
Kara Bresnahan was a member of the Big Ideas team behind “Project Drsti: A Sustainable Method for Alleviating Vitamin A Deficiency.” Bresnahan received a BA in Nutritional Sciences and French as well as a PhD in Nutritional Science and Global Health from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She then went on to earn an MPH with a Nutrition and Epidemiology emphasis at UC Berkeley.
During her time at Cal, Bresnahan worked with Christopher Johnson to develop Project Drsti which proposes alleviating Vitamin A deficiency in people living in developing regions by harnessing the metabolic power of the probiotic bacterium Lactobacillus casei (L. casei.) Bresnahan and Johnson aimed to engineer L. casei to produce provitamin A (β-carotene) during yogurt fermentation with the goal of creating provitamin A biofortified yogurt that could benefit populations such as people in India who consume yogurt regularly. The bacteria strain developed by Project Drsti can be inexpensively created, freeze-dried for storage, and easily integrated into existing yogurt-production methods. Bresnahan’s proposal won Honorable Mention in the Global Health category of the 2015 Big Ideas@Berkeley contest.
Katya Cherukumilli
Cherukumilli conducted field work in Colorado on climate change impacts on plant species distribution.
Katya Cherukumilli helped develop the Big Ideas proposal “A Novel Approach to Remediate Groundwater Fluoride Contamination in Nalgonda, India.” Cherukumilli was a Regents’ and Chancellor’s Scholar at UC Berkeley who earned a BS in Environmental Sciences while completing minors in Global Poverty & Practice and Energy & Resources. Cherukumilli is currently pursuing a PhD in Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley.
In 2015, Cherukumilli worked with four other UC Berkeley students to address the issue of drinking water contaminated with toxic levels of fluoride which can lead to dental and skeletal fluorosis. The project built upon Cherukumilli’s graduate research into sustainable fluoride remediation which was supported in part by a USAID-sponsored Development Impact Lab (DIL) Explore Travel Grant in summer 2013.
Cherukumilli and her team focused their project on rural Nalgonda, India, and proposed using raw bauxite ore to create a defluoridation technology that is affordable, effective, and easy to operate as well as maintain. Cherukumilli also worked with her team to design business models that would allow defluoridated water to be provided to low-income populations at an incremental price meant to encourage use of the decontaminated water. This approach won second place in the Global Health category of the 2015 Big Ideas@Berkeley contest. The project went on to win first place in UC Irvine’s Designing Solutions for Poverty Contest, first place in the Research category of the 2016 USAID Higher Education Solutions Network Technical Convening’s Innovation Marketplace, and received funding as a VentureWell E-Team.
Cherukumilli is currently part of the Development Engineering graduate program, and she plans to complete her PhD at Cal in May 2017.
Amy Herr
Amy Herr is the Lester John & Lynne Dewar Lloyd Distinguished Professor of Bioengineering at UC Berkeley. She is also the Faculty Director of the Bakar Fellows Program which fosters faculty entrepreneurship in the STEM+ fields. Professor Herr holds a BS from the California Institute of Technology in Engineering and Applied Science, an MS from Stanford University in Mechanical Engineering, and a PhD from Stanford University in Mechanical Engineering.
Professor Herr was the Principal Investigator for a Development Impact Lab grant that developed a rapid point of care device for infant HIV diagnostics. The project utilized existing microfluidic technology to develop a device that could detect the presence of HIV viral proteins in infants in low resource settings. Her project secured a DIL Explore Travel Grant in Spring 2014 which allowed PhD student Rachel Gerver to conduct a pilot study in HIV clinics and central testing labs in Kenya.
Professor Herr’s lab at UC Berkeley focuses on bioinstrumentation for quantitative biology and medicine. The point of care device for infant HIV diagnostics is just one innovation to come out of her lab. Professor Herr has won numerous awards for her research including the NIH New Innovator Award, the Ellen Weaver Award from the Association for Women in Science, and the Mid-career Achievement Award from the American Electrophoresis Society. In December 2016, Professor Herr received the prestigious honor of being inducted into the National Academy of Inventors.
Currently, Professor Herr is supervising several Bioengineering seminars in Spring 2017 including the Master of Engineering Capstone Project (ENGIN 296MA) and the Senior Design Projects course (BIOENG 192.) Professor Herr is also continuing her research in her lab.
Emily Woods
Briquettes: Briquettes made in summer 2015 by the Feces to Fuel team in Naivasha, Kenya.
Emily Woods is the co-founder of the sanitation start-up, Sanivation which currently operates in Kenya. Woods developed Sanivation as a research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute while earning her BS in Mechanical Engineering. Woods then went on to receive her MS and PhD from the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley.
Sanivation installs container-based toilets in Kenyan homes for free and charges a small monthly fee to service them. The company then takes the waste and transforms it into a clean burning alternative to charcoal. Sanivation also licenses their model to refugee camps and trains local staff to help meet the immediate demand for sanitation services.
In 2015, Woods and her co-founder, Andrew Foote, collaborated with two other UC Berkeley students to create the Feces to Fuel team. Their project, “Feces to Fuel: Saving Trees, Budgets, and Lungs,” aimed to unlock “the potential in human feces and other waste streams by transforming it into affordable household cooking fuel.” Through the project, Sanivation provides in-home toilets to low-income households. They then collect the human and agricultural waste, treat it, and turn it into charcoal briquettes. In addition to being a renewable energy source, the briquettes produce less smoke than traditional charcoal which results in a reduction of indoor air pollution and exposure to toxic fumes. Feces to Fuel won first place in the Energy and Resources Alternatives category of the 2015 Big Ideas@Berkeley contest. In 2016, the team won second place in the Big Ideas Scaling Up category.
Currently, Woods serves as the Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Sanivation. Her social enterprise aims to expand throughout East Africa and serve one million people by 2020.
Kara Nelson
Kara Nelson is a Professor of Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on topics such as pathogens in water and sludge, water reuse, nutrient recovery, and sanitation in developing countries. She has won several awards for her research including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and a Fulbright Fellowship to Colombia.
Professor Nelson was the Principal Investigator for research into designing a business model for toilet waste. Professor Nelson’s research focused on developing a sustainable business model for the treatment of potentially pathogenic waste in household toilets. In Fall 2013, her project was awarded a DIL Explore Travel Grant that allowed MBA student Ryan Jung and PhD candidate William Tarpeh to travel to Nairobi, Kenya, to pilot test several prototypes with users.
Professor Nelson was also the Principal Investigator for an urban sanitation management project. This project focused on managing fecal sludge in septic tanks within urban areas of India and Bangladesh. A DIL Explore Travel Grant allowed PhD student, Sharada Prasad, to travel to South Asia for further research into fecal sludge management.
In the Spring 2017 semester, Professor Nelson is teaching several Civil and Environmental Engineering courses including Environmental Engineering (CivEng 111) and Water Systems and Society (CivEng 110.)
The Blum Center and Big Ideas@Berkeley is pleased to collaborate on an exciting initiative supported by the State of California to strengthen the UC’s innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem.
Long recognized as a campus hub for educating and supporting innovators, the Center’s Big Ideas@Berkeley social innovation contest and ecosystem — and more recent Social Innovator OnRamp class — have produced a remarkable record of for-profit and non-profit successes.
Over the past decade, we’ve encouraged, mentored, and supported over 5,000 student innovators, whose efforts have attracted over $150 million in additional funding and valuation after competing in Big Ideas. We are proud of our student innovators and look forward to collaborating and strengthening our ties with the other partners on campus.
According to Sophi Martin, Innovation Director at the Blum Center, “this network will strengthen the ties between already prominent entrepreneurship programs to have even more impact at the local, state, and national level, including coordinated entrepreneur support across the programs and special events to augment the already vibrant innovation ecosystem on the campus.”
The Blum Center is particularly energized to work on enhancing the reach of our social entrepreneurship programs among women and people in underrepresented communities in innovation systems. We are passionate about increasing diversity among founding teams and look forward to continuing to build the unique services available to all innovators.
Students from the Blum Center’s Global Poverty and Practice Undergraduate Minor during fieldwork in the Philippines. Photo Credit: Kristy Drutman
By Rachel Dzombak and Chloe Gregori
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent a prioritized agenda for global change by 2030, with objectives such as the elimination of poverty and an end to world hunger. The SDGs present an integrative approach to development by addressing intersectional linkages of poverty that lead to global inequality. The fifth SDG entitled “Gender Equality” is a strong example of this cross-cutting new approach. SDG 5 measures gender equality along nine broad dimensions including increasing access to education for girls, ending gender discrimination, eliminating sexual violence, addressing unpaid work, and increasing female political participation.
In order to truly take action, society, and by extension universities, must address the many nuanced ways in which gender inequality manifests, as well as its systemic causes and its complex interactions with other forms of discrimination. In response to SDG 5, the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley is reexamining what academia can do to improve gender equity – in the classroom and in society. From discussions with faculty, students, and staff, four key insights are emerging.
1. Provide students (of all genders) opportunities to establish empathy
A critical first step for students is to understand why gender equality exists, why most difficult issues in society are not gender neutral, and why working toward gender equality is a worthy pursuit. To that end, establishing empathy for a community or population increases students’ motivation to work on a challenge area and heightens their awareness of problem implications. In order to bring the complexities of gender equity and other global problems alive for students, the Blum Center facilitates connection with those that know and live the problem. This includes examining the root cause of gender inequities in our courses, working alongside marginalized individuals who experience discrimination firsthand in our fieldwork, and discussing strategies in panels and events. Ensuring students of both genders engage in gender equity efforts is a challenge many universities face. Over 95% of fieldwork and projects dedicated to gender equality have been led by female students. Men have an active role in the pursuit of gender equality, but may not know where and how to engage. Whether by facilitating events on campus or supporting fieldwork opportunities, all students need opportunities to hear from and engage with varying perspectives.
2. Support faculty and classes that engage in gender dimensions
The Blum Center strives to support faculty who research and teach about the gender dimensions of global challenges. For some students, classes provide a “critical awakening” or a first exposure to the complexities of gender dimensions in development and everyday life. One Blum-affiliated course, “Water and Development,” taught by Professor Isha Ray, (Energy and Natural Resources, Gender Studies), covers not only the policy and technical challenges that prevent universal access to water, but also the gender implications of the lack of water and sanitation, and the work needed to address the issues. Many students refer to her class as transformative. As one graduate student reflected, “A lot of people say that we need to increase access to drinking water to prevent child mortality, and Isha always says: what about the health of the woman who is carrying the water on her back?” Engaging students with the nuanced implications of gender in anti-poverty work in the classroom allows them to take this perspective into the field, and into their future careers as development practitioners.
3. Connect students with mentors
Mentorship can drive students’ connections to projects and impact areas. Mentors take many forms: a faculty advisor shaping a research endeavor, an alum providing project feedback, or a peer student with experience in a particular subject area. Interviews with students reveal that mentors often inspire students to take on specific projects as well as enlighten students to a dimension they previously had never thought to incorporate. When a team works on a project but is unaware of the gendered implications, that represents an opportunity to connect the students with a mentor who can shed light on why their proposed intervention may differentially impact individuals of different genders. For women students in particular, having the opportunity to work with a female mentor can also grow their vision of the potential impact they can have. As one graduate student said, “The reason I continue to have a lot of interest in my project is that I’m a woman- working with a woman- with a women advisor- on a project for women…which is awesome.” The presence and continued support of mentors can solidify students’ intention to devote time, energy and resources to make impact, including around gender equality.
4. Broaden innovation ecosystem to encourage action from diverse sectors
Interdisciplinary problem solving, by diverse problem solvers, is necessary to tackle the world’s most urgent and complex problems. This is particularly true about gender-based inequality and violence. When addressing such multi-faceted issues, experts from multiple disciplines are required. Policy, technology, economics, social sciences, as well as other fields, must come together to enable changes to entire systems. As examples of this approach, the Blum Center’s Global Poverty & Practice undergraduate minor and Development Engineering graduate program include students across a wide variety of disciplines — from engineering, social sciences, to arts and humanities — all working together on real issues in and out of the classroom. This innovation ecosystem has supported the implementation of a screening tool for cervical cancer, community conversations around masculinity stereotypes, and a summer camp to encourage teenage girls to stay in school. This impact-oriented ecosystem also helps to recruit and retain women and underrepresented students in entrepreneurship and engineering. Over 60% of students across our programs are female (vs. 3% female CEOs, for example) and women-led teams are on average slightly overrepresented among winners of our annual Big Ideas contest. In addition to encouraging and training students to tackle gendered issues, universities also need to expand opportunities for women to become leaders in their respective fields.
Moving Forward
At the Blum Center, we are exploring strategies to make progress toward gender equality. We are interested in engaging with a wide variety of experts. We imagine there are many methods that should and can be implemented (and if you think so too, we’d love to hear them). At this point, what we know for sure is that we want to support individuals engaging in challenging conversations, provide space for students to feel comfortable tackling hard issues, and encourage knowledge sharing throughout our ecosystem. SDG 5 needs smart people working across disciplines, and with irrational determination to end inequality for women, viz., half the world’s population (and ⅔ of those living in poverty). It is our hope that helping students to engage in gender dimensions will prepare them to tackle the many forms of gender inequality as they become tomorrow’s leaders, and will inspire more impact makers to join the fight.
The Blum Center is UC Berkeley’s interdisciplinary hub for poverty action and poverty studies, bridging technology, scholarship and practice to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges. Home to thousands of like-minded students on the UC Berkeley campus, the Blum Center has been an advocate of gender equality since the center’s inception; over 20% of the Center’s project portfolio consistently focuses on gender-oriented projects, tackling both domestic and international challenge areas such as domestic violence, maternal health, community sanitation, and other issues that differentially affect men and women.
Rachel Dzombak is a PhD candidate in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. She currently researches the role of product design in enabling sustainable supply chain decisions as well as methods to increase women’s participation in STEM and entrepreneurship. She is in the Development Engineering PhD minor program offered through the Blum Center.
Chloe recently graduated in Peace & Conflict Studies with a minor in Global Poverty & Practice (GPP) from UC Berkeley. Her previous involvement as The Blum Center includes peer advising for the GPP minor, serving as the Director for the Anti-Trafficking Idealab, and working as a Program Assistant under the Director of Student Programs and the Director of Innovation. She is now Partnerships and Programs Associate at LeanIn.Org
On the evening of November 4, 2016, students, anti-trafficking experts, community members, and professionals from a wide variety of fields filled Banatao Auditorium at Sutardja Dai Hall for the advanced screening of Siddharth Kara’s feature film, Trafficked. There was standing room only, as over 150 people attended the event sponsored by The Blum Center for Developing Economies and the Institute for South Asia Studies.
Prior to the screening, guests mingled and learned from community members about anti-trafficking initiatives on the UC Berkeley campus. Members of the student-run Anti-Trafficking Coalition at Berkeley were on-hand to provide information to attendees.
After the mixer, Director of Special Projects Heather Lofthouse kicked off the main event by giving a brief history of the Blum Center. Since the founding of the first center at UC Berkeley in 2006, there is now a Blum Center on all ten UC campuses. Collectively, these centers have offered courses to over 16,000 students, providing opportunities to engage in research or service in over 75 countries. Lofthouse also credited the American Himalayan Foundation (AHF) and their STOP Girl Trafficking initiative for helping make the screening possible.
Next, Hannah Ousterman and Kathy Brasil, co-directors of the Anti-Human Trafficking IdeaLab at the Blum Center, explained the work of their organization. The IdeaLab is an interdisciplinary think tank comprised of undergraduate and graduate students that focuses on researching sex trafficking, labor trafficking, and issues related to gender-based violence. The film screening is one of their main events this fall.
Brasil then introduced Siddharth Kara, the screenwriter and producer of Trafficked. Kara is an internationally renowned expert on human trafficking. He is a Fellow at the UC Berkeley Blum Center and Director of the Program on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Currently, Kara also advises the United Nations, foreign governments, and the US government on anti-slavery issues. Kara encouraged audience members to attend the Break Free Run in Oakland which takes place annually to raise awareness and funds to combat human trafficking. Kara also highlighted AHF’s STOP Girl Trafficking Initiative which was founded by Richard C. Blum and has helped 15,000 Nepali girls stay in school and avoid being victimized by traffickers.
In relation to Trafficked, Kara explained that the film was inspired by his nonfiction book Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. The purpose of the film, according to Kara, is to take audiences on an authentic journey introducing them to the brutal realities of human trafficking. Kara explained that most people who grow up in the United States learn about the transatlantic slave trade and the brave campaign to eradicate slavery that was inspired by movements in Europe. However, Kara insists that the 13th amendment was not the end, but just the beginning. Kara said, “Slavery still exists here and throughout the world more pervasively and perniciously than anyone wants to acknowledge. Slavery can be seen everywhere, from the food we eat, to the clothes we wear, to the smartphones in our hands, and to the young women raped by our friends, colleagues, and neighbors.” He continued, “Slavery strips people of what makes them human–their dignity, freedom, and even control over their own bodies.” Kara closed by saying that he hopes Trafficked will inspire people to join the efforts to end slavery.
After the film, Chloe Gregori, Program Assistant at the Blum Center, led a panel discussion with Siddharth Kara, cast member Patrick Duffy, trafficking survivor and anti-trafficking advocate Minh Dang, and Humanity United’s Investments Manager Sandy Tesch Wilkins.
Gregori started the panel off with a few prepared topics for each panelist before opening up the discussion to questions from the audience.
Panel Discussion
Siddharth Kara
“What led you to take on this project?”
When I wrote my first book, which was published in January 2009, I had the aspiration that the stories in the book could be told in a feature film format. I didn’t have any idea how to write a screenplay at first because I only had experience writing non-fiction books, but I knew that millions more people would see a film than know about me or come to one of my classes. Film is one of the most powerful tools we have to change things. Just look at films like Blood Diamond and The Killing Fields. My aspiration was to create a film that could be the center of gravity to change the narrative on human trafficking.
Given the large number of different types of trafficking, how did you choose the three types of trafficking featured in this film?
The challenge was to convey as much information as possible in a condensed film. I knew that I wanted to make a global film set in the United States. A global film because that is the reality of human trafficking, and set here because people don’t realize that side of trafficking. This country has the resources and energy to make an impact globally.
What are your hopes for how the film will help advance the anti-human trafficking movement?
My dream is that this film will capture the blood, sweat, and passion of enough people to do
whatever needs to be done to eradicate every form of slavery there is today. It is my hope that after seeing this film more people will think “Not on my watch. I will not pass this disease on to my children.”
Patrick Duffy
“How did you become involved in this film?”
I got a phone call to be part of this movie. I read the screenplay and found it intriguing and very depressing. The story is about the people next door. They are people you think are good but do the things my character did in the film. We all think of Ashley Judd with wings, but in this film she’s different. This film is another focus of what I do, which is to try to make something of value every day. For example, on our last day in Houston a woman had gone to a nail salon which is another common site for labor trafficking. The young Indonesian girl who did the woman’s nails shook her hand after the manicure and left a piece of paper with a phone number in her hand. The woman went back later on to find out if the girl was okay, but by then she was gone. Those opportunities to make a difference exist every day. I make an effort to keep my eyes open. If everyone does a little bit, we can have an enormous impact.
Sandy Tesch Wilkins
“Can you tell us more about Humanity United’s work?”
Within Humanity United, I specifically work with corporate supply chains. For example, some of the characters referenced having to pay off a debt or being recruited for a job that they thought was one thing (working on a cruise ship) but then being trafficked. Consumer products, agriculture, and construction are common areas for labor trafficking. Humanity United doesn’t have a particular geographic focus, so it does work in the US and outside of it.
“What are your reactions to the film?”
I was very impressed that they were able to weave so much into this film. It covers a lot about trafficking which is a complex problem that affects over 20 million people in the world.
Minh Dang
“Can you tell us more about your work on the United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking?”
Human trafficking is an atrocity that requires our emotional connection to the issue and our best thinking. In our first report, one of the council’s recommendations was to look at representations of human trafficking in the US media. The media’s focus has largely been on trafficking outside the US. When the issue is portrayed in the US, sex trafficking is emphasized almost exclusively.
“How do you envision survivor leadership in the anti-trafficking movement?”
I am a survivor, but people often don’t think that survivors look like me and can be someone next door. People have been exposed to “disaster porn”–we are either desensitized to atrocities or are blown out of the water by how horrible it is. Survivors in leadership positions are trying to put a human face to the movement. We want to say that not only do survivors need to have a seat at the table, but they need to be leading what is happening.
Audience Q&A
Panel, from left to right: Kara, Sandy, Minh, Patrick.
1) Audience member:“How do you talk to people who are feeling overwhelmed by the issue of trafficking?”
Dang: The first thing you should tell them is that the feeling of being overwhelmed is only 1% of what trafficking survivors experience. If survivors can endure 99% more, then they can work through their emotions. Second, you should give them action steps to deal with their feelings and help solve the issue.
2) MISSSEY representative:“How do you leave work at work when you are dealing with individuals who have gone through traumatic events in their lives like exploitation and trafficking?”
Dang: Self-care is not a singular act. Organizations should be designed to have the practice built in. You need to really find out what brings you joy and seek out other allies. Be able to step back from the work, and have accountability partners that help you follow through with your self-care like a gym buddy.
Kara:Anyone who does human rights work has to be very mindful. You are never the one who has suffered as much as the person you are meeting or documenting, but it does take an emotional, mental, and physical toll. I wasn’t that good about it early on. I didn’t realize that I needed to take the time to heal. [Self-care] requires a community and some help.
Ashley Judd did a Masters of Public Policy at the Kennedy School. She did a good deal of time in war zones and refugee camps. We spent time talking about how we didn’t take the time needed to rest and repair. Since then, I’ve focused on time with family and doing simple things like going to the movies. For any of you who are considering working in human rights, make self-care part of your journey because if you break down there is one less person doing that crucial work.
Duffy: I stand in awe of every person I’ve met who is on the front lines of addressing these issues, but there are people who may not be able to do that. However, they can still do something. For those of us who can’t muster the life condition to dedicate our lives the way the rest of this panel has, we can do something that is still valuable. We can be the people who represent the average, everyday folks. I’m a voice for us “weekend warriors.”
3) Counselor and Human Trafficking Researcher: “Do you know of any avenues for the resiliency of the counseling community in relations to addressing mental health concerns for survivors?”
Dang: Research on the mental health of survivors is an area that I myself want to learn more about. There are programs around the world that have worked with survivors over the long-term, but I don’t think that there are actually very good studies on it.
Wilkins: If you’re looking for specific NGOs for models, [Humanity United] works with the Alliance to End Slavery and Trafficking. There are a number of policies that they set forth that may be useful for you to look at.
4) Peter Bittner, Journalist: “What is the role of the media in shaping the public’s perception of issues like human trafficking?”
Duffy: It’s a tough question about the media and their responsibility for social issues. Film companies’ responsibilities are to their stockholders, but we need to hold our reporters and our network news accountable. We need to hold their feet to the fire. We have an avenue to do that: our social media networks. We make huge changes in our institutional norms through social media. I have long advocated that network news shouldn’t be rated. It should be standardized and not focused on making profit. If we did that, then that section of the media would fulfill their responsibility. However, for entertainment media, it’s a harder request. There are passion projects that have a positive effect such as Philadelphia and Blood Diamond, but they also attract a certain market. The aim is still to make profit.
Dang: There is a responsibility to stop using the term child prostitute. Not labeling survivors as prostitutes is the responsibility of the media.
5) Peter Bittner, Journalist: “Why did you choose to make a feature film instead of a documentary?”
Kara:There have been several well done documentaries on issues of trafficking, but very few commercially viable feature films. Feature films though can attract a much larger audience than a documentary ever will. Patrick [Duffy] can testify to how hard it is to make a movie and how hard it is to get people to see it. But if it can be done, you can capture a lot of attention and change the current. The current [of anti-trafficking work] is still largely trundling along. This isn’t a brisk river yet because more people need to jump in and help move it forward. If enough people get to hear about issues like this and look up various organizations like AHF and Humanity United, then something can change.
6) Audience member: “Can you comment on what needs to be done about all the men who actually go into the brothels?”
Kara:There was a conscious choice made in this film to show you the truth. It’s not just the
degenerate, perverse, unpleasant men of the world involved in this. It is doctors, lawyers, professionals, politicians, young men, and old men. But men aren’t all scoundrels. There was the quick-thinking bus driver who made all the difference in the climactic arc for two of the characters.
There are competing philosophies in this world about this issue. Is it prostitution or is it trafficking? Demand Abolition is an organization that follows the Nordic model in which Sweden was the first country to end the prosecution of trafficking survivors. They passed a law that didn’t make it a criminal offense to sell sex, but made it a crime to buy sex. The law has reduced incidents of trafficking. Other countries have followed this model such as France, but the other side [of the debate] says that prostitution must be made legal and that it should be regulated. This is not to say that people cannot make a fully informed, conscious choice to engage in sex work, but from my experience there have been factors such as poverty or hardship that has led them to this work. With these factors, how can we really know if they had a choice? The ultimate question in this debate is whose rights do we want to protect?
Dang: If we’re talking about ending demand and the people who are needing to survive
through sex work, what is our emancipation plan to help people lead a dignified life? This is a very complicated issue, and putting everyone in jail does not solve the problem.
We have to ask ourselves, “what is the culture we have that fosters the buying of another person?” Do people who grow up in the sex industry and choose to stay as adults really have viable options? What about the “bad men” who were raped as children or who were trained to treat people this way?
We need to evaluate how mothers treat their sons and how fathers treat their sons. We need to talk about early prevention. Action after the fact is not prevention. If sex work is legalized, it doesn’t necessarily decrease trafficking because trafficking just goes underground instead.
Wilkins:Partnership for Freedom sponsored by Humanity United is currently gathering ideas on whether countries should aim for decriminalizing or legalizing sex work as a solution to human trafficking. If you want to engage in this debate, you can submit your ideas there.
7) Audience member:“What direct actions can people take to help end human trafficking?”
Duffy:Have a conversation. People have sex a lot, but don’t talk about it. You can have a sex conversation with your child because then they can come to you with questions. You can have a brilliant conversation that can help change the cycle that leads to trafficking.
Dang:Google survivorsofslavery.org and hug somebody.
Wilkins: Look at a specific piece of clothing or product and find out where it comes from. It can be overwhelming to think of where everything comes from, but focusing on just one item will enlighten you and help you change your purchasing habits.
Kara: The focus of this film is on sex trafficking, but there were references in the film to labor trafficking. If you had done nothing else on this issue and knew nothing about it prior today, the fact that you were here tonight is already the first step. You are on the journey and are part of this community now. Maybe after this you’ll be able to go home and take that second step.
Screening for blood diseases like Malaria is typically done in a lab by a pathologist. But for many people in developing countries, going to a doctor for a blood test is nearly impossible.
With support from the Blum Center, the Fletcher Lab is building a solution to this problem. Matt Bakalar, a Bioengineering PhD student on the team, spoke with the Seeker Network’s Laura Ling about Cellscope. The Cellscope converts a cell phone camera into a handheld microscope, which can detect parasites in the blood in just 30 seconds. This means patients can be quickly diagnosed on site and give treatment right away.
Special thanks to our partners at Seeker. Seeker features adventurers, explorers, and storytellers who take a deep look at some of the most unique and provocative stories, designed to expand our perspective and build our awareness of the world. Through the lens of world, science and exploration, Seeker’s award-winning journalism team covers current events and global issues through daily programming and field documentaries.
Nearly half the people on Earth use inefficient fuel sources like wood or coal to cook their food. Every year three to four million people die from illnesses related to smoke inhalation from cooking this way, as smoke from open fires contains high amounts of toxic chemicals which can cause a variety of illnesses, including lung cancer and stroke.
To help combat this global health issue, UC Berkeley student Danny Wilson has developed a specially designed efficient cookstove. Wilson and his team are distributing these stoves to places like Sudan, Darfur and Ethiopia where the problem is quite prevalent.
Special thanks to our partners at Seeker. Seeker features adventurers, explorers, and storytellers who take a deep look at some of the most unique and provocative stories, designed to expand our perspective and build our awareness of the world. Through the lens of world, science and exploration, Seeker’s award-winning journalism team covers current events and global issues through daily programming and field documentaries.
What if urine, something you flush away without a second thought everyday, could actually be useful? William Tarpeh, a UC Berkeley and Blum Center-supported Environmental Engineering PhD student is researching this very idea. Will spends most of his day extracting the nitrogen from pee to transform it into liquid fertilizer. Recently, Will partnered with Sanergy, a company building toilets in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya. Sanergy collects feces for use in fertilizers, but before working with Will, they were disposing of thousands of liters of urine each day. On a small scale, Will is able to turn urine into fertilizer very easily. The challenge is how to scale up and easily convert large amounts without raising the cost too much.
Special thanks to our partners at Seeker. Seeker features adventurers, explorers, and storytellers who take a deep look at some of the most unique and provocative stories, designed to expand our perspective and build our awareness of the world. Through the lens of world, science and exploration, Seeker’s award-winning journalism team covers current events and global issues through daily programming and field documentaries.
The Blum Center is home to 
On the one hand, James, a mother of four, was eager to advance the education of young tribe members and teach them to live in two cultures. Yet her mind jangled with stories from her grandfather Smith Williams. He had told her about Ba-lay Ba-lin—the Bloody Run—an 1871 atrocity in which white settlers violently forced Native Americans off their land, turning the Eel River red with their blood. In 2007, when James first stepped onto the UC Berkeley campus to talk with Mechanical Engineering Professor Alice Agogino, now education director of the 
Like past collaborations, the recent educational one was the result of shared interests and available funding. Zhao Qui, project director of the Pomo Youth College and Career Success Project, explains that in October 2016 her organization received a Department of Education grant to fund new cultural and academic enrichment activities for native students; one area of concern was low access and achievement in math and science. At around the same time, the Blum Center received funding from the National Science Foundation to support development engineering students working on 
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The award was 
Erica Stone, Blum Center Founding Trustee, and President, American Himalayan Foundation
Alice Agogino, UC Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Blum Center Education Director
Dr. Sophi Martin, Blum Center Innovation Director, and
There is a saying in Swahili: “Maji Yaje Kwanza” which means “water is the first of many things”. The people of Mihingoni—most of whom are subsistence farmers—depend largely on rainwater for survival, but climate variability and long dry seasons continue to stunt crop yields. Low agricultural productivity decreases household income, and increases hunger. Lack of proper water, sanitation and hygiene leads to disease, and Kenya continues to have one of the worst under five mortality rates, globally. Families are forced to choose between sending their girls for water or sending them to school, and they choose water first. This limits the prospects for their future, and the cycle of poverty in Mihingoni continues. Until now.
“I didn’t want to make any assumptions about what the community needed, or what the solution should be,” Miller said. “The meeting was entirely spoken in KiGiriama, which allowed those most affected by the project to fully express themselves and their needs. We wanted to put the people’s needs at the center of all of our work.”
Last month, the Blum Center hosted a networking reception for its inaugural cohort of Innovation at the Nexus of Food, Energy and Water Systems (InFEWS) doctoral students. InFEWS is a prestigious National Science Foundation-funded graduate research program that uses the Development Engineering (DevEng) methodology to create solutions for challenges that span food, energy and water systems in low-resource settings domestically and abroad.
In this podcast, Blum Center affiliated faculty, Clair Brown, speaks about alternative ways of structuring an economy and measuring economic progress, based on the Buddhist values of sustainability, interconnectedness, capability and happiness. Click to 
Richard Blum looks back across 10 years of the Global Poverty and Practice Minor he created at UC Berkeley. More than 700 students have worked with organizations in 70 countries around the world–and the program is still growing. Read the blog post 
Global Poverty and Practice student, Marissa Kaye Scott, travels to Malawi to support the program making big impacts in the “warm heart of Africa”. Click 
UC Berkeley changemakers built a cellphone-turned-microscope that detects parasites in the blood in just 30 seconds—without expensive equipment, a lab, or a clinic. Reporter Laura Ling meets with the team to discuss how the innovation could revolutionize the field of public health. Watch 
Save the Date:Impact Design Education Summit
Rachel Dzombak is a PhD candidate in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. She currently researches the role of product design in enabling sustainable supply chain decisions as well as methods to increase women’s participation in STEM and entrepreneurship. She is in the 
Chloe recently graduated in Peace & Conflict Studies with a minor in 
