By Tamara Straus There are three innovations without which, CellScope—a breakthrough microscopy project of Dan Fletcher’s bioengineering lab at UC Berkeley—would not be possible. They are also part of landscape of innovations that may revolutionize global healthcare. The first is the 3D printer. Before these printers were mainstreamed, students in Professor Fletcher’s lab assembled prototype mobile microscopes from sheets of plastic that had to be cut and glued by hand. New engineering designs usually took weeks and were difficult to modify quickly. With the lab’s Stratasys 3D printer, polished prototypes are now being created in as little as a day. The second innovation that seeded Fletcher’s leap forward in microscopy is energy-efficient LED lights. Whereas traditional microscopes rely on powerful arc lamps that cost $200 per bulb and burn less than 300 hours, the CellScope uses long-lasting LEDs that cost as little as $2.50 per bulb, provide up to 20,000 hours of use, and function on battery power in areas with unreliable electricity. The third and probably most important innovation on which CellScope depends is the mobile phone. CellScope has been able to piggyback on tens of billions of dollars of R&D investment by cell phone companies, which have resulted in, among other things, powerful built-in cameras and the mass production of affordable components. As Fletcher pointed out in a Sept 20, 2013 Wall Street Journal op-ed: “New phones with larger screens and better cameras may not markedly improve our lives, but the push for more powerful devices—and manufacturers’ willingness to respond to demand—is on track to improve the lives of millions of people living in extreme poverty. That’s because customers set on having the latest, greatest smartphones are driving a dramatic decrease in cost and increase in functionality that will benefit people whose total annual income is often less than the cost of a single phone.” Back in 2006, when one-megapixel cameras started appearing on phones, Fletcher challenged students in his Optics and Microscopy class to see if the camera of a cell phone could be modified to capture images of human cells similar to those captured on his lab’s $150,000 research microscope. Continuing the project the summer after the class ended, Fletcher and a group of students attached a standard set of lenses to his sister’s Nokia phone and were able to image blood cells, malaria parasites, and the bacteria that causes tuberculosis. It was one of those moments that scientists dream of. “We had discussions, during the course, with doctors about how broadly microscopy is used in clinical medicine, particularly in the developing world. I hadn’t realized that basic optical imaging is still so important to disease diagnosis and that the most definitive diagnosis for many diseases is seeing the actual disease-causing agent in a patient sample,” said Fletcher. “That’s when I realized that if we could do microscopy properly on a mobile phone, the device could be very useful.” Not only was the potential for disease diagnosis outside of hospital infrastructure considerable, Fletcher and his team knew that mobile manufacturers were in a race to integrate phone cameras with computation, SMS, email, Internet access, and friendly user interfaces. In a few short years, this would mean that CellScope could provide diagnostic solutions at pretty much the same rate as any digitally enhanced microscope in a well-equipped hospital. Members of the Fletcher lab could even foresee a time when patients’ blood or sputum smears could be imaged with a mobile digital microscope and then—using a computer algorithm for automated disease detection—proceed immediately to treatment, without the patient stepping foot in a city hospital or medical lab. It would mean, for example, that tuberculosis, which annually kills more than 2 million people and sickens approximately 15 million, could be tackled in places where laboratory facilities are scarce but mobile phone infrastructure is extensive. It would mean that a new point-of-care diagnostic was possible for many diseases that go undiagnosed in many countries, ranging from debilitating eye disorders to chronic blood parasites. The Fletcher Lab began making its case for the potential impact of CellScope slowly, as it was a side project in a lab focused on making cutting-edge biophysical measurements of cells. In May 2007, CellScope won a Big Ideas@Berkeley award of $8,500, and in January 2008 it received a $100,000 grant from Microsoft Research. By May, The Economist, ABC, Wired, and other media had picked up news of CellScope. In April 2009, the team won another $100,000 grant from Intel’s Inspire-Empower Competition, followed by support from the Vodafone Americas Foundation. And in July 2009, it published its first academic journal paper—in PLoS ONE, documenting how CellScope captured images of the parasite that causes malaria in humans, the bacteria that causes tuberculosis, and sickle-shaped red blood cells. The team also showed in a 2012 National Institutes of Health paper how their images of tuberculosis bacteria could be automatically counted using image recognition software. By 2011, CellScope had raised a total of $500,000, thanks to additional grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, UC Berkeley’s Blum Center for Developing Economies and the Center for Information Technology Research as well as the Vodafone Americas Foundation, and was ready to field test its first device. Its first large field experiments took place at health clinics in Hanoi Province, Vietnam. In partnership with the Vietnam National Tuberculosis Program and the University of California, San Francisco, Fletcher’s group deployed 15 CellScopes for a full year, to evaluate their uptake and ability to detect TB at health care facilities with little medical or IT infrastructure. The Hanoi Province pilots showed that community health care workers were able to operate the CellScope and that disease diagnosis met the standard quality available at major Vietnamese hospitals. This work motivated development of a second generation device that is being tested in Hanoi. Recently, another CellScope device was field-tested in Cameroon where the Gates Foundation and the U.S. National Institutes of Health had been struggling to find a way to restart mass drug administration programs to fight the roundworms that cause river blindness and lymphatic filariasis. The problem health workers faced was that patients were at risk of serious health complications, including death, if they were given river blindness medication while co-infected with the Loa loa worm. But to test for Loa loa, health workers needed to draw several milliliters of blood and prepare two blood smears for observation under a traditional microscope—costly and time-consuming steps impossible to carry out across the country. Health programs were basically stuck; they could not proceed with large-scale treatment. Then in February 2014, CellScope trials of 120 people proved adept at counting Loa loa worms, using only a finger prick of blood and a few minutes of analysis time. The trials also validated CellScope’s automated detection of worms in whole blood, and thus the elimination of time-consuming lab diagnosis. Larger tests involving thousands of patients are planned for 2015. “The Loa loa trials may be the ones that allow us to bring the CellScope to scale in developing regions,” said Clay Reber, a UC Berkeley master’s student in bioengineering who has been on the CellScope project since 2010. “They could show that the CellScope meets conventional diagnostic methods and will be cheaper and easier to use than current methods. They could enable the much-needed mass drug administration programs against river blindness to restart. Worldwide, there are 130 million people at risk of being infected with the river blindness worms and about 13 million people with Loa loa.” Another testing ground for CellScope devices is Thailand, where there are only 648 ophthalmologists for the entire country (1.52 doctors per 100,000), with most located in the urban centers of Bangkok and Chiang Mai. Cytomegalovirus (CMV) retinitis, which disproportionally affects HIV patients and can lead to blindness, is treatable, but infection rates are high and diagnosis rates are low. Since 2012, community health workers and other non-specialists have a half dozen Ocular CellScopes to test their utility for patients at risk of CMS. Results are forthcoming. Professor Fletcher admits it’s challenging to address the many diagnostic opportunities that CellScope could address simultaneously. “The key,” he said, “is great collaborators—great clinical collaborators who have embraced the technology, contributed to its design and implementation, and allowed us to plug into existing field studies and test sites with this alternate technology.” With so many potential applications and field tests for CellScope, it is no wonder that the team has at times felt overstretched. CellScopes have been sent and used literally around the world. In Hawaii, the education nonprofit Kahi Kai is using the mobile microscopes to collect data for various water quality indicators, such as plankton. In Egypt, Dr. Annika Guse of Heidelberg University took CellScope for coral reef monitoring. There is even a CellScope in Antarctica, and Parisian artist Geneviève Anhoury is opening a show this December using images taken with a CellScope. Perhaps the strongest example of CellScope’s wide applicability and embrace is its for-profit spinout, CellScope, Inc. In June 2013, Khosla Ventures invested $1 million in the company founded in 2010 by Erik Douglas and Amy Sheng, two former students of Professor Fletcher’s. Since then, the company has secured additional funding on the promise it will create a “smartphone-enabled digital first aid kit.” CellScope Inc.’s first product is an iPhone otoscope that enables parents and physicians to remotely diagnose ear infections in children, an ailment that results in an estimated 20 million U.S. doctors visit per year. The release date for the otoscope is set for 2015. Douglas said 800 doctors and clinicians have been testing it since last December, and 100 California families have been using the device at home. For Fletcher, the CellScope represents not so much new science as a new approach to the old problem of disease diagnosis, one that moves clinical microscopy forward by solving integration, implementation, and usability challenges. “I think it’s really exciting to see how a technology that has come from an academic lab, was created on a 3D printer, and is intended for use by minimally skilled healthcare workers can help someone in a developing region receive better healthcare and maybe even help seed an industry here in the U.S,” he said. Fletcher has no objections to the domestically oriented for-profit spinout, but hopes “there is continued attention—and funding—to support solving the often very different healthcare problems of developing countries with these devices.” Fletcher’s mind tends toward scientific skepticism, toward the need for real-world proofs and repeatable results. But he is willing, after some urging, to forecast his device’s possible impact. “My hope is that CellScope will present a new way of delivering healthcare,” he said. “It has the potential to provide much faster access to disease diagnostic information as well as more regular information about our own healthcare. Our technology is part of a fundamental change in healthcare that will see each of us able to take much better care of ourselves by collecting and analyzing personal health data with devices like mobile phones. And CellScope is just one device in that direction. The mobile healthcare revolution has

By Sybil Lewis A dozen UC Berkeley graduate students eager to learn about different campus initiatives on international development participated in the second “Innovation Crawl” Nov. 20, hosted by the Development Impact Lab (DIL) and the Blum Center for Developing Economies. With the support from the U.S Agency for International Development, DIL hosts events such as the Innovation Crawl and funds projects that are at the intersection of technology and international development. The Innovation Crawl was organized by DIL’s Idea Team—a group of interdisciplinary graduate students dedicated to bringing together students, researchers, and faculty working on international development and promoting cross-campus exchange. “Top-tier research, professional development, and graduate initiatives in international development are going on across this campus, but the average individual misses them,” said Pierce Gordon a member of the DIL Idea Team and MS/PhD Student in the Energy and Resources Group. “DIL’s Idea Team, which was founded last year, aims to gather the communities passionate about global poverty issues and to introduce the great work being completed on this campus.” Participants at the Innovation Crawl come from diverse interests, countries, and disciplines. They included Master’s and PhD students in Public Health, Business Administration, the School of Technology, Development Practice, and Public Policy. “The university, like much of the world, operates in silos. For someone like myself who is on the policy side of social issues, I see the importance of understanding what everyone is doing in different departments,” said Sasha Feldstein, a first year Masters of Public Policy student at the Goldman School of Public Policy. Inspired by the spirit of “bar crawls,” the Innovation Crawl included a tour of four labs and centers on campus. The first stop was the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), which focuses on four core initiatives—Energy, Health Care, Intelligence Infrastructure, and Data and Democracy—to address pressing social and environmental issues facing California. Brandie Nonnecke, a research and development manager of the Data and Democracy core, presented the California Report Card, an online platform that allows visitors to grade the state’s performance on policy issues such as immigration and higher education. The report card was developed by CITRIS in collaboration with the office of Lt. Governor Gavin Newson to harness technology for increased democratic participation. The group crawled onward to the Berkeley Institute of Design, where Mechanical Engineering Professor Alice M. Agonino showed different human-centered, interdisciplinary design projects, ranging from data collection on Massive Open Online Courses to sustainable design projects in Native American communities. The final stop was at the Visualization and Control of Biological Assembly Lab, also known as the Fletcher Lab, where students got a first-hand look at tools being engineered to improve the landscape of disease diagnosis around the world. Frankie Myers, a research scientist at the Fletcher Lab, presented CellScope, a technology that turns the camera of a mobile phone into a high-quality light microscope to image patient samples and diagnose diseases such as tuberculosis. Ali Mohammed, a Somali healthcare practitioner who attended the Innovation Crawl, said that in his home country devices such as CellScope could be crucial, as many deaths occur from curable diseases that are not diagnosed due to lack of equipment, energy, or trained medical professionals. The DIL Idea Team plans to have more Innovation Crawls that are tailored to themes such as sustainability and health and that address the changing field of international

Each fall, students of the Global Poverty & Practice minor of the Blum Center compete to win a cash prize for best photography from their practice experiences. Below are this year’s winners. 1st Place: Priscilla Liu, Hariana India In the foreground, a young boy in a migrant camp in Hariana, Punjab tends a water buffalo. Like other children in the camp, he’s kept home from school to contribute to chores like tending animals or sorting trash. In the background, another boy sorts trash to be sold and a woman walks to a forested area in the camp where ditches serve as makeshift toilets. 2nd Place: Roxanne Rahnama, Fort Dauphin, Madagascar A woman brushes her teeth at sunrise, using water from a lake in Fort Dauphin, Madagascar, where villagers bathe, wash their clothing, and often openly defecate. Water supply and sanitation are serious problems in Madagascar, where diarrheal disease is a top lethal illness among children under the age of 5. 3rd Place: Thoa Hoang, New Delhi, India Walking across a tight rope in the middle of a busy market, this little girl is earning her keep, working to support her family. New Delhi residents tend to pay her only a swift glance, whereas foreign tourists sometimes drop a couple rupees into her

By Sean Burns How can a wedding change a village? Sounds like some kind of development riddle, or maybe even a Hollywood screenplay. Not for Global Poverty & Practice senior Ashley Miller. In the summer of 2013, Miller travelled to Nairobi to participate in a study abroad program at Kenyatta University. As is the case for many students’ international sojourns, Miller’s most transformative experience didn’t occur in the classroom. In the final week of her summer program, Louisa Mwenda, a fellow Kenyatta student invited her to a family wedding in the Kaloleni region of Kenya. The trip would profoundly redirect the course of Miller’s undergraduate education and the entire community of Mihingoni, a sub-county of Kaloleni. Mihingoni is a 6,800-person village in the southern coastal province of Kenya. Miller and Mwenda made the seven-hour bus ride from Nairobi together through farmlands to the Indian Ocean. During the weekend, Miller found herself in all kinds of engaging conversations. Mwenda’s father, an American R&B aficionado, bonded with her over Marvin Gaye, Nina Simone, and the global diaspora of African-American culture. But one thread of conversation trumped them all: the limited access to safe drinking water in the Mihingoni village. For Miller, conversations about water access and public policy were not new. Concern for the political and environmental dimensions of water distribution were part of what drew her to the Blum Center’s Global Poverty & Practice Minor at UC Berkeley and led her to define her own major in Interdisciplinary Studies. Miller’s courses at Kenyatta built upon this interest, focusing on the intersection of resource conflicts with the politics of gender and the challenges of environmental degradation. During her weekend in Mihingoni, she witnessed how everyone depended on rain catchment and, as she began the trip back to Nairobi, filled with the joy and connections of a wedding weekend, she found herself envisioning an ambitious water project with members of the Kenga Family. “I remember saying to Louisa’s aunt during the car ride: Why don’t we work together to get safe water to Mihingoni? But, at first, she misunderstood me; she thought I was suggesting drilling a community bore hole—a small-scale and short-term water source that is commonly funded by outside NGOs.” What Miller envisioned was more ambitious. About 1.5 miles outside of Mihingoni, access to municipal Kaloleni water stops. Beyond, there exists no public infrastructure for the distribution of safe, treated water. What Miller and her comrades in the Kenga family began to flesh out—in the weeks and months after the wedding weekend—was a plan to extend the public water main to Mihingoni, bringing safe water to at least 3,000 community members. Being an entrepreneurial Cal student, Miller sought out the Big Ideas@Berkeley competition as a venue to develop and seed fund the idea. Between the fall of 2013 and spring 2014, Miller, through continual and in-depth communication with members of the Kenga family, created a proposal for a community-built project that, in collaboration with Kilifi-Mariakani Water & Sewage Ltd., the Kaloleni municipal water supplier, would bring safe water to a community-accessible water kiosk located at the central Mihingoni Primary School. The location was chosen for many reasons. First, the school serves more than 800 students; drinking taps and hand-washing sinks would make a significant improvement to quality of life for students and teachers. Second, the Kenga Family had direct ties to the school faculty, and everyone felt that the school administration was well poised to equitably oversee the community water kiosk through a newly created water committee made up of parents, teachers, and the school principal. When Miller’s proposal won 2nd Place in the Big Ideas @ Berkeley Human Rights category, she knew she had accomplished an important step toward the project’s realization. To complement this momentum, the Clinton Global Initiative University (CGIU) invited her to the 2014 annual conference.  Both Big Ideas and CGIU provided Miller with the mentorship and networking essential to the developing project. In her lengthy conversations with the Kenga Family, the phrase “maji yaje kwanza” became a guiding aphorism. It translates: water is the first thing or water comes first. For Miller, the phrase struck her as an ideal name for the project.  Much of her undergraduate study has focused on the relationship between water access and broader social justice determinants, including access to education. “My goal in the project was always about assisting the Mihingoni community in overcoming infrastructural and political barriers to self-determination,” she said in an interview. For Miller and her local collaborators, this decidedly meant working with rather than around local government. “Many of the international nonprofits in Kenya are digging wells for clean groundwater. While this is good and often reliable, it does not sufficiently address bigger systems of inequality,” she explained. Maji Yaje Kwanza therefore is a community project that seeks to hold the public sector accountable to the populations it is underserving. During a three-week period in June and July of 2014, Miller and her Kenga Family collaborators successfully coordinated the construction of the 1.5-mile extension of the municipal water main to reach Mihingoni Primary School. With essential support from the local chief, a government water engineer, and school officials, the project hired nearly 200 village residences to dig the trenches and backfill over the new piping. For storage and distribution of the water, two 10,000-gallon tanks were installed at the school property, which now lead to washing sinks and drinking taps. The Maji Yaje Kwanza team handled the budget and payroll, with a total cost of $20,000 largely subsidized through the Big Ideas award, additional Blum Center support for standout CGIU student projects, and a collection of grants from other sources, including the Donald A. Strauss Foundation, Berkeley’s Center for African Studies, and the Shinnyo-En foundation. Miller is now waiting to hear news of the commencement of water delivery to Mihingoni. While Maji Yaje Kwanza completed the water main extension and water storage aspects of the project, a larger World Bank-funded initiative is necessary to provide sufficient pumping capacity to get the water to consistently reach the village. Once this comes together, thousands of people will have access to the school water kiosk and, over time, to domestic taps along the 1.5-mile pipe.  The school will sell the water for approximately 6 cents for 5-gallon container of water. This price will enable the school to cover the meter costs, with any additional income going toward the purchase of hand soap (for the three new sinks), antiseptic for the pit latrines, and toilet paper for the students and staff.  For Miller, once the water begins to flow, the next steps will be multiple. First, she aspires for all sub-counties within the Kaloleni region to have similar access to municipal water; this means replicating and scaling up the community process just completed in Mihingoni. While the first phase of this might be community water kiosks, a further step, in the minds of many residents, should be infrastructure for people to directly receive water in their homes and on their farms. Miller agrees, and she has a particular interest in expanding the practice of rainwater harvesting and drip irrigation in agriculture, the predominant industry in the province. In part, her aspirations are informed by international perspective. “There are many other regions in the world more arid than Kaloeni that have the infrastructure of sophisticated, public water systems,” she said. “Think about many areas in the Middle East. Why isn’t this the case in Kenya?” The answer is not lost on the people of Mihingoni. According to Miller, they analyze the inequities that confront their daily lives within the longer history of colonial exploitation of the coastal regions of Kenya. This history has included land acquisition and forced resettlement by successive waves of Portuguese, Omani, and British control. The Mihingoni are committed, pitchfork by pitchfork, community meeting by meeting, to reverse these colonial legacies. Sean Burns serves as the Director of Student Programs for the Blum Center for Developing Economies at University of California,

By Andrea Guzman A 2013/2014 UNESCO report found that 250 million children across the globe are not learning basic literacy and numeracy skills. Of these, 57 million children—a disproportionate number of whom are from disadvantaged backgrounds, live in conflict-afflicted countries, or are disabled or simply girls—aren’t enrolled in school at all. Big Ideas@Berkeley and USAID’s Global Development Lab are aiming to change these numbers through the Mobiles for Reading contest category by inviting students to develop novel technology-based innovations to enhance reading skills for youth in developing countries. This new contest category is sponsored by All Children Reading:  A Grand Challenge for Development, a partnership between USAID, World Vision and the Australian Government. The creation of the category comes amidst a growing international movement to use mobile technologies as tools for enhancing children’s reading skills. Numerous studies have shown that children who do not develop reading skills during early primary education are on a lifetime trajectory of limited educational progress and economic opportunities. Meanwhile, mobile devices are ubiquitous, even in low-income regions. According to the International Telecommunications Union, 96.2% of people on the planet have mobile cellular telephone subscriptions. To Rebecca Leege, project director of the All Children Reading initiative, mobile technology can be a particularly effective tool to disseminate local language instruction materials. “Evidence confirms that children best learn to read in the language with which they are most familiar,” said Leege in an email. “However, many children enter schools where they are taught in a foreign language and have little or no access to mother tongue reading resources, making it difficult for them to gain the foundational skills needed to learn to read. This, coupled with low engagement from family or their community to support their learning to read, limits the reinforcement needed to develop a proficient reader.” Leege added: “A basic phone or tablet can provide new and vital mother-tongue reading resources to engage children’s curiosity and interest in reading in communities with sparse access to books.” While mobiles for reading remains a new approach, some programs have illustrated promising results. A pilot program for illiterate women conducted by the Afghan Institute of Learning showed that between May 2011 and May 2012 reading via mobile halved the time in which students were able to attain literacy at a basic 2 level. Teachers sent daily texts to students, who read the incoming messages and responded via SMS, demonstrating reading comprehension and writing skills. Researchers found that cell phone texts generated excitement among students, as literacy became not an “abstract skill” of alleged importance, but a tangible skill that could bring the students to “another level of understanding of the world around them.” Over the past few years, a growing number of NGOs, academic researchers, social entrepreneurs, donors, and policymakers have begun to develop and support mobiles for reading technology. On October 15-16 2014, USAID and the mEducation Alliance held the third annual Mobiles for Education Alliance Symposium in Washington, DC, which brought together 185 participants from the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and the Middle East to discuss trends and topics to advance the field. Although participants repeatedly underscored that technology and mobile devices are exciting new tools to foster inclusive and quality education, many also pointed out that the human element is crucial. “What matters is the human interaction,” said Brian Gonzalez, the symposium’s keynote speaker and director of the global education sector at Intel. “But not one-to-one, but one-to-many in order to improve the way teachers teach and children learn.” Leege believes that among the greatest barriers to innovation in mobile reading are access to electricity and connectivity. “To assist those learning to read in low-resource settings, low-cost and open source materials easily maintained by the user are vital,” she said. “We would like to see student innovation that addresses unreliable—or absent—electricity and connectivity in low-resource communities.” The Mobiles for Reading contest is open to over 500,000 students across 18 universities, from Uganda to Australia (for a full list of eligible universities, visit the Mobiles for Reading webpage.) Students who wish to participate must develop novel mobile technology-based innovations to enhance reading scores for early grade children in developing countries. Alternatively, proposals may use existing mobile-based technologies to improve early grade reading scores by adapting or applying those technologies in new and innovative ways. A five-page pre-proposal is due November 13 to the bigideascontest.org website. Three to to six student teams to be selected to continue on to the full proposal round in the spring. Winners will receive awards up to $10,000 to go toward further developing their idea. “We hope to capitalize on student’s creativity, knowledge, personal experience of learning to read, as well as their desire to innovate for a better world,” Leege

By Abhik Pramanik On October 20, the Blum Center for Developing Economies hosted a talk by Alex Thier, head of the Policy, Planning, and Learning Bureau at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Entitled “Ending Extreme Poverty: What UC Berkeley Can Do,” Thier’s talk centered around the Post-2015 Development Agenda, USAID’s role in the development community, and the need for bilateral and multilateral donors to partner with innovative entrepreneurs to make a difference. Thier reminded the packed hall that today roughly 1 billion people, or 18 percent of the world population, live in extreme poverty, which the World Bank defines as earning or consuming less than a $1.25 day. Although these numbers may seem alarmingly large, extreme poverty rates are actually down from more than 40 percent in 1990. This reduction represents a fulfillment of Millennium Development Goal 1: to halve the rate of extreme poverty by 2015. With the imminent expiration of the Millennium Development Goals, the international community is now debating development goals for the next 15 years. Yet one objective is clear: almost every bilateral and multilateral organization, including the World Bank, USAID, the European Union, and the African Union, has set a target of bringing the number of people living in extreme poverty to zero by 2030. Thier argued that the elimination of extreme poverty is a distinct possibility. While some scholars have talked about severe poverty as inevitable, the remarkable economic movement over the past two decades—which saw 700 million people lifted out of extreme poverty—proves otherwise. Moreover, the political will to tackle the problem seems to be growing. In his 2013 State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama declared that the U.S. would band together with its allies and partner to end extreme poverty by 2030. Additionally, both USAID and the World Bank have changed their mission statements within the past year to commit to ending extreme poverty. Though naysayers still exist, Thier said he believes that the outcome ultimately rests on choices—at the individual, village, institutional, and country level to fight for economic development. He noted that the biggest obstacles to ending extreme poverty are fragile institutions and weak governance. Citing the examples of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Botswana, and the Republic of Korea, he summarized how each country took a divergent path since enduring various weaknesses in the 1960s. Due to rapid industrialization, foreign capital investment, and intensive manufacturing, South Korea is now a high-income country, with a higher life expectancy than the U.S., and it has created its own agency for international development. The DRC, on the other hand, has experienced botched governmental policies leading to debt crises and a bloody civil conflict that has raged for decades. As a result, citizens of the DRC are currently among the world’s poorest. In another example, Botswana has experienced years of high growth followed by sharp economic downturns and even sharper rebounds because of its over-reliance on extractive industries. The lack of economic diversification has hindered Botswana’s development, but the country is still much better off than the DRC. Thier said he believes that the key distinction among these nations’ economic growth is their level of good governance and effective institutional capacity. As a result of these insights, USAID recently adopted a “New Model of Development,” which centers on leveraging local ownership, engaging in public-private partnerships, scaling up innovative ideas, and using cutting-edge technology to deliver measurable results. To illustrate how this works, Thier talked about two USAID programs: Feed the Future and Power Africa. The former, started in 2009 in response to the global spike in food prices, works with local farmers to increase their crop quality and yields. The initiative currently runs in 19 countries and already has improved nutrition for 12 million children and pushed 7 million farmers out of extreme poverty. Power Africa was launched in 2013 to help the 400 million Africans who currently lack access to electricity. It aims to double the number of people with access to electricity in Sub-Saharan Africa through the use of innovative financial tools and by applying the lessons learned from the Feed the Future initiative. Within a year, Power Africa has leveraged $25 billion in capital with more than half coming from African nations and the private sector. Thier ended his talk with a plea to the next generation of problem solvers. He said he hoped UC Berkeley students would heed his call to develop new ideas and technologies to help make development assistance more effective, so that by 2030 extreme poverty could be eliminated. Some of this work is being done by the Blum Center’s Development Impact Lab (DIL), which received a $20 million grant from USAID in 2012 to help transform the way universities source, design, evaluate, and scale up technologies that have a potential to alleviate extreme poverty. Currently, 90 DIL innovations are being tested and scaled in 30 countries, involving more than 500 interdisciplinary students, and over 400 industry, government, and social sector

By Sybil Lewis Many students graduate from Cal intent on making an impact in the world. The reality of direct service work, however, can cause even the most committed to feel discouraged and to question what meaningful and financially sustainable work looks like—challenges that Jessica Praphath, a Cal alumna, faced while working on poverty alleviation in her hometown of Stockton, California. Stockton was hit hard by the 2007 financial crisis. In 2008, foreclosures soared to 9.5 percent and housing prices fell by 39 percent. In July 2012, it became the largest American city to file for bankruptcy protection. Praphath, whose parents immigrated from Thailand, grew up in “pockets of poverty” in the predominantly Southeast Asian communities around Stockton, and returned there a week after graduating from UC Berkeley in 2013, determined to work on public health and community issues at the grassroots level. She could have stayed in the more affluent cities of the Bay Area, but after minoring in Global Poverty & Practice (GPP), she said she decided her vocation was to better “understand the systemization of poverty and how I and my community fit into that system.” Praphath’s first job out of Cal was at a resource center of the Community Partnership for Families of San Joaquin, where she completed her GPP practice experience. There, she was in charge of establishing a virtual education program for students in low-performing schools in south Stockton. But when you “work in a nonprofit in Stockton you wear 25 different hats,” she said. She soon became involved with the nonprofit’s umbrella program, Neighborhood University, providing online parenting and English as a Second Language (ESL) classes. Praphath worked countless hours to provide ESL, one of the community’s highest demands. Although the first few weeks of classes started off with about 40 people, over time the numbers slowly faded. Eventually, the classes were cancelled due to low attendance. Praphath said she was disappointed to “work so hard and then watch the project fail.” The failure felt personal. Yet she also knew that the class’s low attendance might have something to do with the culture of welfare in south Stockton. Many people were distrustful of organized social assistance, in part because Stockton’s district lines had been redrawn so that most of the post-crash development money went to renovating downtown rather than to helping low-income south Stockton. Residents became accustomed to social workers using data about their lives to collect grant money that eventually went elsewhere. Praphath said she discovered that one of biggest problems in development work is to empower a community that has been exploited or ignored. Another challenge is the lack of funding for community members and those who want to work with them. Praphath’s $13 hourly wage did not cover her monthly bills, which include payments on almost $20,000 in student loans. The Community Partnership for Families of San Joaquin also wasn’t able to provide her health benefits or employ her full-time, even though she was putting in 40 to 50 hours per week. After months of exhausting work and financial difficulties, Praphath reluctantly left the family center for a job at the Health Education Department of Community Medical Centers, a federally qualified health center in Stockton. Yet two months into the job, she said she felt something was missing—the one-on-one interactions with people, the community aspect. To fill this gap, she volunteered for the Reinvent Stockton Coalition, a community-based initiative spearheaded by Stockton City Councilman Michael Tubbs. Praphath said the coalition has made her rethink what works in community development.  “I graduated from Cal thinking that meaningful work was measured by how many people you can get in a program,” she said. “But in the field, it’s not about that. Being effective is not about 40 people attending your ESL class or health workshop. It’s about whether you can change people’s lives.” Looking back, Praphath said she thinks attendance of the family center’s ESL classes dropped partly because beneficiaries were not involved in shaping the classes. She is a believer in the participatory development of social programs. Yet she realizes this is easier said than done, especially when there is a “disconnect between professional and college-educated people and community members.” At Community Medical Centers job, she sits on a bimonthly public health task force that brings together representatives from nonprofits, foundations, and government organizations to discuss plans for public health initiatives. Praphath believes in the mission of the taskforce and sees a strong desire to enforce change, but she notes that a fundamental piece is missing: a community representative. The same was true for the initial planning meetings of Reinvent Stockton. When she looked around the table during those first meetings, all she saw were dedicated people who went to good universities and, like her, returned to Stockton to help improve it. Praphath has since played a vital part in the Reinvent Stockton coalition’s expansion to south Stockton community members. They helped write two assessment surveys, which mapped Stockton’s “community strength index,” focusing on issues such as education, public safety, housing, economic development, and health. And in July 2014, the coalition launched its first community assessment survey, from which community members and volunteers collected more than 800 surveys. Praphath, who is collecting follow-up surveys, recalled an emotional phone conversation with a south Stockton resident named Regina about crime and policing. Regina told Praphath that her son had recently been shot and that distrust of the police was high. “I talked to Regina for 56 minutes and 8 seconds,” she said. “I know the exact time because I remember getting off the phone and feeling like it was one of those experiences where you feel so connected to another human being and it helps you understand your purpose and why you are doing what you are doing. All the stress goes away and it all makes sense.” Praphath said when she first returned to Stockton with her UC Berkeley degree, some people expected her to have all the answers. She made it clear that she was there to learn. “When I meet community members, I let them do a lot of the talking,” she said. “This way, I am seen not as someone who is trying to push knowledge or test out my education, but as someone with a genuine interest in what they have to say.” A year later, she has come to believe that community members are the ones with the answers. They are the experts—the “think tanks” as she puts

By Sybil Lewis In the summer of 2012, an interdisciplinary research group at UC Berkeley set out to study the demand for and effects of community-level, solar-powered microgrids in Western Kenya. To the surprise of the members of the group—led by Professors Edward Miguel (Economics), Catherine Wolfram (Business), and Eric Brewer (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)—they could not identify many communities that were truly “off grid.” There just always seemed to be an electricity line nearby. As a result, the group shifted its focus to populations who were “under grid”—in other words, people whose homes and businesses were near but not directly connected to the grid network. In partnership with Innovations for Poverty Action, the research group began the time-consuming process of mapping out 150 communities in order to gauge each household’s relation to the grid. The census data quickly began to generate a lot of interest from local policymakers and led to the July 2014 working paper “Barriers to Electrification for ‘Under Grid’ Households in in Rural Kenya,” published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). To make available the significant economics and engineering findings of the NBER paper, supported by UC Berkeley’s Development Impact Lab, the Center for Effective Global Action, and the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions, we asked lead author Ken Lee, a PhD student in Agricultural and Resource Economics, the following questions. 1. What is the main difference between “off grid” and “under grid” electricity connections, and what policy implications does this distinction have for African countries? The International Energy Agency estimates that in Sub-Saharan Africa, 600 million people live without access to electricity. What follows quite naturally is an assumption that most of these people are “off grid”—or too far away to realistically connect to a national electricity network. As a result, we’ve seen growing support for off grid, distributed energy technologies, most of which are best suited for regions without access to grid power. Yet many countries are expanding the reach of their national grid infrastructure. In Kenya, for example, there has been a recent push to connect all of the country’s secondary schools, health clinics, and markets, suggesting that a large proportion of the population is now within walking distance of an electricity connection. We are hoping to change the framework in which we view this problem. It is possible that a substantial portion of the 600 million people without electricity are not “off grid,” but are “under grid,” or close enough to connect to a low-voltage line at a relatively low cost, and this is what we illustrate in our research paper. This distinction is important because the policy implications for off grid and under grid communities are quite different. In under grid communities, it may be preferable to focus on supporting policies that will leverage existing infrastructure with the goal of increasing “last-mile” grid connectivity. 2. Your research showed that despite Kenya’s strong push for rural electrification, national electrification levels remain below 30 percent. What have been some of the biggest challenges in effectively connecting rural communities to power grids? The most important barrier to grid connectivity has been the high price of an electricity connection. Currently, the price of a household connection is $410, which is incredibly expensive even by American standards. In a country where gross national income per capita is $1,730, this price is simply unaffordable for poor, rural households. There are several other barriers to electrification as well. For example, even if the price were lower, it may still be necessary to provide households with an option to finance their connections, so that they could pay back the principal amount over time. Finally, rural households in Kenya tend to be spread apart and there are few straight lines through which one could easily run a power line. This makes it challenging for electricity planners to build out cost-effective low voltage networks, particularly when they are unable to connect all of the neighboring households at the same time. 3. What effect does reducing energy poverty have on other aspects of development, such as income, well-being, and education? There is no question that access to modern energy is a key input for economic development. For example, electricity opens up the possibility for households to extend their lighting hours, changing the way that people use their time, and allowing children to (hopefully) study later at night. It also allows households to engage in all kinds of new income-generating activities. In one of our study sites, we met a woman who had already begun selling cold fruit smoothies to her neighbors, within a month of gaining an electricity connection. Given the high cost of rural electrification, there is a need to rigorously document the socioeconomic impacts of modern energy. There is also a need to better understand how newly connected households will consume energy moving forward. Our research team is currently implementing a randomized evaluation of grid connections in Western Kenya, and through this project, we hope to shed additional light on these questions. 4. What are the options available to poor rural Kenyan households to finance electricity installation and continued use? Currently, the options available for households to finance installations and appliance purchases are limited. Although the national utility had offered a financing plan in the past, the program encountered many challenges. There is, however, high demand for financed energy solutions. The recent success of the “pay-as-you-go” solar home system offered by M-KOPA provides an interesting example. Households are paying as much as $200 over the course of a year to finance a limited solar home system product. What makes their financial model work is that the daily payments can be processed through the M-PESA mobile money platform. So while there is a general need for additional financing options for grid connections, the example illustrates that there is an equal need to develop innovative billing and collection technologies for financed grid connections that will incentivize both lenders and borrowers in a sustainable way. 5. How can governments in Africa design projects to improve national electrification levels?  Our study region in Western Kenya has high population density and extensive grid coverage, making it an ideal setting in which we would expect to observe rapid rural electrification. Yet the vast majority of the 15,000 rural households and businesses that we document remain unconnected despite being located within connecting distance of a power line. So the real issue is not the lack of an electricity supply, but the fact that both the price of a connection and the cost of supplying that connection is prohibitively high. It just doesn’t make sense for a utility to spend lots of money to connect a single household in a remote, rural community, even if the grid is physically present. The most promising strategies for improving national electrification levels will vary from country to country. Wherever there is grid coverage, however, governments may wish to consider policies that will leverage existing infrastructure, while taking advantage of the economies of scale in supplying last-mile connections. Connecting multiple households at the same time would not only reduce transportation costs but also would allow utilities to plan local distribution networks that minimize costs. Coordinating these connections poses the collective action problem that would need to be solved through a government policy, such as a mass connection program. The idea of subsidizing last-mile electricity connections to households is, of course, nothing new. This is how many developed nations, including the United States, reached universal

By Andrea Guzman In 2010, Sergio Venegas Marin, an ambitious student at Cosumnes River College in Sacramento, was aiming to transfer. He looked at eight universities, and settled on UC Berkeley because of its Global Poverty & Practice (GPP) minor. Born and raised in Cadiz, Spain, Venegas said the GPP minor attracted him because poverty and social problems were part of his everyday life. The youngest of three children, he was raised by a single mother who worked several part-time jobs.  Venegas said it seemed unfair that his mother had to work 20-hour days sometimes in order to provide basic necessities for her children. “It was complicated to make a living,” Venegas, now 25, said. “It was difficult and it didn’t feel right that it was that difficult.” In Spain, Venegas’ family and many of his neighbors relied on social assistance programs to make ends meet. But when more conservative political parties took office, the programs were cut, school dropout rates increased, and many youth became involved with crime and drugs. Cadiz, a southern port city that has long struggled with high unemployment, is now experiencing rates of 40 percent. Venegas said his old friends from Cadiz are living “completely different lives”—marked by low job prospects and economic struggle. When he was 17, Venegas’ life changed. He followed his mom and dad to Sacramento, California, where his father’s family lived. There, he learned English and enrolled in community college. At Cal, he majored in economics and took as many classes with a development focus as possible. He said the GPP minor enabled him to channel his passion for social and economic justice. He found like-minded fellow students—people with similar experiences and interests and who sought to use their education to reduce poverty and inequality in the United States and around the world. After graduating in 2012, Venegas searched for jobs and discovered that many social sector positions were unpaid. Frustrated and worried about money, he applied to investment banking and private sector jobs. But at the interviews, he realized those jobs were not for him. Seeing the lack of minority professionals reminded him of the social problems that need to be addressed. He decided to turn down a $75,000 job offer, and worked part-time as a campus host at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and as a part-time instructional assistant at his community college in Sacramento. “I was very frustrated, because I felt every opportunity in the development field was open only to people who didn’t need to be paid, who already had an economic advantage,” said Venegas. But he soon landed a job as an analyst at a consulting firm called Mission Analytics, which evaluates and provides technical assistance to government social welfare programs. Venegas not only found a way to influence public policy through the job, he opened the door to fellow GPP students to do the same. Two other members of the Mission Analytics team are GPP alums. He said the firm chose to hire the GPP students because of their unique skills and education. “I think it’s the ability of looking at a problem from different standpoints,” he said. “GPP students have a way of mixing everything they have learned. They are able to care about the methods but also the end goal we want to accomplish.” In the future, Venegas intends to get a Master’s in Public Policy and return to Spain to help create a more participatory democracy and a stronger welfare state. He advises students still in the GPP minor to get involved in their communities and pursue their passions before and after graduation. “Instead of wasting your time and just wanting to graduate, you should get involved,” Venegas said. “Being passionate prepares you to take on the

By Tamara Straus Some people have called it the personalization of higher education. Others see it as the natural evolution of pedagogy at a world-class public research university. Lina Nilsson doesn’t disagree with either of these interpretations, but she definitely sees on-campus, in-class social impact work as “the changing face of education.” “Connecting academic learning to real-world issues and problem solving is something that students are demanding,” said Nilsson, director of innovation at Blum Center for Developing Economies. “And students can’t be expected to pull together all the pieces needed for their ideas to have impact. In addition to subject-matter expertise, they also need coaching and mentorship. They need to learn by example. And there’s no reason that can’t be made available to them at the university.” These are among the reasons Nilsson launched a new Blum Center-sponsored course this fall called “Social Innovation OnRamp.” Created in part to provide a space to accelerate the projects of UC Berkeley students who have won the prestigious Big Ideas@Berkeley contest, the course provides an overview of a broad range of skills for the creation, evaluation, implementation, and growth of early-stage projects that serve the public good. The course also comes with an OnRamp website that provides resources for budding social innovators to find funding, startup and training programs, and recommended reading. In its very first offering, the OnRamp course quickly oversubscribed. In October, UC Berkeley’s Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation awarded the course a teaching grant. Several of the students, such as Political Science Major Michael Alexander Clark, have unabashedly said, “It is the best class I’ve taken at Cal.” Part of the energy in the class comes from Nilsson herself, who while a post-doc in bioengineering at UC Berkeley, created a startup called Tekla Labs, which provides guidelines for medical professionals in developing countries to build lab equipment using locally available supplies. For this, Nilsson was named a MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35. But Nilsson herself admits that she and her Tekla Labs colleagues “could have done a lot of things better, if we had learned a few things earlier.” This need to learn from both successes and failures has shaped the theory and the practical drive of the OnRamp course. The OnRamp’s high-energy atmosphere also comes from the students themselves. They are a mix of graduate and undergraduate students representing departments as diverse as business, political science, computer science, psychology, information management and systems, mechanical engineering, applied mathematics, anthropology, environmental economics, energy resource, and peace and conflict studies. Some projects focus on mental health; some on agriculture; others are pushing along ideas that might “innovate” or “disrupt,” to use the parlance of social innovation, student career support and homelessness. About half the student teams in the class are focused on U.S. social impact, and the other half on developing countries. Along with Nilsson, Course Facilitators Kate Fenimore and James Roditi, and a dozen guest speakers serve as both cheerleaders and cautioners for student innovation. “What we try to say is: ‘Here’s a scaffold of skills and insights you need to master and evaluate if you want to have meaningful impact as a social entrepreneur,’” explained Fenimore. The course presents 12 such scaffolds, including: framing and pitching ideas; developing a theory of change; identifying, understanding, and communicating with stakeholders; understanding, maximizing, and measuring social impact; network, outreach, and communication; social impact concepts; product/service prototyping and design; execution and logistics; business models and legalities; and knowing when to pivot or quit. Every week, a practitioner engages the students in an hour-long discussion on these scaffolds, with the possibility of additional mentorship. John Romankiewicz, a dual master’s degree student at the Energy & Resources Group and the Goldman School of Public Policy, said he enrolled in OnRamp to move along his idea for The Food Bikery, which seeks to deploy a low capital, low footprint alternative to food trucks. He reasoned that food trucks, which are now a $1 billion industry in the U.S., may not be as green as many people think. They cost about $50,000 to outfit with a kitchen and generator, whereas food bikes cost around $5,000, and generate much lower emissions, take up less space, and serve as a more affordable pathway for budding chefs to showcase their talents. Eventually, Romankiewicz would like to see co-ops of food bikes in relatively flat, temperate cities like Berkeley and Austin that could share food storing and prepping facilities. To put his idea into action, he and Jason Trager, a Cal mechanical engineering PhD student, built a prototype in 2013 made from recycled materials for a 150-pound, two-wheel trailer. They outfitted the trailer with a griddle and propane tank and rigged it to a standard street bike. Romankiewicz, who goes by the moniker “Sustainable John,” began to show up at parties and make Jian Bing, a Chinese egg crepe garnished with green onion and cilantro that he mastered while living in Beijing. He wrote a proposal for The Food Bikery, entered it in the Big Ideas contest, and won a $2,000 prize in May 2014. Two weeks later, he won another $2,000 prize from a food company called So Delicious, which was running a small sustainability grants competition on Twitter. “I have a minimum viable product,” he said. “I know it works. What I don’t know is if I can get around the regulatory issues.” That’s where the OnRamp course comes in. Romankiewicz said the OnRamp has forced him to refine his pitch, research the regulatory hurdles for food bikes—which like food trucks would need to meet health and food sanitation requirements—and analyze the financials. He estimates that food bike owners could sell 30 to 40 meals per shift, taking in $200 to $400 in revenue, which, he said, “would come to about $25/hour, well above the minimum wage earned by kitchen workers.” Right now, the project’s greatest hurdle is refrigeration and sanitation. “Nobody wants to carry a refrigerator on their bike or drag a generator through the streets,” he said. So he needs to argue to city and county officials that food bikes should have a four-hour operation window, during which time a bike cook could load his trailer, arrive at his location, cook his meals, and call it quits before any food spoils. The OnRamp class has served a similar prod for Tchiki Davis, a NIH-funded doctoral student in psychology. She has been working with her father, a software engineer, on a series of online games that train young people to focus on positive information. Davis is among a growing group of psychology researchers who believe that happiness, much like math or music, is a skill that can be learned—and that positive cognitive stimulation, such as looking repeatedly at a sea of smiling faces, can reduce stress. Her Lifenik games are based on peer-reviewed papers by psychology scholars like Derek M. Isaacowitz of Northeastern University and Mark W. Baldwin of McGill University, who have conducted repetitive visual training tests that have been shown to increase self-esteem and reduce stress. “So much of our behavior is socially engineered in negative ways, but we can change our engineering,” said Davis. “Most people know that if we can retrain ourselves to regularly exercise, then we will improve our physical health. But it is also true that if we retrain ourselves to regularly think about the world in more effective ways, then we will improve our emotional health.” Like Romankiewicz, Davis is a Big Ideas contest veteran seeking practical guidance. “I have the research training,” she explained, “but not the business training,” adding that what she has found in the OnRamp classes is quite different from for-profit business workshops. “My greatest hurdle is not necessarily understanding the market for the games,” she said. “It’s making sure the games are psychologically effective. It’s balancing the social impact and scalability aspects of the project.” Davis is currently applying for a $450,000, two-year NIH grant to help build and test Lifenik games. Like her teacher Nilsson, she doesn’t intend to use her doctorate to pursue a tenure track academic career. “I want to turn research findings into actionable, user-centered products, tools, and interventions that improve people’s quality of life,” she said. “Right now, this project is my passion, and I intend to pursue

By Tamara Straus Kweku Opoku-Agyemang, a postdoctoral fellow at the Blum Center, believes that one of the greatest downfalls in the field of international development is detachment. “Training in development is often solution-oriented. It involves implementing projects,” the 34-year-old Ghanaian said. “This may be why it’s easy to be detached from people and places. But detachment can have bad outcomes.” Opoku-Agyemang has been subtly underscoring this point in his UC Berkeley course, “Poverty, Technology, and Development.” During a recent lecture, he told students the case of the Lake Turkana fish processing plant, a $22 million project designed in 1971 by the Norwegian government to provide jobs to the Turkana people of Kenya. The idea was to get the Turkana to run a fish processing plant for export, but the Turkana are nomads with no history of fishing or eating fish. Furthermore, the plant operated for only a few days, because running the freezers and providing them clean water in Kenya’s northwest desert were just too costly. The field of international development is strewn with such stories of ineffectiveness or, to use Opoku-Agyemang’s word, “detachment,” in all its cultural, psychological, sociological, and historical variations. “About half of World Bank projects fail, costing billions of dollars,” he reminded his students—before launching into the larger question of the course and his current research: whether the current wave of technological advancement can alleviate global poverty. “That’s an ongoing discussion,” said Opoku-Agyemang. He is measured in his opinions, perhaps from a decade-plus of education and research, in which he earned a doctorate in Development Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an M.A. in Economics from Ohio University, and a B.A. in Geography from the University of Ghana. “It depends on the example. There is a lot of excitement about technology and development now, but I think it’s too early to tell how successful the results will be.” Still, Opoku-Agyemang is not waiting on the sidelines to find out. He is among a new generation of international scholars using interdisciplinary approaches from political economy, development economics, behavioral economics, business economics, and applied econometrics to understand the effects of technological advances, particularly mobile banking and communications, on poverty alleviation. Already, he has designed several applied research projects that document, through both qualitative and quantitative methods, how best to both formulate and evaluate development projects. According to one of his mentors, Jeremy D. Foltz, a professor of agriculture and applied economics at University of Wisconsin, Madison, Opoku-Agyemang’s doctoral thesis was a standout because it provided new insights into informal finance, particularly in savings and credit markets. Opoku-Agyemang’s thesis looked at Ghanaian susu collectors, who work out of marketplace kiosks and through whom rural earners without bank accounts deposit and access their own money. Susu collectors are one of the oldest financial groups in Africa. For a small fee, they will hold onto people’s money and enable savings. But Ghanaians who deposit money with susu collectors do not establish formal credit worthiness with banks, even though their savings rates can be relatively high. Opoku-Agyemang’s question was why—and, in turn, what does credit worthiness really mean? In the summer 2010, he conducted a survey to explore how small entrepreneurs use susu collectors. Some made daily or twice daily deposits; others parted with their earnings twice-weekly, fortnightly, or monthly. What he found from collecting questionnaires from 400 clients confirmed a hunch: the more frequently a person deposited money with a susu collector, the higher that person’s credit score would be in traditional finance. Banks took note. Rural banks in the Central Region of Ghana even used Opoku-Agyemang’s credit worthiness measurements to expand their customer base. “Kweku gained exceptional access to local bank officials in the Central Region of Ghana, where there is a banking sector project to scale up micro-lending and do mobile banking,” said Professor Foltz in an email. “In the space of one summer, he was able to collect the best most comprehensive dataset on susu banking in West Africa that I have seen.” Opoku-Agyemang has been pleased to see the results of his research: More Ghanaian banks now work with susu collector unions to mobilize funds to their best clients. But he wonders whether some entrepreneurs’ savings rates will change as they enter the formal banking sector. “Working with a susu collector is very social,” he explained. “One of the shortcomings of formal banking is that it’s relatively impersonal.” In other words, there may be less motivation to save when you give your earnings to a machine as opposed to a person who can commend your will power to save rather than spend. Opoku-Agyemang’s current research is looking at the role of mobile technologies in Ghanaian activism and political reforms. He explains that a decade following the reforms of the 1990s, which led to new constitution and a multiparty system, Ghanaians’ confidence in local government has dipped—in spite of a robust national democracy. Especially in rural areas, many Ghanaians are politically disengaged. District and town meetings are badly attended. Even the strong Ghanaian tradition of using radio shows as means for citizens to complain directly to elected politicians, seems to have waned. “People used to line up around the block to call into the radio shows. It was a very influential way to be heard and make change,” Opoku-Agyemang said. His current study, like his previous one, is based on a hunch: people will become more informed and politically active if they have an easy mechanism to voice their opinions—particularly to those in power. To test this, he designed a field experiment in five languages for Ghana’s Central Region that randomly varies access to politically participatory radio shows and enables more call-ins through mobiles and voice messages. Opoku-Agyemang plans to see if those who call in more often are more likely to vote in local elections. Opoku-Agyemang, who grew up in the historic trade city of Cape Coast, does not think he necessarily has an advantage being a Ghanaian studying Ghanaian and African development issues. “I am only one person,” he said. “I tend to be very hesitant if someone is generalizing about a people or a situation. Ghana is a nation of 25 million people.” This preference for individual perspectives may have something to do with Opoku-Agyemang’s early education and family background. Unlike most academic economists, he grew up on literature. Opoku-Agyemang read Shakespeare as a teenager. He penned short stories in college. Literature is also the Opoku-Agyemang family business. His father, Kwadwo, is an emeritus professor of literature at University of Cape Coast, an expert on African oral literatures, a poet, and a novelist. His mother, Jane Naana Opuku-Agyemang, is a literary scholar as well, an internationally acclaimed expert on the African diaspora, and Ghana’s minister of education. Even Kweku’s siblings have felt the strong tug of books. His sister, Adwoa Atta, is a graduate student in French literature at University of Toronto; and his brother, Kwabena, is a graduate student of English literature at University of West Virginia. Opoku-Agyemang explains his break from the family business in a matter of fact way “Mathematics is a language, too,” he said. But he admits that economics has appealed to him “because it tries to provide solutions. It provides me with a way to think about poverty as lived experience and as a public policy problem.” Opoku-Agyemang said the experience that confirmed his interest in political economics occurred after he graduated from college. In Ghana, all public university graduates are required to spend a year working for the government. Opoku-Agyemang got assigned to the HIV/AIDS Secretariat and to a project aimed at lowering infection rates. Although there was public awareness of the disease, by 2005-2006 rates were rising. One of the results was that Ghanaians with HIV dropped out of basic school. The HIV/AIDS Secretariat decided the best approach would be reinvigorate the curriculum and set out to work with the Teacher’s Union. They decided that to reach students, all taboos should be on the table for discussion. The creation of the teaching guide took six months of continual student-teacher workshops and a year before a final document was published. “The experience put me in touch with basic technology adoption—understanding how many iterations and modifications are required and how long it takes,” said Opoku-Agyemang. The experience also led to results. HIV infection rates fell from 3.6 in 2003 to 2.2 by 2008, and in 2013 only 1.3 percent of the Ghanaian population had contracted the disease. “I think it would have been very easy to quickly write up a teaching guide, give it to teachers, and be done with it,” Opoku-Agyemang said of the project’s success. “Instead, we realized that there needed to be as frank discussion as possible, that teachers and students would have to make themselves vulnerable.” In other words: no detachment. Development experts around the world are now using psychological insights to inform social and economic policies—sometimes with results like one Opoku-Agyemang experienced at Ghana’s HIV/AIDS Secretariat. “Behavioral economics has become popular because in the past economists had a limited view of how people acted,” he said. “There wasn’t enough attention paid to basic human behavior, to procrastination and forgetfulness. What I like about behavioral economics is that what looks common sense is only proved after the fact. Common sense before a rigorous study is actually not so clear to pinpoint.” UC Berkeley Professor Ananya Roy, who serves at the Blum Center’s education director, views Opoku-Agyemang’s work as part of an interesting moment in development studies and especially development economics. “On the one hand, there is great interest in specific methodologies such as RCTs [randomized control trials], as well as in the technologies that can be used to perfect such methodological approaches,” she said in an email. “On the other hand, economics is returning to broad questions of political economy, tackling the puzzles of capitalism and persistent poverty and inequality. What is inspiring about Kweku is how comfortably he inhabits both worlds. He thinks like a political economist, recognizing the need to have a global, historical, and critical understanding of development. But he is able to act alongside the practitioners of development economics and the advocates of poverty action. In this sense, Kweku represents the best aspects of the amalgam of approaches and worldviews that make up the academic programs of the Blum Center, notably the Global Poverty & Practice Minor and the Designated Emphasis in Development Engineering.” Learn more about Dr. Opoku-Agyemang’s work in this video, “Mobile Democracy in Ghana.” The Blum Center Postdoctoral Fellowship is supported by the Development Impact Lab at UC Berkeley in partnership with USAID. The fellowship aims to support research and teaching in a wide range of interdisciplinary fields and on a variety of subject areas relevant to poverty, inequality, and poverty