Blum Center Education Director Alice Agogino, and on Berkeley Engineering’s faculty since 1984, has received the 2021 Berkeley Faculty Service Award, along with mechanical engineering colleague Oliver O’Reilly, the 2021 award co-recipient.
Blum Center Education Director Alice Agogino, and on Berkeley Engineering’s faculty since 1984, has received the 2021 Berkeley Faculty Service Award, along with mechanical engineering colleague Oliver O’Reilly, the 2021 award co-recipient.
The Berkeley Faculty Service Award is given annually to honor a member of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate who has provided outstanding and dedicated service to the University.
“In this, of all years, to stand out for effort and dedication, is truly an accomplishment,” says S. Shankar Sastry, faculty director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley. “As a testimony to her service, even in the midst of the pandemic Alice has been able to take the lead in getting the new Masters of Development Engineering approved for a fall 2021 start.”
Agogino first established Development Engineering at the Blum Center with a Graduate Group and Ph.D. concentration in 2016. The new MDevEng professional master’s degree program represents a major expansion for the field.
A Berkeley alumna (M.S. ’80 ME), Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Berkeley Engineering; she is also affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business, Energy Resources Group, and Women and Gender Studies.
A collaboration between Blum Center Research Director and bioengineering professor Dan Fletcher, Professor Jennifer Doudna of UC Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute, and Dr. Melanie Ott of UCSF’s Gladstones Institutes is developing a CRISPR-Cas13a-based diagnostic to rapidly detect SARS-CoV-2 RNA.
Courtesy Dan Fletcher
A collaboration between Blum Center Research Director and bioengineering professor Dan Fletcher, Professor Jennifer Doudna of UC Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute, and Dr. Melanie Ott of UCSF’s Gladstones Institutes is developing a CRISPR-Cas13a-based diagnostic to rapidly detect SARS-CoV-2 RNA. This mobile phone-based diagnostic technology aims to provide results in under 15 minutes and could rapidly increase diagnostic capacity worldwide.
The National Security Innovation Network, a program office within the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Blum Center have expanded their partnership to connect students, researchers, and entrepreneurs at the University of California, Berkeley, with the DoD. This collaboration allows NSIN to help bring the university’s energy and talent to solve important defense and national security problems.
National Security Fellow Kaitie Penry (third from left) at a Bootcamp with the 4th Fighter Wing. Photo: Vivek Rao
The National Security Innovation Network, a program office within the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Blum Center have expanded their partnership to connect students, researchers, and entrepreneurs at the University of California, Berkeley, with the DoD. This collaboration allows NSIN to help bring the university’s energy and talent to solve important defense and national security problems.
The NSIN efforts on campus are led by Kaitie Penry, who serves as NSIN program director at UC Berkeley to expand its network on campus and with entrepreneurs in the Bay Area.
The appointment further builds on a collaboration already established between NSIN and the Blum Center Bootcamp program. This initiative educates and empowers participants from military units to solve pressing problems within their organization. The NSIN network adapts to the emerging needs of those in the defense and national security arenas and helps link academic and venture partners to solve DoD challenges.
As the NSIN program director at UC Berkeley, Penry builds connections by expanding NSIN programming to new and diverse communities that may have important insights for addressing national security concerns. Penry works closely with faculty, students, and industry stakeholders to help solve problems related to AI, cybersecurity, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and more.
“Our campus is filled with problem-solvers who care deeply about innovations in national security that make our planet a safer place,” said Shankar Sastry, Faculty Director of the Blum Center at UC Berkeley. “This new partnership with NSIN and the OSD will provide opportunities for innovators working across disciplines to understand and solve the complex security challenges in areas ranging from humanitarian assistance and disaster relief to cybersecurity and preventing the spread of pandemics and misinformation.”
Penry brings significant experience to this new role gained from 10 years of DoD service. In her first year at UC Berkeley she is already making an impact on innovation for national security. Penry has deployed programs such as the X-Force Fellowship, X-Force Capstone, and Hirethon to help engage students within the national security ecosystem. In Spring 2021, she will launch the renowned Hacking for Defense program, which challenges teams of students to develop minimally viable products addressing real-world defense and national security problems, and Hacks, a program that offers students, academics, entrepreneurs, and early-stage startups a two-week period to engage in collaborative problem-solving with DoD sponsors.
Penry has a bachelor of arts degree from UC Davis and a master of arts degree from American University.
Penry is one of eight NSIN university program directors embedded at top research institutions. Other NSIN partner institutions are the University of Virginia, Arizona State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, South Dakota Mines, University of Washington, Washington University in St.Louis, University of Nebraska Omaha.
The Blum Center is pleased to announce that Amy Pickering has accepted the position of Assistant Professor in Development Engineering, a joint Blum Center-College of Engineering appointment made possible through a generous gift from Richard C. Blum and an anonymous donor.
The Blum Center is pleased to announce that Amy Pickering has accepted the position of Assistant Professor in Development Engineering, a joint Blum Center-College of Engineering appointment made possible through a generous gift from Richard C. Blum and an anonymous donor. Pickering, the Tiampo Family Assistant Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tufts University, will commence her teaching and research duties at Berkeley in January 2021.
Professor Alice Agogino, who led the search committee and is the Blum Center’s Director of Education, notes that Pickering’s background ideally matches the needs of the Development Engineering position. She had over a decade of experience in multidisciplinary research in development, high quality scholarship, and an impressive record in both teaching innovations and diversity, equity, and inclusion contributions.
Pickering received a BS from Cornell University in Biological Engineering, a MS from UC Berkeley in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and a PhD from Stanford University in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment & Resources. Her current and proposed research directions are in developing novel water and sanitation technologies, impact evaluation of scalable interventions on child health and development, and environmental surveillance for infectious diseases. She has >70 peer-reviewed publications.
Pickering has been Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator on 22 current or completed research grants from the NIH, NSF, USAID, the World Bank, and foundations including the Thrasher Research Fund, Saint Anthony Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Givewell. She has 15 years of field experience in development in Bangladesh, Benin, India, Kenya, Mali, Malaysia, Mexico, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania.
With her strong teaching record in Environmental Engineering and Development Engineering, Pickering said she is eager to contribute to teaching the Design, Evaluate, and Scale Development Technologies course and to design new courses, such as Public Health Impacts of Climate Change and Ethics in Development Engineering. She also expects to continue her strong record of mentoring students, especially women and underrepresented minorities.
Professor Agogino said the search committee was particularly impressed by Pickering’s work with KQED developing an e-book to engage students in STEM topics that featured an inexpensive water purification device she co-designed for use in Dhaka, Bangladesh, an initiative that included collaboration with Blum Center students. Her research has enjoyed strong interest from the press, with articles and podcasts in BBC World Service, New York Times, Lancet Press Office, Everyday Health, The Hindu, World Bank, and the ASME Global Development Review.
Joeva Sean Rock, an outstanding instructor in international development who researches agricultural biotechnology, food sovereignty, and environmental governance, has joined the Blum Center’s Global Poverty & Practice program as Lecturer.
Joeva Sean Rock, an outstanding instructor in international development who researches agricultural biotechnology, food sovereignty, and environmental governance, has joined the Blum Center’s Global Poverty & Practice program as Lecturer.
Rock, who has served as Professorial Lecturer in the Health Inequity and Care Program in the Department of Anthropology at American University, has taught courses on globalization, social movements, and political-economic determinants of health. She earned a BA in International Studies/Political Science from UC San Diego and a MA and PhD in Anthropology from American University. She has served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University.
Her current book project is We Are Not Starving: the Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Ghana, “an ethnography of Ghanaian activists, farmers, scientists and officials embroiled in intense debates over agricultural futures, national development and political sovereignty,” according to Rock’s website.
Among Rock’s areas of expertise is online learning, a boon for UC Berkeley, as the campus enters its first full semester of virtual learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’m thrilled to be joining a program that takes a critical lens to poverty and development practice,” said Rock. “As inequalities continue to widen in the U.S. and around the globe, we need more than ever students and practitioners who are committed to building different, more equitable worlds. GPP 115 seeks to do just that, and equips students with interdisciplinary skills in asking deep questions, analyzing structures of inequality, and imagining alternatives.”
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Global Poverty & Practice Experiences were cancelled this summer. However, the Blum Center created the GPP Summer Study, taught by Dr. Rachel Dzombak with 22 students across 15 majors to explore ways in which they might create change for a problem they care about.
The signature element of the Blum Center’s Global Poverty & Practice undergraduate minor is a “practice experience” for students to connect the theory and practice of poverty action. Students select to work with nongovernmental organizations, government agencies, social movements, or community projects that focus on various dimensions of poverty action—from community health and food security to economic justice and grassroots political power, in the U.S. and abroad.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed that. Students have been forced to cancel their summer 2020 practice experiences, and seniors have questioned their ability to finish the minor. As one student wrote, “My PE in Ghana was cancelled and since I am a senior I am unable to reschedule my PE abroad to next summer.”
To address this problem, the Blum Center created an online offering for students to engage in deep learning and to allow for mindset shifts. GPP Summer Study taught by Dr. Rachel Dzombak supported 22 students across 15 majors to explore ways in which they might create change for a problem they care about. Problems pursued by the students included:
How might we address rising health disparities among low-income communities of color during the pandemic?
How might we reduce rates of disease in the northern region of Peru?
How might we expand educational technology access for young children?
Throughout the summer, GPP students leveraged toolkits from design and systems thinking to understand how to make change in a complex problem space. The first challenge was to determine what problem to tackle. Using a Ladder of Abstraction (Fig. 1), students thought critically about the problem space entailed and why it mattered. This helped them to see the problem space from multiple perspectives. They used “journey mapping” to understand, for example, the experience of an individual navigating the healthcare system during COVID-19. And they were challenged to map the system in which their problem exists—charting political, historic, economic, and social forces within specific communities.
The students also engaged in introspection exercises to apply the same innovation process to themselves. “Students are grappling with really hard problems and questions in their life: Do I return to school during a pandemic? What are my job prospects amidst a pending global recession?” said Dzombak. “The same tools that can help a student discern a global development challenge can be used to help navigate ambiguity in their own life.”
Dzombak said she structured the course so that students updated each other on their projects during each session. She also gave them time to connect about the complexity of being a student during a global pandemic. Asynchronous videos and resources allowed students to go deeper into their projects as time allowed.
Said one student, “The Global Poverty & Practice Summer Study gave me a tool set to break down an issue and figure out ways I could begin to implement the changes I want seen.” A second shared: “It made me realize that GPP and my practice experience actually deal with real aspects of the world that need to be examined and not merely be seen as a ‘minor’ or a ‘practice.’”
Now in its sixth year, the Development Engineering PhD program enables UC Berkeley doctoral students from engineering and social science fields to pursue applied technological research in low-resource regions around the world. The InFEWS—Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Water, and Energy Systems—Fellowship, as part of this doctoral program, enables students to work with and for poor communities that face extreme challenges accessing nutritious food, clean and reliable energy, and safe water. Both programs recognize and stand to correct Paul Polak’s observation that 90 percent of the world’s design efforts are aimed at 10 percent of the population.
Among this year’s graduates are: Julia Kramer, who received a PhD in Mechanical Engineering and a Master in Public Health and whose research focuses on global health and equity; Alana Siegner, a graduate of the Energy and Resources Group whose work addresses food distribution, access, and justice questions; and Christopher Hyun, also a PhD graduate of the Energy and Resources Group, whose research addresses water, pollution, and development, largely in South Asia.
Julia Kramer: Design for Global Health Accessibility
Julia Kramer has earned multiple advanced degrees at UC Berkeley: a Master of Public Health, a PhD in Mechanical Engineering, and a Designated Emphasis in Development Engineering. In addition to her scholarly work, she is co-founder of Reflex Design Collective, a consulting firm that uses design thinking to fight social inequality, and Visualize, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering and supporting midwives to screen for cervical cancer.
Kramer’s dissertation, “Designing for Health Accessibility: Case Studies of Human-Centered Design to Improve Access to Cervical Cancer Screening,” is based on her Development Engineering work in Ghana, India, and Nicaragua. She describes the impetus and framework for her research thus: “Our world faces immense challenges in global health and equity. We see huge disparities in access to health care across geographies, and while we have made massive strides in addressing health issues, we know that these disparities persist. In my dissertation, I explore the role of human-centered design to improve global health access. Human-centered design, a cross-disciplinary creative problem-solving approach, has been applied and studied in both academic research and industry practice, but its role in improving global health access remains poorly understood.
“I present research on designing for health accessibility in the context of one particular disease: cervical cancer. Cervical cancer is an illustrative example of the global disparities in access to health care, given that cervical cancer is preventable. Every year, 300,000 women around the world die of cervical cancer, and 90% are in low- and middle-income countries. My research examines the work of two organizations that created unique solutions to improve access to cervical cancer screening in India and Nicaragua. I developed case studies of each organization grounded in ethnographic fieldwork, including over 250 hours of observation and 15 interviews over two years. Through these case studies, I show how early efforts to understand the barriers inhibiting cervical cancer screening access allow design practitioners to create novel and feasible ways to address these barriers. This demonstrates the importance of design practitioners considering multiple dimensions of accessibility, while conducting design research in order to improve the potential impact of their ideas and prototypes. Overall, this dissertation establishes the foundation of a new framework to ‘design for accessibility’ that can spark further research across sectors, including but not limited to global health.”
Alana Siegner: Education at the Intersection of Food Systems and Climate Change
After graduating with a double major in Environmental Studies and International Relation from Tufts University, Alana Siegner spent three summers in Uganda working on an Engineers Without Borders clean water storage project. Siegner then served as an AmeriCorps National Teaching Fellow with Citizen Schools, working with 8th graders in Boston Public Schools. At UC Berkeley, where she completed a PhD from the Energy & Resources Group (ERG) and was an InFEWS Fellow, she researched sustainable, agroecological food systems and farm-to-school programs as mechanisms for developing student environmental and climate literacy. Her master’s project focused on the San Juan Islands as a case study of high-functioning school food programs and environmental education; and she served as a sustainable agriculture intern for two summers, working alongside small scale diversified farmers on Lopez Island. Siegner has developed, implemented, and evaluated food and climate change curriculum. She served as a graduate student researcher with the Berkeley Food Institute, working on a study of East Bay urban agroecology, with a focus on food distribution, access, and justice questions; and as an agriculture and plumbing systems engineer for the THIMBY tiny house project, a collaboration of ERG students, faculty, and graduate students from other departments.
The dissertation chapter most closely tied to Siegner’s InFEWS Fellowship is “Education: Experiential Food and Climate Change Curricula on Farms, in School Gardens, and in Humanities Classrooms.” It addresses the motivation for creating experiential, interdisciplinary, action- and solution-oriented climate change educational resources for a variety of educational settings. Using an integrated Food-Energy-Water nexus framing, she introduces concepts of systems thinking and experiential learning about natural resources as they relate to climate change education in the United States. Examples of experiential and solutions-oriented interdisciplinary curricula are provided from the San Juan Islands in Washington state, from Oakland, California, and from Washington, D.C.
Christopher Hyun: The Challenge of Sanitation in Low-Income Communities
Christopher Hyun has over a decade of experience in South Asia, working on water, sanitation, pollution, culture, religion, and development, particularly in the Ganges River Basin in Varanasi, India. He has worked with multiple NGOs on capacity building, education, and watershed and waste management. He earned a M.Sc. in Environmental Science from Banaras Hindu University, and in 2013 moved to Berkeley to join the master’s program in the Energy & Resources Group, then continuing on to become an InFEWS Fellow and complete his PhD at ERG with a Designated Emphasis in Development Engineering.
Hyun’s dissertation, “Shit, Now What? Overcoming the Struggles of Infrastructure, Inequity, and Capacity to Achieve Sanitation for All,” details how and why inadequate sanitation is a hallmark of low-income communities in low- and middle-income countries. He writes: “The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 6 (SDG 6) attempts to address this challenge by declaring ‘sanitation for all’ and targeting a 50 percent reduction of ‘untreated wastewater’ by 2030. However, urban areas of low- and middle-income countries have struggled to reach such treatment targets. Since the 1980s, development practitioners and researchers have interrogated the reasons for these shortcomings, primarily focused on the need for decentralized technology; however, increasingly blame has focused on the complexity of social phenomena. My scholarship is grounded in empirical research on the challenge of sanitation in low-income communities. While centered on the crisis of sanitation, I seek to advance and inform critical theoretical and policy-relevant debates on socio-technical systems, local governance, and capacity building.
“I hypothesize that sanitation shortcomings indicate gaps and miscommunications in our collective understanding of sanitation systems. Practitioners and researchers often base interventions on the ‘sanitation service chain,’ which defines the sanitation system as an engineering one as opposed to one with both social and technological dimensions. Therefore, I ask: (1) What are the definitions, functions, and actors of sanitation uncovered across major disciplines? (2) How do these disciplinary understandings compare to baseline understandings of sanitation, i.e. SDG 6 and the sanitation service chain? I led a cross-disciplinary review team from UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and Columbia University. Our discussion and results provide conceptual clarity to the complexity of sanitation systems through (1) the development of an augmented sanitation framework, as well as (2) recommendations for how cross-disciplinary research can support and advance the Sustainable Development Goals.”
When UC Berkeley alumna Anna Sadovnikova launched her successful social enterprise devoted to helping pregnant mothers overcome the challenges of breastfeeding, she never expected that she would need to reinvent the entire program — transforming an in-person breastfeeding simulator into a virtual training program. But that’s what she and her team did this spring.
It is with a heavy heart and beloved appreciation that we memorialize the passing of Dr. Bertram Lubin, a groundbreaking pediatrician and children’s hospital leader. Bert, as he was widely known, was the kind of person the Blum Center dreams of having around—to mentor students, advise faculty, inspire ideas, and lend decades of knowledge about the fight for disease mitigation and healthcare equity.
It is with
a heavy heart and beloved appreciation that we memorialize the passing of Dr.
Bertram Lubin, a groundbreaking pediatrician and children’s hospital leader.
Bert, as he was widely known, was the kind of person the Blum Center dreams of having
around—to mentor students, advise faculty, inspire ideas, and lend decades of
knowledge about the fight for disease mitigation and healthcare equity.
Bert joined the Blum Center Board of Trustees in 2016, and in 2019 he came to Blum Hall to serve as a senior health advisor because he could not fully retire. Although his career had been long and illustrious—he had served as the former president, CEO, and research director of Children’s Hospital Oakland for more than 40 years—there was still much he wanted to do.
And
indeed, there was much he did do. He advised students from our Global Poverty
& Practice program in their quest to reduce health inequities in California
and beyond. He brainstormed with us to further the impact of the Blum Center’s
Big Ideas Contest, Development Engineering programs, and healthcare technology
innovations, specifically CellScope.
Months
before his death, Bert was working the phones and sending emails at all hours
to support Project PreVENT, to make backup ventilators available at hospitals
treating COVID-19 patients. He helped pull together a coalition of scientists
and healthcare professionals that included College of Engineering Dean Tsu-Jae
King Liu and Mechanical Engineering Professor Grace O’Connell. “If there’s
anything I can do to help,” was Bert’s constant refrain, during a time he was
weak and fatigued from battling brain cancer.
Dr. Lubin
leaves many legacies. He is widely known for advancing the concept of the
social determinants of health and health equity, which include such varied
factors as early child development, food security, housing, social support,
education, housing, and poverty. A national expert in pediatric hematology,
particularly sickle cell disease, he launched the first newborn screening program
for hemoglobinopathies in California, which became the national standard,
saving thousands of largely African American children’s lives. He started the
first sibling cord blood banking program in the world for children with hemoglobinopathies;
co-authored the first clinical best practice guidelines for sickle cell anemia;
and supported the application of gene therapy and bone marrow transplantation
for children with hemoglobinopathies.
At Children’s Hospital Oakland, he also mentored over 1,000 aspiring healthcare practitioners from underrepresented, minority high school, college, and post-baccalaureate institutions. The CHORI Summer Research Program was Bert’s way of saying: My parents didn’t go to college, I didn’t come from money, but now I develop groundbreaking health care programs for all children—you can, too.
In an
interview for an October 2019 Blum Center article, Bert said: “I think we have
to have healthcare leadership involved in public policy. If you don’t get
policy and implementation together, then you’re not going to move the needle.
We need to stop pursuing small economic advantages. We need to focus on big
impacts for society.”
Thank you,
Dr. Bertram Lubin. We will carry your inspiration and vision with us.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are
caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of
destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” —Martin
Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963
In
the wake of the deaths of George
Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and too many
others, we remember Dr. King’s words about the rippling effect of injustice and
oppression. We are horrified by the senseless racism and abuse of privilege and
power that remain prevalent in parts of our society. And we stand in support of
the peaceful exercise of grief, horror, and desire for systemic change for those
who are injured and attacked for the color of their skin, the location of their
home, or the assertion of their rights.
The mission of the Blum Center is to promote social justice,
inclusiveness, and greater economic and social opportunity for all. We believe
that racial, ethnic, and religious harmony, empathy, and a shared sense of
purpose are critical to solving the big problems confronting us today: the
pandemic, global warming, poverty, health inequities, and racial and social injustices,
to name a few.
To create an atmosphere for working collectively on these large
problems, we need to strengthen our networks of mutuality and speak a language
that embodies a spirit of community, nationally and globally. We need to speak
of historical sins and understanding, of the stark need for cultural, economic,
and racial justice. We need to reaffirm loud and clear, Black Lives Matter. This
must be part of the language with which we give power to a new culture based on
solidarity, humanity, and progress.
Although we are in a moment of multiple crises: health,
environmental, economic, and political, we harbor the hope that this moment can
yield new understandings, futures, and destinies. Let us work together to
create a more just, equitable, inclusive, healthy, and prosperous world.
When Rachel Dzombak and Vivek Rao began planning for the spring 2020 Development Engineering course “Innovation in Disaster Response,” part of their motivation was to get students to think about the use of technology during past disasters. But by early March, it was clear to Dzombak and Rao that the COVID-19 pandemic was increasing the relevancy of their class in ways no one could have predicted.
When Rachel Dzombak and Vivek Rao began planning for the spring 2020 Development Engineering course “Innovation in Disaster Response,” part of their motivation was to get students to think about the use of technology during past disasters. But by early March, it was clear to Dzombak and Rao—who both earned PhDs in Engineering at Cal, have expertise in design and innovation, and lecture for the Blum Center and the Haas School of Business—that the COVID-19 pandemic was increasing the relevancy of their class in ways no one could have predicted.
For their 23 students—comprising even shares of graduates and undergraduates, technical and non-technical majors, and women and men—determining appropriate technological interventions to disaster-driven problems became visceral. And as the class moved online, connected by Google and Zoom instead of open studio space, the students observed how all manner of organizations were struggling to use technology to protect lives and livelihoods due to the fast-moving coronavirus.
Ethan Stobbe, a Master of Engineering student, recounted that the class started with different readings about drone technology. One reading was written for and by engineers whose view of drones was promotional and laudatory, and the other was written by and for government employees who warned about public policy problems presented by unmanned aerial vehicles.
“I realized there was this massive disconnect between the people who develop the technology and get excited about it and push it,” he said, “and the people who have to use technology to make life in a disaster zone more bearable. That’s the beauty of this class—to see both sides—and to understand how to bring technology that’s less than a decade old into a disaster response zone.”
Stobbe was assigned to the “cash disbursements” team with a fellow engineer and two lawyers. They included: Karen Olivia Jimeno, a Master of Development Practice and Fulbright student from the Philippines; Mozheng (Edward) Hu, a Master of Engineering student focused on product design from China; and Ifejesu Ogunleye, a Master of Development Practice student who trained in law at University of Manchester and the Nigerian Law School. As they conducted interviews about cash disbursement with representatives from FEMA, Give Directly, and other organizations, they were guided by Dzombak and Rao not just to focus on the mobile technology, but on “framing and reframing” their understanding of how to make cash disbursements more effective.
Alex Diaz, Head of Crisis Response & Humanitarian Aid at Google.org, lectured to students on disaster prevention, response, and recovery, focusing on the roles of technology and governance.
The team’s first framing question was: How might we help streamline the disbursement of cash relief while maximizing its impact in disaster response? This prompted the students to question how the disbursement process works, why particular steps in the process are difficult, which organizations are the largest, and what existing standards govern the field. After conducting several interviews with practitioners, they learned that cash allocation can be enhanced through crowdsourced information and public accountability, but that targeting people is a challenge and enrollment and verification takes time. So they reframed their question to: How might we speed up the distribution of cash transfers by improving the enrollment of and verification process of disaster survivors?
The team’s final idea, which included a prototype website presented over Zoom in early May, was “biometric pre-registration” along with a policy guide to address legal concerns. The idea was to compel individuals in flood, hurricane, and other disaster zones to pre-register their biometric information on a website, in order to receive cash disbursements more easily in the event of a calamity. The point, argued the team, is to work around the problem of identification, as driver’s licenses, social security documents, and birth certificates often disintegrate in disasters. During their final presentation, the team acknowledged how seeing the rollout of the CARES Act, in which tax returns were used as a verification method, validated the need for solutions that enable quick access to cash for citizens.
Dzombak and Rao see the educational approach they offer to the cash disbursement and other teams as part of the emerging discipline of Development Engineering. “Development Engineering embraces complexity as a sub-discipline in itself,” explained Rao. “A lot of ways that design-based problem solving or technology-driven problem solving is taught—the problem isn’t engaged in a multi-dimensional way.”
Dzombak underscored that although the course teaches design methodologies, “The actual project is the focus and outcome of the class. The projects themselves demand that one builds technical and social fluencies and specifically how to move back and forth between the two to solve problems that matter.”
Dzombak feels strongly that STEM education needs more problem contextualization, more emphasis on ethics, and more rigor around collaboration and teamwork. She was drawn to Development Engineering during her PhD at UC Berkeley because she wants to see academic inventions tested and applied but also because she believes that well implemented technologies, devised in an interdisciplinary and collaborative way, can improve and even save lives.
Rao explained that there is a long orthodoxy in higher education that you must learn theory before exploring applied technologies or solutions—an orthodoxy that stems from the need for deep knowledge before tackling complex problems. “But there is also an urgency to many problems,” said Rao. “Students have a hunger for them and there are many ways to contribute to problems before you have a PhD in a specific field.”
Rao noted that the accessibility of technology is changing who gets to intervene in disasters and how. “The ability to manufacture a mechanical part would previously have required a high degree of fluency in several knowledge areas and toolkits,” he said. “Now, a rough prototype of that product can be designed and built with a credit card and a few clicks. In many cases, the learning curve on technical tools has eased to the point where you can engage with tools and theory simultaneously and cater to students where they are.”
Dzombak noted that the augmented reality and data visualization sessions of their course would not have been possible four years ago when she and Rao were working on their doctorates. “Every student would have needed a background in programming and hardware in order to engage in that space. But given where toolkits are now, students were able to download software, do some reading, and then engage in a meaningful way.”
Since technologies will alway be advancing, Dzombak and Rao believe there is a growing space for people who are tech savvy but not tech specialized and can frame questions while leveraging the latest tools. “We’re trying to teach students how to learn how to learn in a very explicit way,” said Dzombak. “Because of the way jobs are shifting, people are going to be forced to get up to speed on new technologies and figure out how to use them to tackle problem areas.”
The student team that explored drone imagery is an example of this approach. They were excited to apply drone technology to fire mitigation in California. But after talking to fire chiefs, image processing researchers, and drone operators and designers, they surfaced several problem areas in which they did not have the expertise to make a contribution. For example, they knew that one of the challenges in using drone video footage during disasters is how best to parse the massive amount of data generated. And they also knew that drones suffer from flight mechanics and battery power issues during disasters, but those issues are best handled by drone manufacturers. Where could they make an impact?
One area where they found less activity is how to leverage public and private drone operation after the first hour of a disaster. The “Rapidash” prototype—developed by Master of Development Practice Student Aaron Scherf, Master of Engineering Student Wai Yan Nyein, Cognitive Science Student Meera Ramesh, and Data Science Student Jinsu Elhance—is an app that enables public and and private drone operators to collaborate during disasters by providing maps of high vulnerability areas and access by firefighters to this information. The idea is to get firefighters crucial information about the direction and density of a blaze as soon as possible and especially when public drones are too far away.
Katie Wetstone, a Master of Development Practice student who was assigned to the “disinformation” team, said that this kind of idea formation has been a strength of the class. “We were given a structured way to process information after interviews and organize different insights,” she said. “This approach is different from other courses, in that we have more time to research and understand a problem space rather than jumping to a solution.”
Wetstone said it wasn’t until the last third of the class, after interviews with Alex Diaz at Google.org and Chris Worman at TechSoup, that her team homed in on the idea that disinformation is a “public sector problem in a private sector space.” They also realized that immediately after a disaster there is an “information vacuum period” when a lot of disinformation spreads, making people vulnerable to news that increases anxiety and bad decisions.
“This whole problem is a balance between education, technology, and policy,” said Master of Development Practice Student Sadie Frank. “Until the policy mechanisms around enforcement and regulation of social media change, or until private social media companies make significant personnel investments, our best approach might be to teach people how to recognize and avoid disinformation.”
During the final projects showcase, the disinformation team presented “Compasio,” a downloadable device extension that filters potentially inaccurate information on social media through pre-verified accounts and geolocation. The software essentially warns users when information is suspect or unverified.
Dzombak notes that “Innovation in Disaster Response” is not meant to jumpstart social enterprise ideas, such as new apps and web services, though it might. “The training is meant to prevent unintended consequences once students go into the workforce. That’s why we spent a lot of time on critical thinking, ethics and values, decision-making, and teaming.”
Deniz Dogruer, an Engineering Education PhD Student and COO of Squishy Robotics, who served as the graduate student instructor for the course, noted that the range of disaster-related problem spaces students explored—drones, disinformation, evacuation, disaster documentation, and cash disbursement—made the course particularly complex to teach but also advantageous for development engineering training.
On Zoom: Innovation in Disaster Response Graduate Instructor Deniz Dogruer (upper left) and Course Developer-Lecturers Rachel Dzombak (upper right) and Vivek Rao (bottom).
Although the COVID-19 pandemic that forced the course online gave faculty and students a chance to consider the importance of technology during disasters, Dzombak said it’s been a “mixed bag.”
“In some ways, it gives students an excellent way to connect with their learning. The disinformation team, for example, was inundated with so many examples of how their problem can manifest,” she said. “On the flip side, so many people think the future of education is purely online. But the intangibles that we’re trying to teach—collaboration, peer-to-peer learning, process iteration, emotional connections—are just drastically changed. I think the irony is that solving complex societal problems requires people collaboration as much if not more than advances in technology. We need to be present with each other, not just with the machine.”
George Moore, an InFEWS Fellow and Development and Mechanical Engineering PhD student, has been awarded the Birgeneau Recognition Award for Service to Underrepresented Students.
George Moore, an InFEWS Fellow and Development and Mechanical Engineering PhD student, has been awarded the Birgeneau Recognition Award for Service to Underrepresented Students. The Blum Center emailed with Moore to find out more about his academic and extracurricular interests and views on the culture of STEM.
What was it like to move to UC Berkeley for
grad school after growing up in Alabama and attending University of South
Alabama?
These two places have really different
cultural values. So, in addition to the excitement of being in a new physical
space, there was a lot for me to learn about Bay Area culture. In general, my
decision to come to Berkeley was intentional: I knew that my academic capacity and
personal lifestyle would be challenged.
Why have you felt compelled to help
underrepresented communities develop STEM skills or advance in their STEM
careers?
All underrepresented communities are not the
same. It would be foolish to think that I have something helpful to offer just
because I also identify as a member of an underrepresented community. But
because support for these communities is insufficient, I feel inspired to give
what I have to offer. Because I have
been able to navigate a piece of the STEM institutional system, it’s easier for
me to feel more comfortable offering my service in these disciplines. What
I think is most important is that I offer my experience and advice purely as a
resource, and not a conviction, that should be imposed on someone else’s
lifestyle. In other words, it’s not my place to steer underrepresented folks
towards an engineering degree or, more broadly, pursuing a STEM career.
Instead, one of my essential goals is to shed some light on how to navigate and
leverage opportunities in STEM when the system is not designed for you to
succeed. I’d hate to see someone abandon their cultural values for a career in
STEM.
Tell us about your service work—with the
SMASH Academy and the Pinoleville Pomo Nation.
I have enjoyed the opportunity to meet,
share, and learn from scholars at the SMASH
Academy and community members of the Pinoleville Pomo Nation. With
both groups, I was able to share some of the Human Centered Design strategies
that I and other practitioners use to address big problems. My hope is that my
work reassures and, if necessary, instills confidence in SMASH Scholars and the
PPN community so that they are aware of their capacity to solve their own
problems.
As vice president of the Black Graduate
Engineering and Science Student Association, what kinds of programs have you
implemented?
I’ve worked alongside Liya
Weldegebriel (BGESS President) and several other strong black graduate students
on the BGESS executive team to help provide supportive programming for BGESS
members this year. A few notable programs include our Buddy Lunch mentorship program,
Professional Development Workshop, Cultural Exchange Speakers Series, and
attendance at AfroTech in the Fall. The Buddy Lunch program matches BGESS
members based on their interests and encourages them to meet up for lunch to
share experiences and advice navigating life at UC Berkeley. Recently, the
program has moved to virtual lunches via Zoom in response to the COVID-19
pandemic. The Professional Development Workshop was inspired by conversations
about figuring out how to prepare ourselves for life after graduate
school. The Cultural Exchange Speaker Series have offered a platform to
have culturally relevant conversations with each other. These events range from
panel sessions with prominent black scholars in STEM to sharing our own
cultural backgrounds—acknowledging that while we share a lot of the same values
and struggles as the black graduates in STEM, our cultural backgrounds are
actually quite different. AfroTech
is an annual Conference held in the Bay Area that focuses on accelerating black
careers in engineering, design, and entrepreneurship. Thousands of black
professionals in STEM and related fields attend this conference every year. In
the Fall of 2019, we had at least 15 BGESS members attend.
Your LinkedIn page notes that you are “On
a mission to thread a desire for empowering marginalized communities with a
passion for sustainable design. Hence, I stay familiar, and critical, of
frameworks like the Human-centered Design process and Life Cycle
Analysis.” Please explain your skepticism about HCD and LCA. What issues
does it fail to address for marginalized communities?
While these
frameworks are constantly being modified to better serve their purpose,
“service to marginalized communities” is not always included in that purpose.
So it’s important that I use these frameworks with caution and understand the
underlying assumptions that other researchers and practitioners have made. A
good understanding of these assumptions is what enables me to refine these
frameworks to better serve a marginalized community of interest.
For many entrepreneurs who come out of the University of California’s Big Ideas social innovation contest, the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic are motivating them to find creative ways to shift their business strategies to stay busy and afloat.
For many entrepreneurs who come out of the University of California’s Big Ideas social innovation contest, the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic are motivating them to find creative ways to shift their business strategies to stay busy and afloat.
Around the UC Berkeley campus, there has been a plethora of COVID-19 responses that will help developing and developed countries alike.
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
So began T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land about madness and death, trauma and hope, and the confusing world of the early 20th century. A century later, we find ourselves in another cruel April, one witnessed and suffered by the whole world due to the coronavirus disease pandemic: COVID-19.
At the Blum Center, we like all centers and departments and schools have been shifting to online teaching, advising, and working—as well as closely following the spread of the disease to low-income countries and regions. As you know, the news is bad. The COVID-19 crisis threatens to disproportionately affect developing countries, not only as a health crisis but as a devastating social and economic crisis.
For poor countries, the socioeconomic fallout from COVID-19 could take years to recover from, according to a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report released on March 30. The report warns that income losses are expected to exceed $220 billion in developing countries, and nearly half of all jobs in Africa could be lost:
“With an estimated 55 per cent of the global population having no access to social protection, these losses will reverberate across societies, impacting education, human rights and, in the most severe cases, basic food security and nutrition. Under-resourced hospitals and fragile health systems are likely to be overwhelmed. This may be further exacerbated by a spike in cases, as up to 75 per cent of people in least developed countries lack access to soap and water.”
But there is room for hope and more for action. As Berkeley Economics Professor Edward Miguel points out in a recent Cal news article, Africa has certain strengths for combatting COVID-19. Unlike much of Europe, the median age of many African countries is young: 20 years old. That could mean the proportion of people who die could be much lower in African countries. That might also be true for India, where the median age is 26.8. Miguel, who is faculty director of the Center for Effective Global Action, also notes two other strengths: Even though Africa is rapidly urbanizing, a large share of the population still lives in rural areas, where social distancing is more possible.
He continues: “Another strength is the regional experience in sub-Saharan Africa dealing with Ebola in the last five or six years. There was infrastructure put in place to screen people, to contain an epidemic. I know Ebola and COVID-19 are quite different, but that capacity building may help now. And Africa has 30 years of dealing with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Partially due to local initiatives, partially due to global aid initiatives, African health systems are much stronger than they were 20 years ago, or 15 years ago.”
Still, there is much to fear and prepare for. Multilateral agencies, international foundations, and all manner of aid organizations focused on poor countries are moving funds and resources toward saving lives. A UNDP-led COVID-19 Rapid Response Facility has been launched with an initial $20 million; however, UNDP anticipates a minimum $500 million need to support 100 countries. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank have urged debt relief to poorer countries hit by the coronavirus pandemic, with bilateral creditors playing a major role.
“Many countries will need debt relief. This is the only way they can concentrate any new resources on fighting the pandemic and its economic and social consequences,” said World Bank President David Malpass at a March 26 meeting. Malpass reported that the bank has emergency operations under way in 60 countries and its board is considering the first 25 projects valued at nearly $2 billion under a $14 billion fast-track facility to help fund immediate healthcare needs. Meanwhile, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development have pledged $274 million in health and humanitarian assistance. And Bill Gates is spending billions to set up factories that will make the seven most promising coronavirus vaccines.
Around the UC Berkeley campus, there has been a plethora of COVID-19 responses that will help developing and developed countries alike. The first target of a new AI research consortium, the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute (of which I am co-director), is research that addresses the application of AI and machine learning to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Bioengineering Professor and Blum Center Chief Technologist Dan Fletcher and his lab members have come up with a way to adapt the fluorescence microscopy function of their mobile phone microscope, the CellScope, to assist in rapid testing. Fletcher and his colleagues have been working with virology expert Melanie Ott of the Gladstone Institute and CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna, among others, to provide the rapid remote detection portion of the team’s CRISPR-based COVID-19 RNA detection method. Dr. Bertram Lubin, the Blum Center’s and College of Engineering’s senior advisor in health, has been working with a coalition of UC Berkeley engineers led by Mechanical Engineering Professor Grace O’Connell, emergency room doctors, and critical care pulmonologists to turn sleep apnea machines into ventilators. And Development and Mechanical Engineering Student Paige Balcom is in Uganda (where there are 55 ICU beds with oxygen for a population of nearly 43 million people), using her social enterprise Takataka Plastics to manufacture face shields for doctors and staff in the town of Gulu.
In this issue of the Blum Center’s Innovation Chronicle, we salute these and others working stop the spread of COVID-19 and educating the next generation of Berkeley changemakers. Fiat Lux!
Shankar Sastry is Faculty Director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies and Siebel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Bio-engineering and Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley.
In anticipation of the expansion of its Development Engineering programs and continued growth of the Big Ideas Contest and global problem-solving initiatives, the Blum Center welcomes two new members to its board of trustees.
Michelle Nunn is president and CEO of CARE USA, a leading humanitarian organization that fights global poverty and provides lifesaving assistance in emergencies. CARE works in 93 countries and directly reaches 63 million people annually. Nunn took the helm of CARE in 2015 and has since invested in innovative new programs and partnerships with private corporations and other nonprofits. Among her initiatives, Nunn has set a goal of increasing CARE’s micro-savings program from 7 million participants to 60 million participants by 2028.
Before joining CARE, Nunn built an illustrious career of civic and public service as a social entrepreneur, a nonprofit CEO, and a candidate for the U.S. Senate. She co-founded the volunteer-mobilization organization Hands On Atlanta, and expanded it from a single entity to a national network of more than 50 affiliates. Nunn oversaw that group’s merger with Points of Light, creating the world’s largest organization dedicated to volunteer service, with affiliates across the globe engaging more than 70,000 corporations and nonprofit organizations.
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Virginia, Nunn majored in history with a minor in religion and earned her Master’s Degree in Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She also received a Kellogg Fellowship to study faith and social justice in more than a dozen countries, from Peru to Namibia to Jordan.
Afsaneh Mashayekhi Beschloss is the founder and CEO of RockCreek, a leading global investment firm that applies technology and innovation to sustainable investments. Previously, she was managing director and partner at the Carlyle Group and president of Carlyle Asset Management. She was treasurer and chief investment officer of the World Bank and worked at Shell International and J.P. Morgan. Beschloss has advised central banks and regulatory agencies on global public policy and financial policy. She led the World Bank’s energy investments and policy work on sustainable investing in traditional and renewable energy and power projects to reduce carbon emissions. She founded its Natural Gas Group to invest in natural gas and power projects in emerging economies.
Beschloss serves on the boards of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the World Resources Institute, and the American Red Cross, among others. She is a member of the World Economic Forum and the Council of Foreign Relations. Beschloss is a past Trustee of the Ford Foundation, where she chaired the Investment Committee.
Beschloss is a recipient of the Institutional Investor Lifetime Achievement Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Ripple of Hope Award. She was recognized as one of American Banker’s Most Powerful Women in Banking. Beschloss holds an MPhil (Honors) in Economics from the University of Oxford, where she taught international trade and economic development. She is the co-author of The Economics of Natural Gas and author of numerous journal articles on energy, finance, impact, and sustainability.
Said Professor Shankar Sastry, faculty director of the Blum Center, “We are delighted Michelle Nunn and Afsaneh Mashayekhi Beschloss have agreed to lend us their intellect, ear, insights, and sage advice to further the Blum Center mission to educate the next generation of global citizens and support breakthrough interdisciplinary research for the widest societal benefit. In Fall 2021, we will launch the first professional master’s degree in Development Engineering, piggybacking on what we have learned from our faculty innovations, our Big Ideas Contest, our undergraduate program in Global Poverty & Practice, and our PhD programs in Development Engineering. We are grateful these two exceptional people will be helping us with that and other efforts.”
Woojin Jung, an assistant professor in the Rutgers School of Social Work, credits her interdisciplinary education in social welfare, public policy, and development engineering for her award-winning research. In December, she was honored with the 2020 Society for Social Work and Research Outstanding Social Work Doctoral Dissertation Award for Combating Poverty Through Aid: A Critical Analysis of Alternative Models, which she wrote at UC Berkeley to fulfill her PhD in social work and development engineering. To find out more about Jung’s poverty measurement research and her contributions to development engineering, the Blum Center conducted the following interview.
Rutgers School of Social Work. Photo by John O’Boyle
Your
dissertation examines the discrepancies between
different global poverty measures and brings that analysis to bear on
identifying the salient dimensions of poverty in developing countries. What
were your most surprising or meaningful takeaways from this analysis?
One surprising finding is that the
discrepancies between the two approaches to poverty were larger than I thought.
For instance, in Cambodia in 2010, only 10 percent of the population was poor
by a $1.90 poverty measure, but almost half of the population was living in poverty
by multidimensional measure. In development agencies, when it comes to the
usage of indicators, income measures dominate but this study shows that each
measure requires attention. How to incorporate multiple measures is another
issue. Policymakers and research communities can juxtapose various measures one
by one, taking a dashboard approach, but I want to take a systemic account of
discrepancies. It was interesting to me that exceptions and mismatches between
measures are not always bad but may serve as interesting sources of information
and have the potential to be used as a policy instrument.
The most unexpected finding was that some evidence of the match between needs and policy intervention, which I would call the diagnosis and prescription match. My study finds that the “capability poor” countries receive marginally higher social sector aid relative to economic sector aid.[1] Social sector aid aiming to address capability poverty has skyrocketed since the beginning of the 2000s, significantly outpacing the economic and production aid. The result of the analysis tells us that higher rate of social sector aid is not uniform but more in countries where poverty is more multidimensional. Further research can expand this discussion by analyzing whether the considerable policy shift favoring the social sector was in response to the growing rate of “capability poor” countries to “income poor countries” or in response to the large magnitude of capability poverty as relative to income poverty. As for the individual country, more attention can be paid to outliers lacking the diagnosis and treatment match[2]
Given what you know about discrepancies between measures of
international poverty and advances in technology to better measure
poverty, how can the development community better distribute aid in, say,
Myanmar, where you focus some of your paper?
I would say that development
communities should be more clear and consistent about the definition and
concepts of poverty and policy responses to address poverty. Rhetorically, the
development community calls for tackling “poverty.” However, in terms of aid
targeting, they equate the meaning of poverty with low gross national income.
Strictly speaking, poverty and low gross national income inform needs from
different angles. The poverty rate exclusively focuses on those falling below
the poverty line and reflects the distribution of income (and dimensions of
other wellbeing). However, average national income, which is a measure of
central tendency, takes account of everyone’s income, and the super-rich can
move the mean upward. In my previous study, I found out that aid per capita per
country is explained by GNI per capita and population, but poverty rate does not
have any significant explanatory power, or even if it does, it is in the
negative direction (the poorer, the less aid). The ways economic growth and
national income translate into poverty reduction differs by country; both
income and poverty should be taken together. For instance, among countries with
a similar average income per capita, should not those with a large proportion
of poor be receiving more aid?
I also think that development communities should take advantage of the advancement of technology to measure poverty. We can validate and test the performance of new poverty measures through supervised learning, triangulate alternative measures, and use them to impute missing data. I found that the areas with the highest needs often have the least certain data, spatially and timely irrelevant. When serving these areas, even if the development community uses their best intentions, it is left with ad-hoc decisions to pick beneficiary communities. When the World Bank and Korea International Cooperation Agency started their community-centered development (CCD) projects in Myanmar in 2012-2013, the country didn’t have any reliable income and consumption data to identify the most impoverished townships or villages. The country’s first DHS data became available in 2015 and 2016, but proxy poverty measures such as the wealth index[3] are available in only 441 village clusters. Using geospatial interpolation techniques or poverty prediction techniques using satellite imagery, development communities can better pinpoint where the poor are and fill the development gaps using global social welfare program—development aid.
Your study concludes with a call for social work
research and practice to return to the basics, and to begin by considering client
needs. Why are you compelled to make this call?
Actually, I am speaking to the broad field of social
science, including social welfare/social work and development engineering. I
was compelled to make this call because a particular way of generating evidence
may have obscured broader lessons. The knowledge continuum of a development
project is composed of need assessment, implementation, evaluation, and policy uptake.
Each piece of evidence can
contribute to creating a holistic sense of impact. There will be a cost
involved in putting too much emphasis on one of the continuums (e.g., outcome
evaluation), a specific sector (e.g., health), or scope (micro approach). For
instance, rigorous
experimental studies can tease out socio-economic impacts of interventions but
are less likely to recover quantities that are useful for policy.
Similarly, too
much emphasis on outcomes can result in disproportionate aid allocation to
sectors with easy-to-measure outcomes, such as health, HIV/AIDS prevention,
while stifling innovations with hard-to-reach populations. With the promise of
the big data revolution, questions also arise over the value added—other than
confirming what’s already been known—in the international development context.
Many development projects have failed because they did not simply pass the
scrutiny of the very first test: Does the intervention take precedence over all
competing resources for individuals and communities in extreme deprivation? Is
providing a laptop for a child really a priority for children suffering from
lack of water or food and in a village without electricity?
The sub-field of
social welfare/social work is heavily leaning towards health science while the
sub-field dedicated to anti-poverty policies has been losing its ground, particularly
in the U.S. Still, I am not quite convinced why studies covering individual health
outcomes such as patients experiencing depression or sleeplessness are more
likely to be funded than inquiries about poverty, inequality, or structural
impediments to finding decent work, which might affect billions of people and
many other social problems. Part of the reason would be the substantial funding
streams exclusively earmarked to the health sector with concrete indicators for
success. Science that advances health is important to both the rich and the
poor, but science that reduces poverty would be only an issue for the poor. I
think such an imbalance in social welfare and in social science as a whole can
be partly remedied by going back to basics, starting from client and user
needs.
Tell
us about your effort to combine fine-grained spatial
techniques with satellite imagery to assess aid allocation in data-sparse
communities in Myanmar. What did that involve, and what did you discover?
My efforts focused on creating
poverty variables, combining spatial analysis and remote sensing methods. They
involve the entire process of data science techniques—atomized data collection,
the representation of non-traditional data, downstream machine learning tasks,
and data visualization. Like in many other countries, Myanmar does not have poverty
data at a small community level where aid projects are taking place. This would
make it difficult to say whether aid-receiving communities are poorer than non-aid
receiving communities or whether aid volume is explained by the degree of wealth.
I used spatial interpolation techniques to overlay the gridded wealth field onto
the georeferenced aid project locations, so that we can estimate the level of
poverty in project villages as compared to non-project villages. The
fine-grained spatial analysis also allows measurement of poverty at a small
scale such as a 5 km by 5 km square grid depending on the resolution of the
images, and it does not depend on administrative boundaries. What I also found
interesting is that there are multiple ways of measuring poverty or needs
broadly so that we can link needs and interventions. One of those is a distance
to conflict areas from project villages, a measure of need relevant to fragile
and conflict-prone countries. Beyond spatial interpolation, I also use
nontraditional data sources such as daytime and nighttime satellite images. For
instance, annual average nighttime luminosity across Myanmar was extracted from
raster/image files and was trained to predict poverty using a convolutional
neural network.
Through this new
approach, I discovered mixed evidence in needs-based
targeting. Community centered development (CCD) in Myanmar disproportionately
flows to better-off communities, as indicated by a lower share of vulnerable
populations per township and areas that shine brighter. However, unlike the literature
that argues that aid favors the richest, my study suggests that a need-based
allocation is also in place in Myanmar, at least for community-centered
development, an aid instrument known for its emphasis on participation and
inclusion. The previous studies used aggregated poverty measures at the state
level, which is the highest administrative level, across African countries. Within
villages of similar levels of population and electrification, aid goes to areas
with low assets. The analytic tool I developed also helped me answer other
questions. I found that the donor’s ideology shapes the design of aid projects
design and project design matters in targeting. One CCD project concentrates on
poorer regions, while the other project supports villages close to conflict
zones.
Why did you choose to get a designated emphasis in development engineering? What did the field bring to your dissertation and how might it shape your academic career?
With a policy analyst background in development agencies, I wanted to continue work on international development and was about to start a concurrent MA in economics while earning a PhD. At that time, I also discovered the development engineering program and sought advice from Dr. Clair Brown to weigh in. I like what the program is aiming for—that is, addressing poverty by emphasizing human-centered design, adapting technology to local needs, and scaling up interventions. So I decided to take a route to development engineering.
I took core development engineering
courses and was connected with innovative projects and their research teams,
such as the Darfur Cook Stove project. That inspired me a lot, so for the last
chapter of my dissertation, I wanted to survey “technology-informed
data-intensive projects” (e.g., Development Impact Lab projects supported by
the Blum Center) and interview principal investigators. However, after the
discussion with the Blum Center, I realized that there is no centralized
reservoir/data warehouse to collect such data. Due to this obstacle in doing a
study of other studies, I thought, “Why don’t I get involved in data-savvy
research?” and I ended up doing such research. The rigorous core and elective
course of development engineering paved my way toward building data fluency and
programming skills.
As I acknowledged in my dissertation, being part of the development engineering group has expanded my area of interest to the application of technology for social good. I really benefited from the marriage between STEM and social science education. For instance, I drew my aid occurrence and density outcome variable from spatial differences in African elephant densities. The development engineering program helped me select rigorous data science and impact evaluation courses to promote my analytic skills. It put me in touch with faculty members from various disciplines. The guidance and mentorship from my advisor, Dr. Brown, as well as Dr. Agogino and Dr. Levin, have been strong. Dr. Brown has been nourishing my scholarship in every way from the formulation of the research question to coaching for a job interview, to following up with article submission. The NSF INFEWS fellowship was also a tremendous financial support to pursue my dissertation.
The data science training and my
interdisciplinary background with social welfare, public policy, and development
dngineering will profoundly shape my academic career. I believe my unique
contribution to the field is showing how to harness technology and data to identify
the needs of the most impoverished in the world—from the eyes of social work, as
well as for its direct work experience with clients.
—Tamara Straus
[1]
Particularly low policy
score (CPIA) countries receive more assistance to the civil service and
governance subsector, which was a sub-sector that led to the increase in aid to
the social sector.
[2]
For instance, Zimbabwe in 2016 received a higher ratio of social sector aid
(USD 151) despite its income poverty status. In contrast, Sudan in 2010
received a lower rate of social sector aid (USD 6.77) despite its capability
poor status.
[3]
Although the wealth index cannot be used directly to construct benchmark measures
of poverty, these asset-based measures are capable of capturing a household’s
long-term economic welfare in poor regions lacking consumption, expenditure and
price data.
Erica Stone, who has served as president of American
Himalayan Foundation for close to 30 years, came to her job through an
unusual path.
After graduating from Cal with a BA in Sociology she met Gil
Roberts, an Alta Bates emergency room physician whom she describes as “part
climber, part doctor, part Hells Angel.”
“Gil said, ‘Would you like to go camping?’ I was smitten so
I said, ‘Sure.’ Then I asked ‘Where?’ He said, ‘Everest Base Camp,’ and I said,
‘OK.’ So, we went camping. We walked from Kathmandu to Everest Base Camp. This
was 1991; it took a month. We fell in love and then we went back to Nepal a
lot.”
Roberts was among the first Americans to climb Hidden Peak
in the Karakoram range in Pakistan and almost lost his life scaling Everest in
1963, when a 30-foot-high slab of ice tore loose and killed his climbing
companion. Through the climbing community, he later met UC Regent Richard Blum,
who started the American Himalayan Foundation (AHF) in 1981 to alleviate the
widespread poverty he had witnessed on his trips to Nepal.
“Gil was on the board of AHF,” explains Stone. “I went to a
meeting or two. At one point, Richard was looking around for someone to grow it
because it was tiny, with revenues of $60,000 per year. By then I had an MBA
from the Haas School of Business and was working as a consultant. At first, I was
reluctant but then I thought, Why not? So,
I traded my crampons and duffle for a laptop and garment bag.”
Erica Stone on horseback in the Mustang District of Nepal on the way to visit an American Himalayan Foundation grantee.
Stone’s adventurous spirit and sharp business skills have
been a driving force behind the American Himalayan Foundation’s steady
expansion, which now gives away around $4 million a year. The nonprofit has a diverse portfolio
of programs—from supporting girls’ education and restoring ancient temples to
building health clinics and protecting tigers. Its staff is intensely loyal; in
addition to Stone’s 29 years at the helm, Vice President Norbu
Tenzing has been with AHF for 27 years, Nepal Country Director Bruce
Moore for 20 years, and Deputy Director Charu
Pradhan for 17 years.
Stone says much has changed—particularly travel to and
communications with one of the world’s more inaccessible regions—and much remains
the same. “We had a startup feel about us in the early days and that has not changed,”
she notes. “If you want to operate in Nepal, you need to be willing to pivot at
any point and in any direction, because it’s not a country that you can
predict.”
The foundation’s reaction to the earthquake in 2015 illustrates this flexibility. The Gorkha earthquake killed nearly 9,000 people and injured almost 22,000, which meant that AHF had to continue programs and add new ones in a country that was literally convulsed. Thanks to its educational programs, AHF could mobilize its local partner networks on the ground to help distressed students and their families. AHF and it partners deputized teachers to distribute “blue bags” with food, water, clothes, toothbrushes, and other essentials. The foundation also built 54 temporary schools and later rebuilt or repaired a hospital, elder homes, and schools.
Stone’s approach to philanthropy is marked by this kind of practicality: do what makes sense, meet people where they are. Although its headquarters are in San Francisco and AHF employs a staff of six in Kathmandu, the foundation is largely leveraged—meaning it always works in partnership with local people and organizations to identify, implement, and improve its programs.
“In the early years especially,” relates Stone. “I would go
and look for local rockstars—people who are driven, passionate, savvy, and can
actualize. We would sign onto their vision and help them build capacity.”
STOP Girl Trafficking is one the initiatives that has grown from a local rockstar’s vision. In 1993, the AHF board—which now includes dignitaries like former Ambassador Peter W. Bodde and celebrities like Sharon Stone—began to hear rumblings about rural Nepali girls being sex trafficked, largely to India. Stone convened a meeting of local people working against trafficking at Malla Hotel in Kathmandu. Eighteen people showed up, including Nepali doctor Aruna Uprety.
“Aruna was clearly the star,” remembers Stone. “She had seen Nepali girls trapped in brothels in Mumbai. They said to her, ‘It’s too late for us. What you need to do is go back and stop other girls from coming here.’ Aruna had this vision for preventing girl from being trafficked—it’s cheaper, easier, and prevents so much suffering. She led us to keep girls in school, and to educate them so they are more valued in their families.”
The American Himalayan Foundation started with 54 girls in 1997 and now supports 12,000 females in 500 schools annually, with 25,000 still in school or having graduated. Funding is always challenging, but STOP Girl Trafficking resonates with people and has been easier to fundraise for than some other AHF initiatives, says Stone. Richard Blum has been very supportive.
Another local star identified by Stone and her colleagues is Dr. Ashok Banskota, an American-trained pediatric orthopedic surgeon who Dr. Gil and Stone met in Nepal in 1988. He asked AHF for a $4,000 donation to buy an autoclave sterilizer for his small clinic. In the 1990s, health clinics in Nepal were ill equipped and poverty was rampant—with an estimated 80 percent of the population living on less than $2 per day. A child’s serious injury or disability could debilitate an entire family and destroy their life chances. Dr. Banskota was among the few doctors with the skill to fix club feet, twisted spines, and fractured arms and the passion to do it for low or no cost.
“I started to go back and see Banskota,” remembers Stone. “He moved from that clinic to another one in a rented house in Kathmandu. [Blum’s wife] Senator Dianne Feinstein came and saw the clinic and said, ‘Richard this is great stuff. He’s astonishing. His dedication to his kids is amazing.’”
Over the past three decades, AHF has supported Dr. Banskota’s
Hospital
and Rehabilitation Center for Disabled Children,
including helping to build a new 100-bed hospital in Banepa, just outside
Kathmandu. Banskota’s son,
Bibek, has followed in his father’s footsteps as a pediatric orthopedic surgeon
and has joined him at the hospital that now employs 230 staff and provides
25,000 consultations and 2,300 surgeries annually. Over 95,000 children have
been healed since AHF’s first visit.
Stone may still see herself as an accidental nonprofit president, but she says she never changed jobs because of the draw of Nepal, its people, and especially its vulnerable girls. Although she grew up far from the Himalayas (in Montreal), she has been a longtime student of female empowerment through her practice of Taekwondo, a martial art she took up as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley after being stalked on its streets. She has 5th degree black belt and for 35 years has run an all-women studio in Berkeley as a community service.
“Empowering women is really important,” says Stone of her JLAG/Wild Crane Rising martial arts
studio. “I have heard it said that men are afraid women will laugh at them and
women are afraid that men will kill them. How do we teach women to defend
themselves, not just physically but psychologically? If you neutralize the
balance of physical confidence between men and women, it makes a lot of other
stuff more possible.”
Stone is psychologically astute about cultural differences
as well. She was quick to realize that American approaches to work don’t
translate well in the Himalayas. “In South Asia, if people don’t see you, they
don’t believe in you,” she says. “You have to show up and sit down and talk to
them. That’s the only way I know how you can have a trusting, lasting
relationship. So Norbu and I meet with every single partner once or twice a
year.”
The doctor-climber who introduced Stone to Nepal died in 2000 to cancer. Yet she says the country Gil Roberts brought her to remains reverential. “When I first went,” remembers Stone, “we were coming into the Kathmandu Valley by plane. It was dusk and I looked down and there was not much electricity in the city, but you could see all these little lights. People were cooking over fires. It was completely magical. I just fell in love. I’ve been about 50 times since, and I’m still in love.”
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation today unveiled that the LoaScope Project for Removing the Greatest Obstacle to the Elimination of River Blindness was one of the highest-scoring proposals, designated as the Top 100, in its 100&Change competition for a single $100 million grant to help solve one of the world’s most critical social challenges.
The river blindness project is led by Daniel A. Fletcher, UC Berkeley’s Purnendu Chatterjee Chair in Biological Systems and Chief Technologist of the Blum Center for Developing Economies, with partners The Task Force for Global Health and The END Fund. Its goal is to eliminate onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness, using the LoaScope, a mobile phone-based diagnostic technology developed by the Fletcher Lab. Two hundred million people in 10 Central African countries are at risk of blindness from the parasitic infection. Half have gone untreated by the “wonder drug” ivermectin—recognized by the 2015 Nobel Prize—because of another parasite that can cause serious or fatal side effects following treatment. Fletcher’s proposal aims to expand access to the LoaScope device; resolve uncertainty about the extent of disease overlap through mapping; and initiate data-driven disease elimination programs across all populations currently excluded from treatment. This work will clear a path towards the World Health Organization’s goal of river blindness elimination.
The arsenic removal project is led by Ashok Gadgil, the Andrew and Virginia Rudd Family Foundation Chair Professor of Safe Water and Sanitation and a Blum Center Affiliated Faculty Member. Its goal is to scale up the Gadgil Lab‘s ElectroChemical Arsenic Remediation (“ECAR”) technology for drinking water. Currently, 200 million historically marginalized people worldwide have no choice but to drink water containing toxic levels of arsenic. Consequences include painful disabilities, internal cancers, and death. ECAR is inexpensive and designed to work even under harsh conditions. It allows water to be purified locally in marginalized communities and sold at affordable prices, while creating local employment and generating sufficient revenue for sustainable operation and further expansion. With additional funding, Gadgil’s ECAR team aims to build 1,004 plants in India, USA, and Nigeria to provide safe drinking water to 4-5 million people and end what the World Health Organization has called “the largest mass poisoning in recorded history.”
The Top 100 represent the top 21
percent of competition submissions. The proposals were rigorously vetted,
undergoing MacArthur’s initial administrative review, a Peer-to-Peer review, an evaluation by an external panel of judges, and a technical review by specialists whose expertise
was matched to the project.
Each proposal
was evaluated using four criteria: impactful, evidence-based, feasible, and durable.
MacArthur’s Board of Directors will select up to 10 finalists from these
high-scoring proposalsthis spring.
“MacArthur seeks
to generate increased recognition, exposure, and support for the high-impact
ideas designated as the Top 100,” said Cecilia Conrad, CEO of Lever for
Change and MacArthur Managing Director, 100&Change. “Based on our
experience in the first round of 100&Change, we know the competition
will produce multiple compelling and fundable ideas. We are committed to
matching philanthropists with powerful solutions and problem solvers to
accelerate social change.”
Since
the inaugural competition, other funders and philanthropists have committed an
additional $419 million to date to support bold solutions by 100&Change applicants. Building on the
success of 100&Change, MacArthur created Lever
for Change to unlock
significant philanthropic capital by helping donors find and fund vetted,
high-impact opportunities through the design and management of customized
competitions. In addition to 100&Change, Lever for Change is
managing the Chicago Prize, the Economic Opportunity Challenge, and the Larsen
Lam ICONIQ Impact Award.
Bold Solutions Network Launches
The Bold Solutions
Networklaunched today, featuring UC
Berkeley-Task Force for Global Health-END Fund as one of the Top 100 from 100&Change. The searchable online online collection of submissions contains a
project overview, 90-second video, and two-page factsheet for each proposal.
Visitors can sort by subject, location, Sustainable Development Goal, or
beneficiary population to view proposals based on area of interest.
The
Bold Solutions Network will showcase the highest-rated proposals that emerge
from the competitions Lever for Change manages. Proposals in the Bold Solutions Network
undergo extensive evaluation and due diligence to ensure each solution promises
real and measurable progress to accelerate social change.
The Bold Solutions Network was designed to provide an
innovative approach to identifying the most effective, enduring solutions
aligned with donors’ philanthropic goals and to help top applicants gain visibility
and funding from a wide array of funders. Organizations that are part of the
network will have continued access to a variety of technical support and
learning opportunities focused on strengthening their proposals and increasing
the impact of their work.
More About
100&Change
100&Change is a
distinctive competition that is open to organizations and collaborations
working in any field, anywhere in the world. Proposals must identify a problem
and offer a solution that promises significant and durable change.
The second round
of the competition had a promising start: 3,690 competition
registrants submitted 755 proposals. Of those, 475 passed an initial
administrative review. 100&Change was designed to
be fair, open, and transparent. The identity of the judges and the methodology used to assess initial
proposals are public. Applicants received comments and feedback from the peers,
judges, and technical reviewers. Key issues in the competition are discussed in
a blog
on MacArthur’s website.
In
the inaugural round of 100&Change,Sesame Workshop and International Rescue Committee were awarded $100 million to educate young children
displaced by conflict and persecution in the Syrian response region and to challenge the global system of humanitarian aid
to focus more on building a foundation for future success for millions of young
children. &
In a recent poll from Oxford University’s Our World in
Data, a majority of
Americans said that the share of the world population living in poverty is
increasing—yet one of the trends of the last 50 years has been a huge reduction
in global poverty. In fact, per
World Bank data, the
proportion of the Earth’s population subsisting on about $2 a day or less has
dropped by more than 75 percent over the last four decades—from 42 percent in
1981 to 10 percent in 2015.
Just as remarkable,
annual worldwide deaths of children under 5 have plummeted since 1990. Thanks
to health interventions in respiratory infections, diarrhea, and preterm birth
as well as massive success in vaccinations for measles, tuberculosis, and
malaria—global child death rates have dropped by more than a half. We also are approaching
90 percent adult literacy and seeing large gains in girls’ education.
So why are so
many Americans unaware of these tremendous global gains?
One reason is
that whereas poverty, health, and educational outcomes are improving in
developing nations, in the U.S. poverty shot up to 1960s levels in 2009 and the
cost of health, housing, and higher education is thwarting socioeconomic
mobility for too many Americans. The regional,
racial, and class details of this phenomenon are constantly in the news. In
fact, in America— thanks to our always-on, click bait media—we are drowning
ourselves in bad news.
Yet here on the
UC Berkeley campus and at the Blum Center, we find students are not just well informed—many
are brimming with hope and commitment to continue to fight extreme poverty in
developing nations and to reduce inequality and work for social and economic justice
in the United States. We also finding that in addition to students lending their
energy and intelligence to established organizations, some are seeking to form
news ones through startups and through incubators and accelerators like Big Ideas, CITRIS Foundry, and Skydeck.
There is also
growing understanding among Blum Center faculty, staff, and students that
higher education must adapt to the future of work. As my good friend Carnegie Mellon
University President Farnam Jahanian pointed out in a recent World Economic Forum article, “There
is an undeniable need to train the next generation in emerging digital
competencies and to be fluent in designing, developing, or employing technology
responsibly. At the same time, 21st-century students must learn how to approach
problems from many perspectives,
cultivate and exploit creativity, engage in complex communication, and leverage
critical thinking.”
All their efforts, combined with the larger story of global poverty reduction, make me think that 2020 is a year for great hope and hard work for global progress.
Shankar Sastry is Faculty Director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies and NEC Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley.
With all of the excitement and funding directed at artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, and gene editing, it is hard to remember that one of the most consistently innovative and financially robust sectors in the United States is the “creative industry.”
With all of the excitement and funding directed at artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, and gene editing, it is hard to remember that one of the most consistently innovative and financially robust sectors in the United States is the “creative industry.”
For Aboubacar Komara, a combination of cultural values inspired the mission behind Kaloum Bankhi–a registered NGO in Guinea that maximizes existing and limited housing space for people in the slums of Kaloum.
Aboubacar Komara, founder and president of Kaloum Bankhi, says his upbringing in Guinea and the United States has shaped how he understands architecture. Born in Guinea, Komara moved to the U.S. in 2013 and graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in architecture in 2018. He explains that the combination of cultural values from both countries inspired the mission behind Kaloum Bankhi–a registered NGO in Guinea that maximizes existing and limited housing space for people in the slums of Kaloum, located within the capital city of Conakry.
How can we meet increasing human demands from the land while protecting natural systems? This is the question that Matthew Potts, UC Berkeley’s S. J. Hall Chair in Forestry Economics and the Vice Chair of the Graduate Group in Development Engineering, asks in his scholarship.
How can we meet increasing human demands from the land while protecting natural systems? This is the question that Matthew Potts, UC Berkeley’s S. J. Hall Chair in Forestry Economics and the Vice Chair of the Graduate Group in Development Engineering, asks in his scholarship. Potts specializes in resource economics, an interdisciplinary field in which he conducts quantitative analyses of forest management, biofuels, plantation agriculture, land use planning, land use policy, biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, and tropical ecology.
“In my research group, we ask how interactions among human labor, history, technology, and nature are shaping tropical lands and the well-being of resource dependent communities,” said Potts at a winter Blum Center Faculty Salon.
Much of Potts’ research in tropical forests provides insights into how to sustainably manage these landscapes, which he says provide public and market goods. Public goods include carbon storage and animal habitats. Market goods include raw materials such as timber, land for agricultural production, and gold.
At the salon, Potts highlighted stories of three commodities: the story of oil palm in Pasoh, Malaysia; the story of cacao in Sulawesi, Indonesia; and the story presented by Jimena Diaz, a PhD candidate in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management, of gold mining in Madre de Dios, Peru.
Potts presented findings from fieldwork he conducted in cross-boundary subsidies in a Malaysian plantation landscape, using oil palm as the primary crop in his analysis. (Cross-boundary subsidies are caused by organisms or materials that cross or traverse habitat patch boundaries, subsidizing the resident populations.) Using two decades of ecological data, Potts and his research colleagues illustrated how subsidies from neighboring oil palm plantations triggered powerful secondary “cascading” effects on natural habitats located >1.3 km away. Specifically, they found that 1) oil palm fruit drove 100-fold increases in crop-raiding native wild boar, 2) wild boar used thousands of understory plants to construct birthing nests in the pristine forest interior, and 3) nest building caused a 62 percent decline in forest tree sapling density over the 24-year study period. As described in their 2017 Nature Communications study, “The long-term, landscape-scale indirect effects from agriculture suggest its full ecological footprint may be larger in extent than is currently recognized. Cross-boundary subsidy cascades may be widespread in both terrestrial and marine ecosystems and present significant conservation challenges.”
Next, Potts presented an analysis of sustainable cacao intensification initiatives in Southwest Sulawesi, conducted by his former student Lisa Kelley, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography & Environment at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa whose initial research was supported by the Blum Center’s Development Impact Lab. Kelley explored how a rapid smallholder cacao boom in the 1980s-2000s produced mixed benefits for farmers and negatively impacted forests. Over the last 20 years, Sulawesi cacao farmers experienced significant yield losses due to the reduced profitability and sustainability of the crop. In one of Kelley’s interviewers, a farmer reported: “When chocolate is young, it produces well and doesn’t require too much work. After it’s mature, it produces little and requires too much work. Meanwhile the price of chocolate goes up and down. As soon as my peppercorn trees yield, I will leave it.”
To improve sustainable cacao production, the Indonesian government, companies like Mars and Nestle, and international organizations like USAID and the World Agroforestry Centre have invested since 2000 half a billion dollars into farmer education and land improvements. Using GoogleEarth to understand land effects, Kelley is working on a study to determine the degree to which the investments have borne results.
Concluding the salon, Potts’ graduate student, Jimena Diaz, presented her ongoing research on the social and ecological effects of small scale gold mining in Madre de Dios, Peru. Diaz emphasized that her research explores the intersection between the social relations of gold production, including labor practices and technologies used in mining, and the ecological consequences of these diverse mining production practices. Through her fieldwork, Diaz has found that small scale gold mining in Madre de Dios has grown rapidly in the past 15 years, causing ecological change and rapid deforestation. Mercury is present in almost all gold mining areas, because it is used to bind fine gold particles into an amalgam that is later burned to release the mercury.
“Misconceptions of mercury and mining practices are common in Madre de Dios,” said Diaz. An important finding from her field research is that not all mining areas are contaminated by mercury and that the type of machinery used in mining may help to explain differences in mercury contamination. Different gold production practices also have different impacts on patterns of deforestation. Areas where miners use heavy machinery tend to show more uniform patterns in deforestation and forest regeneration in comparison to those areas worked with suction pump based technologies. Diaz recommends greater involvement of miners in the design of mining regulations and an explicit recognition of the importance of small-scale mining as a livelihood for a large portion of the region’s population.
“Nature is quite resilient and there are ways to mine that are less impactful,” said Diaz. “Miners themselves don’t want to destroy rainforests, but they also don’t have a lot of economic choices.”
The Blum Center is pleased to announce that Amy Pickering has accepted the position of Assistant Professor in Development Engineering, a joint Blum Center-College of Engineering appointment made possible through a generous gift from Richard C. Blum and an anonymous donor. Pickering, the Tiampo Family Assistant Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tufts University, will commence her teaching and research duties at Berkeley in January 2021.
