Author: blum

World Development journal features the research of Evan Mills and the Blum-funded Lumina Project, which cultivates technologies and markets for affordable low-carbon lighting worldwide.

In this podcast, Blum Center affiliated faculty, Clair Brown, speaks about alternative ways of structuring an economy and measuring economic progress, based on the Buddhist values of sustainability, interconnectedness, capability and happiness. Click to listen to the podcast or learn about her book.

Richard Blum looks back across 10 years of the Global Poverty and Practice Minor he created at UC Berkeley. More than 700 students have worked with organizations in 70 countries around the world–and the program is still growing. Read the blog post here.

By Nicholas Bobadilla

In 2012, UC Berkeley inherited the bright-eyed, intrinsically motivated, and socially-minded Chloe Gregori. This May she graduated as a Peace and Conflict Studies major, Minh Dang Fellow, Big Ideas winner, Global Poverty and Practice minor, and this year’s Chancellor’s Public Service Award recipient: the campus’s most prestigious public service award.

For the past four years, Chloe has cultivated her desire to promote social justice in the realm of human trafficking, a complicated issue that involves slave labor and forced prostitution, targets vulnerable populations like children and undocumented immigrants, and casts a shadow over nations across the world, including the United States.

Chloe’s journey began in high school when she discovered Not for Sale, a San Francisco non-profit dedicated to ending human trafficking. Inspired by the organization’s mission, Chloe started a chapter at her high school to promote awareness among her peers. Extra motivation came from her father, who encouraged her to watch a documentary that followed a 16-year-old sweatshop worker in China. The film widened Chloe’s perspective to include worldwide injustices, and cemented her passion for social advocacy. “It opened my mind that we live in an interconnected world, and that my everyday purchases were created at a human cost. This realization caused me to think about global inequalities, inspiring me to learn more and take action.”

Then came Berkeley, where Chloe arrived, as most freshmen do, flustered and overwhelmed by the thousands of opportunities scattered across Sproul Plaza and every building on campus. In her sophomore year, she joined Berkeley’s Not for Sale chapter. Her responsibilities focused on educational outreach, allowing her to spread awareness about human trafficking in Bay Area high schools. That year, Chloe also had a hand in combining the three anti-trafficking organizations on Berkeley’s campus into the Berkeley Anti-Trafficking Coalition.

At the start of her junior year, Chloe focused on expanding the reach of her work. Alongside her friends and fellow anti-trafficking advocates, Sarah and Hannah Singh, she entered the Big Ideas Competition. Hosted by the Blum Center, the contest gathers students to compete for funding to foster their social impact projects. Chloe and Sarah’s idea involved partnering with the Alameda County District Attorney’s office to reach out to Bay Area high schools and educate students about human trafficking. To expand awareness on campus, Chloe, Sarah, and Hannah hosted a decal to teach students about trafficking and match them with local high school students. The following semester, their involvement with the high schools would deepen, and, as mentors, they helped students create projects that promoted awareness about the issue.

A year of hard work competing against undergraduate and graduate teams from 20 universities across the country paid off when Chloe and Sarah’s project received honorary mention and was awarded $1000. Though the partnership with the District Attorney fell through, Chloe and Sarah led the DeCal, and ensured it remained true to its advocacy and mentorship goals. Now in its fourth semester, the class hosts speakers in the field to discuss their roles and actions students can take.

Aside from campus advocacy, Chloe also spent a summer working with an organization that combats child slavery in Ghana as part of her Global Poverty & Practice minor. “I chose my practice experience because I was interested in learning about human trafficking in a development context.” Founded by an impassioned survivor James Kofi Annan, Challenging Heights provides rehabilitation, preventative education projects, and community programs to combat child trafficking in the fishing industry on Lake Volta. Chloe was fortunate to spend time among the community, gathering stories and learning about the local side effects of trafficking. “I learned a lot by completing my practice experience in a developing country,” she said, “It was a transformative experience to begin understanding the vulnerabilities that perpetuate trafficking, and to learn from a grassroots organization doing meaningful and challenging work on the ground”.

But like many people engaged in this work, Chloe has had her moments of doubt. “Human trafficking is an extremely heavy issue and difficult to combat given its complexities. Honestly, it can be very overwhelming,” she said. “Sometimes I think, what’s the point?” She described a moment of acute apprehension, when she met a woman who led a job training program for trafficking survivors. After Chloe asked the woman to speak at a conference, she responded curtly, “I don’t want to do conferences. Girls are dying. We can’t just keep talking about it.” The exchange left Chloe to question the point of advocacy given the ongoing suffering for victims and the dire need for legal advocacy and social services.

Yet she overcame this hurdle, and was able to reconcile the importance of spreading awareness about the issue given its potential to spur people to action. “The conversation made me realize how important it is to stay connected to community organizations,” she said. “As much as we can talk about these issues, it’s crucial to include people in the conversation who work in the field and/or have been affected by injustice.” She is also motivated by the myriad opportunities available to tackle the issue. “I’ve learned that there are many intersections between human trafficking and other social issues. You can be in many different fields and combat trafficking in some way either directly or indirectly.”

That belief stuck with her, and this February, she served as the lead organizer of the “Freedom in Action” conference at Berkeley. Developed with the guidance of Chloe’s mentor and reputed anti-trafficking advocate Minh Dang, the conference gathered twenty anti-trafficking organizations, hosted 15 workshops highlighting anti-trafficking methods and outcomes, and fundraised for the SHADE Project, a survivor leadership organization in the Bay Area. The conference also included workshops for survivors of human trafficking, led by survivor leaders and advocates in the Bay Area.

Chloe was proud to see the advances she and her peers had made. “The conference allowed us to strengthen relations with organizations in the community,” She said. “Leading a group of people was really valuable, and I felt fulfilled when I saw committee members develop as leaders themselves through the planning and implementation of the conference.”

Her involvement with public service and her Global Poverty & Practice minor inspired a substantial shift in her attitude toward social justice. “In high school, I was more of a do-gooder. I didn’t think about my motivations or the implications of my work,” she said. “GPP made me think of the ethical complexities of ‘doing good’, what my motivations were, and what it means to work with rather than for a community.” All common revelations among GPP students, who are encouraged to think, question, reflect, and repeat, at the risk of paralysis, all for the sake of sidestepping the potential hubris associated with social justice work. (Full disclosure: your writer is a GPP minor.)

Chloe survived this phase and emerged wiser. “In GPP, we learned social change work is slow,” she said. “It’s the struggle of working together and working with people that makes it fulfilling and enjoyable, even given how difficult or frustrating these issues can be.” She’s been fortunate to spend time sharing this perspective and connecting with fellow GPPers in her role as an advisor in the Blum Center. “The Blum Center has provided a close-knit community of students who are engaged in international issues and public service,” she said. “These issues are challenging to combat, but being with people who share these common passions is inspiring.”

For now, Chloe has her sights set on fighting human trafficking in her local Bay Area. She hopes to begin that process in the nonprofit sector and expand upon her work as an undergraduate by spreading awareness through educational initiatives. “I see myself working in education. The first step of social change is awareness. If people, especially youth, become conscious of injustice and learn concrete steps to take action in their community, I think we are on the path to positive change.” Chloe also believes in the power of advocacy on a small scale: “It can also be a conversation with someone who didn’t know about human trafficking. Even these small interactions can make a difference over time.”

Chloe also draws strength from fellow advocates faced with similar doubts, frustrations, and disappointments, but made equally resilient by their ongoing struggle. “Just having people in the field who are doing incredible work is very inspiring.” That solidarity brings strength. “Being allies with survivors and survivor advocates is a way to cope with how challenging an issue it is.”

Our hats are off to you, Chloe. We can’t wait to see where your drive and dedication will take you next.

By Sarah Bernardo

At a university with a long, illustrious history of social activism, it is easy for students to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of movements and awareness campaigns being waged on the UC Berkeley campus. Certain issues seem to fall through the cracks. A dedicated group of Cal students is working hard to make sure that human trafficking does not become one of those overlooked issues.

According to Apurva Govande, the Co-President of the Anti-Trafficking Coalition at Berkeley, sex trafficking, child labor, forced labor, and bonded labor are not isolated issues, but “human issues” that touch every aspect of our daily lives from the clothes we wear to the food we eat.

While the anti-human trafficking community at Cal is small, interest in the issue has been growing rapidly. The Anti-Trafficking Coalition is taking a big step to grow awareness on trafficking and modern slavery by hosting their second “Freedom in Action” conference this Spring (on Sunday, February 28).

The conference is open to everyone, and this year’s theme is “Trafficking at the Intersections.” According to Kathy Brasil, the Coalition’s Publicity Chair, “we will be exploring many nuances of slavery and freedom through a keynote address from survivor and Cal alum Minh Dang as well as a number of unique workshops.” Dang is the founder of the Minh Dang Fellowship for Human Rights which focuses on the eradication of all forms of modern slavery. (The application for the fellowship is open to all UC Berkeley students, and one student is selected each year to serve as a Dang Fellow.)

Govande said, “As student abolitionists, we can often make a much greater difference than we realize. Just being aware of the issue can catalyze change for the people behind the issue: the men, women, and children that human trafficking directly affects.”

Dedicated anti-trafficking activists at Cal have been busy developing programs like the Human Trafficking Prevention Education DeCAL, which Govande says “does a great job of familiarizing students with the issue and brings in speakers each week that highlight different aspects of human trafficking.”

The Anti-Human Trafficking IdeaLab is another result of activist efforts. The IdeaLab is a multidisciplinary think tank that brings together students, academics, and community partners to tackle human trafficking. Their aim is to analyze the intersecting social issues that contribute to modern slavery and to present best practices for combating the issue at its source. No particular experience is necessary, so anyone with an interest in human trafficking is encouraged to join the IdeaLab.

This Spring at the Blum Center, world-renowned anti-trafficking activist and expert Siddharth Kara is teaching Global Poverty & Practice 140, “Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery.” (Read our interview with Kara here.) GPP 140 is an eight week course that examines various modes of exploitation within numerous contextual frames such as economics, culture, and history.

The renewed energy and attention on trafficking got a huge boost at Cal in 2013 when the Student Abolitionist Movement, the UC Berkeley chapter of the International Justice Mission, and Not For Sale combined to form the Anti-Trafficking Coalition at Berkeley. Brasil describes the coalition as a “student-run organization that focuses on educating students, raising awareness in the community, and advocating for more effective legislation in order to eliminate human trafficking in the Bay Area and beyond.”

Although the Human Trafficking Prevention DeCAL and GPP 140 are indications of increased awareness and interest, Russell Wilson, a former member of the Student Abolitionist Movement and advisor to the Coalition, says, “I would like to see more DeCALs as well as actual full credit classes taught on human trafficking. One thing that would be good is if a department such as the Social Welfare department would hire a person with both an academic and anti-trafficking background to create a curriculum around human trafficking.”

The “Trafficking at the Intersections” conference will feature a host of events to engage people who are new to the issues of human trafficking, as well as seasoned activists. Twenty different workshops will be offered, covering a range of topics including “Human Trafficking and the Superbowl Myth,” “Healing Through the Expressive Arts,” and “The Intersection of School-to-Prison Pipelines and Human Trafficking.” Legal professionals and academics such as Alameda County’s Deputy District Attorney Sabrina Farrell; Director of the Boalt School of Law Anti-Trafficking Project Alynia Phillips; and Federal Administrative Judge Marianna Warmee will be leading workshops. Representatives from non-governmental organizations, arts groups, and religious communities like CEO of Breaking the Chains Debra Woods and Reverends Amy Zucker Morgenstern and Debora Pembrook from the Unitarian Universalist Abolitionists will also host sessions.

In whatever way individuals choose to join the anti-trafficking community at Cal, they will be met with passionate and driven advocates. Govande, Wilson, and Brasil emphasize that the reason to become a part of this movement is that human trafficking is something that affects us all.

How Can You Get Involved?

Freedom in Action Conference 2016: Trafficking at the Intersections

The Anti-Trafficking Coalition at Berkeley meets every Monday 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm in 175 Barrows

Human Trafficking Prevention Decal

Minh Dang Fellowship for Human Rights

Anti-Human Trafficking IdeaLab

By Sarah Bernardo

Siddharth Kara is a world-renowned expert on human trafficking and modern slavery. He lectures at both Harvard University and UC Berkeley, and advises the United Nations, the U.S. government, and many other governments, foundations, and NGOs on anti-trafficking policy and law. Kara is also the author of two books, the award-winning Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery and Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia.

This semester, Kara is a lecturer at the Blum Center, teaching Global Poverty & Practice 140, “Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery.”

You first witnessed human trafficking the summer after your junior year in college while at a Bosnian refugee camp. You later went on to work as an investment banker and head your own consulting firm. What made you decide to return to the issue of human trafficking?

I had always been heavily impacted by that summer in the refugee camp, and at the time I was just too young to really process the experiences. So it was some years later when I was reflecting on the course of my life that I returned to the issue. I had worked in investment banking and learned quite a bit about the world of finance and economics. But I had always been affected and haunted by that summer. I was curious: are these kinds of things still happening, and if so is anyone doing anything about it? This was the late 90s, and I didn’t see much in the way of research. There were one or two narrative reports, but nothing analysis-based. So I thought, if I’m ever going to try something like this in my life, now is the time. I didn’t have formal training in human rights research, but I had a sense that this was an economic crime and that maybe I could make a contribution. I took my first research trip in the summer of 2000 across East Asia and Central Europe. The things I saw really overwhelmed me, and from that point I became dedicated to trying to understand and tackle the issue.

What is your opinion on the current state of human trafficking research and education?

The current state of human trafficking research and education is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was when I started my research almost 16 years ago. There are actually classes that you can take on the subject. There are books that have been written. Numerous research projects and reports are being conducted by researchers, NGOs, governments, foundations, and the UN. Having said that, there is still a tremendous research gap. The field suffered across the entire decade of 2000 to 2010 from not having sufficient focus on data gathering to understand the issue. For many years, there was a lack of credibility and legitimacy in anti-slavery work as a result of this deficiency. But that is changing now. There is more research being done, however there is still a significant data gap on human trafficking and slavery around the world.

When you are in acting in an advisory role for NGOs or governments, what is the most difficult aspect about addressing trafficking?

It’s very different depending on whether it’s a government or a non-government organization. With governments, much of my interaction has focused on a handful of challenges. One can be that they are generally in denial that their country has a significant issue or an issue at all with human trafficking. If they recognize that they have an issue, they want to frame it as an irregular migration problem and deal with it from a migration standpoint as opposed to a human rights and forced labor standpoint. They may not have enough data or information to guide their policy, or they may be reluctant to allocate the kind of resources that are required to address the issue both from a law enforcement standpoint and also from a victim empowerment and protection standpoint.

With NGOs, they have the passion and the courage to tackle the issue, but they may suffer from not knowing how to do research or how to measure the impact of their projects, which is very important from a donor standpoint. Data gathering and research is crucial to donors there days, and while NGOs are often in the best position to do this work, they may not necessarily be equipped or trained to do it.

There are also a handful of major obstacles to the successful punishment of human traffickers. One is there is a lack of systemic law enforcement focus on the issue. Two, there is a lack of understanding and training in how to identify traffickers. Three, there is a lack of protection and empowerment of victims who are crucial as witnesses to give information on traffickers and trafficking networks.

Do you think a capitalist economic system can ever coincide with the abolition of modern slavery?

I think so. I think market economy principles and economic globalization have to be recrafted into being a slightly more equitable system for all participants and non-participants, but that’s doable if world leaders want to achieve those goals. I think that will go a long way towards ridding the world of many of the push and pull factors that motivate trafficking and forced labor.

You are working on a film adaptation of your award-winning book Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. What is your vision for the film?

I wrote the script for the film. I adapted many real world cases from those that I documented for my first book and from research that I’ve done since then to tell the first truly global and authentic feature film story on human trafficking. It tells the stories of three young women. One is from India, one is from Nigeria, and one is a foster care child in California. You follow their journeys of being trafficked around the world to the same place in Texas, along the way covering Europe and Latin America. The film spans the world because the issue is a global phenomenon, but the film is set here in the United States because the story of domestic human trafficking is remarkably under-discussed. You hear a lot of stories about trafficking in Cambodia, Nepal, India, Moldova, Nigeria, and Mexico, but not so much the United States. That’s starting to change, and I hope that this film sparks a conversation about the human trafficking problem right here in the U.S.

I hope the film will serve as a vehicle for generating new energy and resources to tackle human trafficking here and around the world.  In support of these efforts, I will be doing several major events with the film with the UN and several governments around the world as well as NGOs to raise awareness and channel resources where they are needed. It will also have a theatrical release to touch the general audience. It has some fantastic stars in the cast, and I’m really looking forward to its release later this year.

How can average citizens contribute to the fight against modern slavery?

The first thing the average person can do is learn more about the issue by reading books and watching documentaries or films. The more you know the more effective you can be.

Two, spread that knowledge. Raise awareness among your peer groups, friends, co-workers, etc. That is a very tangible thing that people can do.

Three, support an NGO that works on this issue in some way. It could be financially or through volunteer work. It could be to help raise resources so that they can scale their efforts. Supporting anti-trafficking NGOs in some capacity is very important.

Four, engage with elected officials on the issue. Demand that they do more both from a sex and labor trafficking standpoint. In particular, on the labor trafficking side, one of the main areas of focus in the field now is how human trafficking, slavery, and child labor taint global supply chains of the things we purchase every day. I think people can get engaged in demanding that lawmakers set regulations for companies to ensure that their supply chains are untainted.

My report “Tainted Carpets: Slavery and Child Labor in India’s Hand-Made Carpet Sector” was the first major commodity-based investigation of slavery and child labor in the production phase of a commodity. It showed a model of how to do that kind of research and how to trace the products from the point of production to the point of retail sale. It showed you can get a sufficient sample size in cases documented to express prevalence rates of slavery and child labor in the supply chain. It made recommendations about how to clean up the supply chain. Ideally, one would do a series of commodity-based investigations and reports like that. I have a long list that I would like to do such as seafood, conflict minerals, garments, tea, coffee, cocoa, rice, and palm oil.

Five, use all the tools we have today like social media and communication to keep energy and momentum going so that you don’t have people getting excited and working on an issue for a while and then fading into something else. It’s important to use tools to keep people engaged, energized, and motivated.

Rachel Gerver is among the first generation of UC Berkeley students in Development Engineering, a growing field for graduate students focused on technological solutions for low-income regions. Gerver graduated from UC Berkeley in 2014 with a PhD in Bioengineering, where she investigated the application of Herr Lab technology for rapid point of care HIV monitoring and infant diagnosis in Kenya. She currently serves as a Biodesign Innovation Fellow at Stanford University, identifying unmet needs in medicine at hospitals and clinics and assessing the market size and competitive landscape for potential new medical devices. The Blum Center sat down with Gerver to learn more about her background and interests.

What were your career plans when you started your PhD and how did they change?

When I started the PhD in Bioengineering at UC Berkeley/UCSF, I thought I would pursue a career in academia and become a tenured professor. About halfway through the program, I realized that I was much more motivated by applied projects and helping to get new medical technologies to market, where they can have an impact on patients’ lives. I also became even more interested in how new technologies can help improve access to medical care for underserved populations.

What was the nature of your Development Impact Lab Explore Grant?

I received a DIL Explore grant to travel to Kenya and work with Family AIDS Care and Educational Services (FACES) to understand whether [Amy] Herr Lab technology could be applied to early infant HIV diagnosis. I spent time in the Nyanza province of Kenya, including Mbita, Kisumu, and Mfangano Island. I learned the importance of understanding the overall system in assessing what technologies can have an impact, and in particular the challenges of supply chains and logistics in bringing medical care to underserved regions.

What is exciting about the medical technology field?

The rapid growth in the medical technology space and the potential of new fields, including mobile technologies, big data, and genomics, to improve human health and access to healthcare around the world.

Where do you see yourself in five years or 10 years?

Continuing to work on technologies that can enter the market and improve human health around the world.

Who are the scholars or practitioners you most admire?

I greatly admire organizations that have worked to get new technologies into the market to improve access to healthcare in underserved populations, including PATH and D-Rev. I also admire physicians such as Paul Farmer, who have devoted their careers to improving global health from the field and inspiring others to do the same.

By Sybil Lewis

On September 25, 2015, the United Nations adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, establishing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, hunger, and inequality worldwide.

The robust set of goals was formulated and agreed to by 193 countries and represent, said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, “an agenda for people to end poverty in all its forms—an agenda for the planet, our common home.” Also known as Global Goals, the SDGs comprise 17 goals and 169 targets, such as Clean Water and Sanitation, Gender Equality, and Climate Action.”

The Sustainable Development Goals replace the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were established by world leaders in September 2010, along with a 15-year agenda to tackle similar issues including poverty, hunger, and child education. According to a 2015 UN report, the MDGs “produced the most successful anti-poverty movement in history,” reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty by more than half and achieving gender parity in primary schools in almost all countries.

While the MDGs were successful, progress has been uneven across regions and countries.  Shortcomings remain in many target areas, such as climate C02 emissions that have increased by over 50 percent since 1990 and the fact that over 160 million children under age five have an inadequate height due to malnourishment.

The idea of the SDGs emerged at the 2012 Rio+20 meeting, where the dimensions of sustainable development were identified as environmental, social, and economic—thus broadening definitions of international development beyond economic indicators. Furthermore, the MDGs laid out eight goals for developing countries, while the SDGs acknowledge that sustainable development cannot be achieved unless all countries participate.

Since its founding in 2006, the Blum Center for Developing Economies has supported people and projects working to achieve several of the SDGs. Through the Development Impact Lab and the Big Ideas@Berkeley competition, the Blum Center has trained and promoted interdisciplinary innovations that deliver poverty-alleviating, sustainable solutions across the world.

Over the past 10 years, winners of the Big Ideas@Berkeley student innovation competition have developed numerous life saving and improving products and services—from portable power units providing electricity to medical facilities in Africa and the Caribbean, to a coalition of students and faculty working to reduce UC Berkeley’s greenhouse emissions.

The Development Impact Lab (DIL) is a global consortium of research institutes, nongovernmental organizations, and industry partners supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) that are committed to advancing international development through science and technology innovations. DIL is headquartered at UC Berkeley where students, faculty, researchers, and experts collaborate to create and implement various solutions.

For example, Darfur Stoves, a DIL and Big Ideas@Berkeley funded project, was started by a team of UC Berkeley researchers who designed a cookstove specifically for refugees of the Darfur conflict. Since then, the Darfur Stoves project has expanded, providing wind-resistant stoves to people in crisis situations in Ethiopia, Haiti, and Mongolia.

Click here to learn more about Blum Center teams advancing the Sustainable Development Goals.

By Carlo David

At age 22, Lavanya Jawaharlal is co-founder of a promising startup, a high-ranking officer within the UC Berkeley student government, and co-winner of a $200,000 award from the investment reality TV show “Shark Tank.”

Lavanya and her sister Melissa Jawaharlal, with whom she founded STEM Center USA in 2013, plan to use the award money for their nonprofit, which uses robotics and hands-on learning to teach Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math to diverse K-12 students.

Their win has produced high enthusiasm from the Berkeley community, but also a sense of relief for those, like Jawaharlal, who are eager to shatter the glass ceiling for American women in STEM. A 2014 University of California Hastings study found that 100 percent of women report gender bias in the STEM fields.

The Blum Center sat down with Jawaharlal to hear her views on the culture and politics of diversity in tech.

Did you ever imagine yourself appearing on national television to pitch your own business idea, let alone being the co­founder of startup that has so much potential for growth? 


Not really. It all started in our living room, teaching robotics to the children of our family friends, who later brought their friends, whose friends brought more friends. We were basically doing what we were passionate about. But then our parents began to feel a little uncomfortable with the idea of having random kids in the living room. So we had to find a space, which eventually became STEM Center USA. Unlike other entrepreneurs, my sister and I never meant our project to grow into the organization it is today. But eventually we realized there is a need to do it.

What was your childhood like and how did it shape your passion for robotics? 

My interest in robotics started when I was a kid. I was never really interested in playing with the toys my parents bought me. Instead, I was more interested in taking apart the toys’ gears. In addition to being an ethnic minority, I was someone you would describe as nerdy. I was known as Lavanya the Tomboy, someone whom everyone looked down upon. I did sports and I was into robotics. Coming to California from a small New Jersey suburb was comforting, because I realized I was not the only person of color with my interests. Once I got into high school, I became more interested in the mechanical aspects of engineering. My sister, Melissa, who is two years older than me, was also very passionate about hands-on learning. Together, we were able to combine our passions and introduce hands-on robotics learning to young students.

According to studies, women make up less than 25 percent of the STEM workforce. As a woman of color in STEM, how do you make sense of this gender gap?

It’s really frustrating. People tend to minimize the differences in opportunities available to men and women, but then you see the education and employment numbers and realize it’s not the case. The gender gap stems from societal issues. When girls are growing up, as soon as they enter elementary school, they are exposed to the notion that they should be good in arts, in drawing. In other words, they are taught to specialize in something that is socially agreed upon as gender appropriate. The same is true for the types of toys they play with; girls play with Barbies, while boys play with cars. At a young age, kids are taught to think and behave in a manner that is consistent with gender norms. This translates into gender-specific occupations. So while I find these statistics frustrating, I am not surprised by them.

Have there been instances, as a mechanical engineering student, as a young entrepreneur, where you felt intimidated or delegitimized?

I have never felt intimidated here at UC Berkeley, but there have been instances where I felt my voice was not heard. Because Mechanical Engineering is such a male-dominated space, I need to work twice as hard to make sure that my voice is heard. If I have an opinion on homework, I feel the need to get my opinion across. In labs, people unknowingly tend to ask questions more from my male colleagues, even if I have been in the lab for the same amount of time or longer. Also, I find that younger students tend to ask male students more questions. This bias stems from the fact that the struggles of women of color, especially those in STEM, are not discussed. When you work in spaces where the emphasis is more on technical aspects, the discourse becomes less about the gendered or racial nature of the environment.

What are some of the problems or deficiencies in the promotion of STEM to young students of color? What can we do better to ensure diversity in these fields?

One of the principles of STEM Center USA is the importance of hands-on learning. Today, in a lot of public school systems, the method of teaching and learning is very tedious: the teacher talks and the students listen and takes note. Essentially, this creates a system that is grounded more in memorization than the application of knowledge. We, at STEM Center USA, allow students to apply what they learn in math and science classes in hands-on opportunities like lab experiments. Also, we have seen significant budget cuts in math and sciences, which translates to gaps in learning. For students, the lack of resources and robust learning environments diminish their confidence and ability to take courses like algebra.

What advice would you give to young girls who aspire for a career in STEM? 


If there’s an opportunity, take it. But the problem is the lack of opportunity for underrepresented students. So if you have the opportunity, take it and be proactive about it. One thing I teach our students is “You’re into robotics? Fantastic!” But it doesn’t mean that you have to be an engineer. It means you also consider being a teacher, an artist, an historian.

Where do you see yourself and your startup a year from now, five years from now? What do you wish to accomplish? 


In the next year, we are aiming to open one or two more offices in Southern California. In five years, we are hoping to open 10 or 20 more offices around the country. And in 10 years, our goal is to operate internationally as well. A huge part of the job is replicating our model, while taking into account the logistics and legal side of setting up new creativity centers. If we are able to expand our operations in a lot of cities, we will allow many more STEM students to maximize their potential.

For further information on Stem Center USA, click here.

By Nicholas Bobadilla

Gregory Chin grew frustrated with the PT Foundation halfway through his eight-week practice experience in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He was working with one of the foundation’s HIV/AIDs clinics, which provides confidential and anonymous STD testing and counseling services that once had been free.

A shift in the organization’s priorities from accessibility to sustainability resulted in a mandatory fee for all clients. To make matters worse, the clinic relocated, further restricting access to clients without reliable transportation.

Like any Global Poverty & Practice student at UC Berkeley, Chin had developed a radar for the kinds of problems he saw at the PT Foundation.

“I thought: You keep forgetting about the people you’re serving,” he said. “You keep running it to make sure this place survives, as opposed to making sure the community you’re working with survives.”

GPP students often recognize and then grow frustrated by the deficiencies of the organizations where they briefly volunteer. The theoretical aspect of the curriculum places heavy emphasis on the critique of poverty interventions. It’s this problematizing that the GPP minor is notorious for, constantly encouraging students to question their organizations and the roles they play within them.

While in Kuala Lumpur, Chin voiced his opinions and lobbied his coworkers for change, but he was aware of his limited authority as a foreign volunteer. He also understood that fixing the problems he encountered required a critical stance.

“We problematize everything we see and then feel frustration as a result. But the fact that we can be frustrated and accept that frustration is a way to motivate ourselves to enact change,” he said. “If we don’t think of why this is better or wrong or what harm it’s doing, we won’t be able to alter it.”

As a Cal student in his final year on the pre-med track, Chin intends to bring this critical mindset to his medical career. “I will incorporate GPP into my future profession by recognizing that there’s always something wrong and there’s always someone who’s not benefitting within a system,” he explained.

For Chin, the often single-pronged, scientific approach doctors take can ignore cultural factors that lead to disease. “It’s about contextualizing experiences, but also about understanding the roots of people’s experiences and using those to understand the systems that people come from.”

Eight weeks in Malaysia gave Chin the time to embrace this more empathetic and individualized approach to medicine—an approach he intends to take one step further. By seeing people as individuals, he hopes to better understand the complex connections they might share. This simple realization has allowed him to go beyond the frustration prompted by the GPP minor and envision a medical career grounded in the complexity of human experience.

“We focus a lot more on how different one person is from another or how different I am from somebody else, but we don’t always focus on trying to find connections,” he said. “When we find those connections, we’re reminded that an individual’s life is complex.”

By Tamara Straus

In 2013 Isha Ray, a UC Berkeley professor and international water expert, received a request from UN Women—to determine whether progress on sanitation in the world’s poorest places has been gender equal.

“I realized I couldn’t answer that question,” said Ray, who has spent 16 years studying the intersection of economic development and safe water. “Having potties here and there doesn’t tell me whether they’re serving women’s needs. ”

Although access to sanitation in the world’s poorest places has improved markedly over the past decade and has become one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals announced by the United Nations in September 2015, the question of women’s needs, particularly menstrual hygiene management, has not been widely addressed in sanitation programs. This is largely because there are still many cultures that consider a menstruating female unclean, untouchable, or bad luck.

Among international development researchers, female-specific sanitation also has not received much attention. A forthcoming scholarly literature review by the UN’s Water Supply & Sanitation Council (WSSCC) has discovered that there has been very little analysis when it comes to the question of whether toilet access, design, or programs satisfy female needs around menstruation, menopause, and infant or elder care. And although there is a big push (and need) to implement off-grid toilets at the home level, there are few sanitation programs specifically designed to make sure low-income girls and women in developing countries have the access, privacy, and conditions they need to go about their public lives when they are menstruating, pregnant, or recovering from pregnancy.

“The WASH [water, sanitation, and hygiene] community is obsessed with stopping outdoor defecation and installing latrines at the household level,” said Archana Patkar, program manager of WSSCC, during a recent lecture at UC Berkeley’s Blum Center for Developing Economies. “This is important and necessary, but girls and women are not always at home—they are in school, they are working. And when they don’t have access to adequate sanitation and they are menstruating, 36 percent of girls and 96 percent of women don’t go to school or work.”

Facts like these have compelled Professor Ray, along with research partners Kara Nelson, a professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental and Civil Engineering, and Michael Lindenmayer, CEO of the nonprofit Toilet Hackers and a UC Berkeley visiting scholar, to commence an action-research project they are calling “Trisan: Going Beyond the Bowl to Achieve Gender Equity in Sanitation.”

The project, which has received seed money from the Blum Center’s Development Impact Lab, will research women’s needs for safety and privacy—not only for defecation, but also for urination and menstrual hygiene management. It aims to develop programs and practical education and outreach material in collaboration with WASH-related NGOs, girls’ schools in India, and the WCSCC.

Ray said during her past two years of research, she has found that most sanitation programs are still being designed implicitly for the male body’s needs. “Although the defection needs are the same, the urination needs are not the same,” she said. “Females cannot pee standing. They cannot use public urinals or go behind a tree. It’s not modest. So the ratio of toilet facilities to bodies in schools, slums, and streets needs to be examined.”

One of the arguments that Ray, Nelson, and Lindenmayer have begun to make is that sanitation programs should be geared explicitly toward female bodies and female needs. The reason, said Ray, “is if sanitation programs are designed for female needs, they will also serve male needs and disabled needs.” Men may not need to use a private latrine four times a day outside of their homes, but menstruating women do. This difference, argued Ray, should have a significant effect on current thinking around multi-family sanitation units in the world’s increasingly populous slums, settlements, and refugee camps.

So far, the Beyond the Bowl research team has not come up against much criticism with these initial research concerns, but it has gotten some important feedback. Among public health experts, said Ray, the questions they encounter are: What is your hypothesis? What are you going to test? Ray said those questions will be answered through their collaborative research. As for city planners, they point out that designing sanitation services for low-income women is more expensive. “Actually, I agree with that,” said Ray “But if it is, then it is, and we have to think about creative financing.”

Ray said she also agrees with those in environmental engineering who say that dealing with waste removal is imperative, and that flushable toilets in low-income public spaces in many developing countries are a long way off. “We must focus on these engineering questions, absolutely,” said Ray, “but we have to add menstrual waste to our waste disposal problems. We can’t just have fecal waste to worry about. Where are those pads going to go?”

Ray is quick to answer her own question: “Those pads are going into the toilet or into the pit latrine. Is it any wonder they fill up? Or they go in a girl’s bag, next to her books and her lunch. Or they are furtively tossed away. Or they have nowhere to go, so females stay home and miss school and work. All of these are bad solutions relative to creative financing.”

In the end, Ray and her colleagues believe the international community needs to start designing and promoting sanitation to achieve gender equality, in addition to public health. “One of the core principles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations was the principle of nondiscrimination,” said Ray. “Human rights cannot discriminate by religion, gender, age, language, or sexual orientation. Yet I feel sanitation programs, with the best intentions in the world, in fact violate that core principle—because they’re geared toward defecation and not urination and menstrual hygiene management.”

The short-term timeline for Ray and her colleagues’ research is to build out their network of sanitation experts and sanitation-focused NGOs and to finish a position paper on achieving gender equality through sanitation, which they will present at the March 2016 meeting of the UN Commission of the Status of Women in New York.

“Of course, we’re not going to argue that we can achieve gender equality exclusively through sanitation; that’s crazy,” said Ray. “But we will ask the Commission to consider sanitation as a pathway towards gender equality—exactly as we would consider employment opportunities or educational opportunities pathways.”

Blum Center for Developing Economies will be participating in this year’s Cal Big Give, an annual one-day fundraising event to support students, faculty, and campus programs at UC Berkeley.

Some of our proudest accomplishments over the past decade have included:

• The Global Poverty & Practice minor, now the most popular minor on campus, has educated over 14,000 students in our classes, graduated over 600 alumni, and completed Practice Experiences in over 60 countries.

• The Big Ideas@Berkeley contest, in its tenth year, which continues to produce impactful innovations, and equally more important, encourages a diverse student population to think of themselves as innovators. To date, winners of the contest have leveraged at least $55 million in additional funding for their high impact projects.

• The Development Engineering minor for PhD students training them to improve human and economic development in complex, low-resource settings. Just launched last year, it is already being replicated in several global universities and training a diverse student body, including 50% women, with the 21^st century skills they will need to make an impact.

To enable these and other great programs to grow and thrive, we hope you will consider supporting the Blum Center during this year’s Cal Big Give:

When: 9pm Wednesday November 18 – 9pm Thursday November 19 (PST)

What: Please visit the Blum Center giving page and select the “Blum Center for Developing Economies General Support” option to enable the our programs to grow and train even more students.

To support GPP or Big Ideas directly,

• Invite your family and friends to visit the GPP giving page and select the “Global Poverty & Practice Student Support” option to enable funding for practice experiences for current and future GPPers! Even a $10 donation will be greatly appreciated.

• Support the Big Ideas contest during the Big Give at the Big Ideas giving page. In honor of the Big Ideas Tenth Anniversary, we encourage you to give in the “Power of 10” (any multiple of $10 you feel comfortable giving).

What else: Please tweet a photo or a short story about your Blum Center experience and the hashtags #BlumGive, #BigIdeasGive, #GPPGive, and #CalBigGive (There are social media contests throughout the day, and we can win extra support from the campus, so Tweet as often as you like during those 24 hours)

Please contact sophi@berkeley.edu at the Blum Center with any questions!

Go Bears!!

By Carlo David

The enormity of the world’s water and sanitation problems cannot be overstated. UN Water estimates that more than 3 million people die from water, sanitation, and hygiene-related causes each year, and nearly 10 percent of the global disease burden could be reduced through improved water supply, sanitation, hygiene, and water resource management.

In Nicaragua, the problem is no less dire. Among a population of just over 6 million, 48 percent don’t have access to adequate sanitation, according to a World Bank study—and 15 percent don’t have access to safe water, with much higher percentages for both needs in rural areas. This is particularly unfortunate because Nicaragua is known as the land of lakes and volcanoes; its rivers and reservoirs are far from parched like California. But it doesn’t have good water and sanitation infrastructure, which means many Nicaraguans rely on unfiltered water from groundwater sources, which are often contaminated by fecal matter.

That’s where NGOs like blueEnergy come in. Since 2004, the San Francisco-based nonprofit founded by Berkeley graduate Mathias Craig has been developing sustainable and community-based models to provide residents of Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast access to clean water and improved sanitation. Among its projects are biosand water filters, which use gravity and naturally occurring bacteria to largely eliminate water contaminants and provide safe drinking water. Since 2009, blueEnergy has installed 900 biosand filters, which have benefitted more than 4,500 residents.

While there are septic tanks and stand-alone latrines in the Nicaraguan towns where the nonproft works, such as Bluefields, these facilities are rare and expensive. blueEnergy navigates the lack of municipal-level water treatment facilities by working at the household level. With a team of research fellows, interns, and community members, the nonprofit is helping transform how residents access clean water.

“The biggest impact that blueEnergy has is we pull together all the dimensions of a solution—people, technology, financing, planning, management—in a setting where the challenges are complex and the service ecosystem is not very well developed,” said Craig, who graduated from Cal in 2001 with a BS in Environmental Engineering.

During the summer of 2015, Badisha Roy, a Berkeley undergraduate student in the Department of Chemical Engineering, interned with blueEnergy to conduct comprehensive testing on biosand filters distributed to Bluefields residents in 2010. Funded by Cal Energy Corps and the Berkeley Energy and Climate Institute (BECI), Roy is among an annual group of students chosen to participate in blueEnergy’s programs in Nicaragua.

Roy said implementing a project of this nature poses numerous structural challenges. Bluefields may be Nicaragua’s chief Caribbean port, but there is rampant poverty, high unemployment, and lack of economic growth. “Water and sanitation are so important and fundamental to people’s daily lives, but not everyone in Bluefields has access,” said Roy, who added that coming up with solutions requires “identifying people’s needs and how you are going to provide those needs.”

While blueEnergy maintains a small number of researchers and interns, it relies significantly on its local staff, community members, and senior fellows, who administer day-to-day operations and constantly train and educate beneficiaries about proper usage of filters and how to inspect latrines.

During her two month fellowship, Roy and her team examined hundreds of filters. After surveying 330 filters in 16 different neighborhoods, installed five years ago, they reported some positive outcomes.

“Generally speaking, most filters were functioning well. They met five or six of the eight parameters we have established to test the efficiency of these filters,” said Roy.

In extreme cases, while water sources and containers tested negative for E. Coli bacteria, the filtered water tested positive. These results demonstrated potential areas to be addressed to avoid reactivation of contaminants as well as the need for more conducting more community training on proper usage of the filters.

Although Bluefields has a long way to go in terms of economic development, filters introduced by blueEnergy have had some impact. Stay-at-home mothers reported being able to start small cafeterias and eateries in their own homes, without the fear of endangering their families and customers’ health by serving unfiltered water.

“Our goal for the future is to see the Caribbean Coast go from 80 percent being without clean water, sanitation, and electricity to 80 percent with clean water, sanitation, and electricity through direct service government partnerships and incubating new service-providers,” said Craig.

By Tamara Straus

Over the past year, UC Berkeley PhD student Zack Phillips and a team of six undergraduates assembled an LED array dome to fit on the Fletcher Lab’s CellScope microscope. The LED array did exactly what the team hoped for: it allowed the smartphone-enabled device to function as three separate microscopes.

Phillips, who works with Assistant Professor Laura Waller in the Computational Imaging Lab, notes that the adapted device is still too fragile to be field tested for tropical diseases. But he is willing to admit that his team’s youthful composition and the speed of their invention are impressive. Phillip’s research group consists mostly of 19- and 20-year-olds and they completed their project in about 800 hours. The team’s next step is to take their $1,000 version—combining the imaging power of three $10,000 microscopes—and turn it into something sturdier that eventually can be priced for clinicians in developing countries at around $500 (not including the cost of the smartphone).

Professor Waller is certainly proud of this young team’s latest innovation. Yet she underscores that her research group and many others in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences have plenty of accessible projects for undergraduate students and that plenty of undergraduate students are making valuable research contributions.

In the case of the Cellscope project, supported by the Blum Center’s Development Impact Lab, it has offered undergraduates the chance to tinker with Arduinos—an open-source prototyping platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software—that are often taught in high school. Other reasons for increased undergraduate involvement and research contributions, says Waller, include: the “maker movement,” which has popularized lab invention, and the affordability of 3D printers, which allow research groups to iterate new versions in a matter of hours.

“It’s totally different now that when I was an undergraduate,” says Waller. “There were 3D printers then, but now we have access to them.”

Waller points out that college student research contributions are also due to a general attitude about the reciprocal nature of undergraduates in university research.  Both sides have something to gain—professors gain engaged college students and students gain a useful learning experience.

“Research is a really nice way for undergraduates to understand the real-world application of their skills and operate in an environment that’s a little bit more like a real job,” says Waller. “It’s a fantastic supplement to their formal education that will serve them better in their future careers.”

This is true not only for the College of Engineering but also for departments across campus. According to Stefanie Ebeling, who runs Cal’s Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP), founded in 1991, there is “definitely an upward trend” in undergraduate participation in faculty research. Ebeling said that there were 550 participating students in the fall of 2005; 935 in 2010; and this fall, there are 1,250 undergraduate research apprenticeships.

URAP was founded several years before the Boyer Report, which was published in 1998 by a commission of educators sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation and chaired by its president Ernest L. Boyer. Entitled Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America’s Research Universities, the report argued that undergraduates at large research universities were often inadequately taught, due in large part to high student/faculty ratios, a predominance of lecture-based courses, and the demands on faculty besides teaching. The Commission argued that research universities should not try to emulate the teaching practices of small liberal arts colleges, but should take advantage of their research-related resources, integrating undergraduate education into the pursuits of graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty.

In the Commission’s words: “…Undergraduates can become junior members of the research teams that now engage professors and graduate students.”

In a November 2013 Center for Studies in Higher Education paper following up on the progress of the Boyer Report recommendations, authors John Aubrey Douglass from UC Berkeley and Chun-Mei Zhao from Stanford summarized the findings of 2010 Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) undergraduate survey, which was administered at all nine UC campuses and six top-25 public national universities.

Among the 130,000 students who answered the survey questions, most (81.3 percent) conducted research as part of a class assignment, such as a research paper—with 40.3 percent assisting faculty in research with or without pay and course credit. Douglass and Zhao found that assisting research faculty is more prevalent in the STEM fields, while independent and personal research is more likely in the humanities, social sciences, and professional majors.

The two authors also found that undergraduate research engagement “leads to self-reported learning gains across many areas, but especially in the areas of field knowledge, how to present and communicate knowledge, research skills, higher levels of satisfaction, better use of time, and higher levels of non-quantitative skills.”

“I think there are some clear reasons why everyone on campus—from students, to faculty, to administrators, to parents—has growing excitement for undergraduate research,” says Sean Burns, director of the UC Berkeley Office of Undergraduate Research & Scholarships. “On one hand, research opportunities give undergraduates a chance to freely pursue their interests and passions. In this sense, research can epitomize the beauty of liberal education. On the other hand, engaging in research—both in terms of skill building and in terms of knowledge produced—turns out to be one of the most pragmatically beneficial choices an undergraduate can make. What employer or graduate school isn’t thrilled to hear a student speak of their research accomplishments?”

On October 1, 2015, Burns organized an Undergraduate Research Fair that brought together about 400 students and faculty, including Randy Schekman, who won a 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and regularly employs undergraduates in his cell biology research lab. Burns said the event attracted a large number of first and second year students from the STEM fields, but there were a decent of students from social science and other disciplines as well.

Brandie Nonnecke, a research and development manager at the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), agrees that STEM students, and particularly computer science students, are in demand at her and other university labs. But she also notes that many of today’s undergraduates are by nature problem solvers and tinkerers.

“They’re being called the Benjamin Franklin Generation,” says Nonnecke. “They’re not afraid of a challenge, and I think they gain a lot of joy in getting hands-on experience.”

Nonnecke says that on CITRIS’ CAFÉ project, an open source, e-participation platform on social and political issues, undergraduates have been instrumental in building the platform. Currently, the CAFÉ team employs six undergraduate students and two Industrial Engineering and Operations Research graduate students.

Aditya Gande, a third year Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences student who worked on the CellScope in Professor Waller’s lab in 2014 and 2015, explains he sought out a research opportunity because he considers it the best way to get experience outside classwork during the school year.

“A lot of people do their own projects,” says Gande, “but I thought I’d go for lab work, because it’s a little more structured and prestigious. Also, from a job perspective, it’s really difficult to add onto your resume if you’re not doing research.”

Gande, a Regents Scholar, has been thinking along these pragmatic lines since he was a teenager. While a junior in high school, the Cupertino resident landed a lab position at Stanford, making a basic android app for Assistant Bioengineering Professor Manu Prakash Lab’s Oscan device, a cell phone-enabled scanning tool for the mouth. Gande then went on to create open source software for 3D image modeling on 2D images. And in his senior year, he analyzed images of beetles to get their flight data.

Although Gande doesn’t plan to get a PhD, he does intend to continue his research career at a medical device startup.

“I don’t want to indulge myself and waste my youth working on social media apps or something like that,” he explains. “I feel medical devices are more impactful, even though they take longer and require much more effort. Low-cost health is important everywhere.”

As for whether it’s difficult to find research opportunities on campus, even for students without computer science skills, Gande has this to say: “Berkeley is a research university. Anyone who says they can’t find opportunities doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”