By Alexa Vazquez

Mingxi Tang studied finance at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and had plans to pursue a career in the industry after graduation. Her path took a sudden turn the day she discovered a video on the UC Berkeley website — an introduction to the Master of Development Engineering program. 

The video showcased MDevEng professors working in under-resourced regions across the world, striving to improve the lives of people living in low-income communities using technology to measure soil nutrients for crop growth. Inspired by the various student projects she saw on the website, Tang applied, was accepted, and packed her bags for Berkeley.

“Honestly, I was really moved. I knew I had to apply to the program, because I wanted to learn the technical skills I need to help people live better lives,” Tang said.   

Tang is now one of the 28 students that make up the fourth MDevEng cohort. The class of 2025 comes from all over the world, with students hailing from China, Uganda, Ireland, and beyond, and having academic backgrounds ranging from mechanical engineering to applied languages. On August 22, Tang met up with the rest of her classmates — each pursuing their own concentrations such as sustainable design and AI and data analytics — at Blum Hall for the start of MDevEng orientation.  

“We’re all coming from different disciplines and communities, and now we’ll learn how to work together,” MDevEng Program Director Yael Perez said to the new cohort to kick off orientation.

The MDevEng program is a 15-month experience merging in-depth technology studies with human development courses to prepare students for careers in social impact, social entrepreneurship, and sustainability. Over three semesters, students engage in technical problem solving, cross-cultural collaboration, and community development, including a summer internship and a final capstone project.  

Previous MDevEng students have played a pivotal role in developing solutions to social initiatives across the world, including assessing the effectiveness of health clinics’ off-grid power systems in rural Rwanda; developing FireTools, a platform designed to support local decision-makers in improving disaster preparedness for low-resource communities; and empowering women in English-speaking African countries by offering training in advanced digital skills, helping to boost female employment opportunities in technology fields. 

During the reception for the incoming cohort, Blum Chancellor’s Chair in Development Engineering and Professor Kara Nelson offered advice on how to make the most of the three-semester program, drawing from her own career pathway to share her experience with students. Nelson described how she was often told to stick to a single field of study, reflecting on the limitations of engineering programs of the past. 

“This program did not exist when I was a student. Professors would meet with me [about my project ideas] and tell me ‘you can’t do that!’ But today, we’re here to tell you that ‘you can do that!’” Nelson said. “You all have your own interests, your own backgrounds, and you know what your vision is. We’re here to support you and help you paint that path.” 

Among the cohort, many students share the common goal of applying AI and emerging technologies to create sustainable solutions for improving quality of life. Tang, for instance, aims to develop her skills in supervised machine learning to create technology that can improve the lives of people with disabilities.  

“I want to acquire a lot of skills during my time here and use my knowledge about AI and machines to help improve people’s lives,” Tang said. “With the kind of experience this program can offer me, I feel like I can definitely achieve that.” 

Throughout orientation, many students vocalized similar aspirations to serve underprivileged communities, among them Pratiyush Singh, a Berkeley graduate who studied civil engineering and is passionate about addressing climate adaptation and water quality issues in India and Africa.   

After two years in industry, Singh saw a disconnect between his work and the communities he aimed to serve. This pushed him to apply to the MDevEng program, where he wanted to employ his expertise in a more impactful way. Singh found the program unique in that it allowed him greater control over the kind of projects he would work on, and a focus on practical application rather than traditional learning methods. 

“Through this program, I want to learn more about using AI and data to scale technologies for low-resource communities,” he said. “I’m going to continue my past work that focused on addressing water quality challenges, and hopefully I’ll improve along the way.”

During orientation, students participated in an activity where they answered what Development Engineering meant to them using a single word. Common responses displayed on the projector screen included “sustainable,” “solutions,” and “community.” However, Singh’s choice of the word “minority” stood out to the cohort.     

“I think of it as justice engineering at the end of the day, because the solutions we’re creating are taken to and impacting minority communities,” Singh explained. “I feel like when you address those problems, it’s a form of social justice.” 

Orientation concluded with an alumni panel featuring Morris Chang, Kaavya “Kavi” Reddy, and Kangogo Sogomo from previous MDevEng cohorts, followed by a social mixer that brought together past and current cohorts, as well as MDevEng faculty and staff. It was the first event of its kind for an MDevEng orientation. 

Reddy, an alum from the first MDevEng class, invited students interested in working with climate change and government organizations to talk to her during the mixer and exchange ideas. Now working with the science-entrepreneurship nonprofit ACTIVATE, Reddy, who started her own concentration while at Berkeley, encouraged the class to pursue projects they were passionate about. 

She concluded with a powerful piece of advice: “Take Development Engineering and make it work for you!”

She elaborated, “If you go out [into the workforce] and you’re not really sure where you fit in [as a DevEnger,] then you’re feeling exactly what you’re supposed to,” Reddy said. “We’re so brand new that we’re bringing this entire discipline to the world.”

By Adrian White

As we step into this first year of the United Nations’ International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development, the world still circles around the issue of global poverty. By one estimate, from 1990 to 2015, extreme global poverty fell from affecting over one third of the world population to only one tenth, decreasing about 1 percent annually. With the COVID-19 pandemic, it picked back up: from 2020 to 2022, each year pushed 1 percent back into poverty. 

As progress reverses at the same pace it was made, with this Decade comes new urgency. How do the growing global poor access clean drinking water? How do we protect public health and food security with affordable, low-pollution food sources? How do we curtail the impacts of climate change on the global economy while centering carbon-lowering initiatives? Sustainability is critical; technologies must take away from carbon emissions, the consequences of which disproportionately affect impoverished communities. With so many moving targets, how does one choose which issue to aim for and check all those boxes? And who will do it? 

Soliver Ché Fusi is an environmental engineering PhD candidate at UC Berkeley. She hurries online to speak with me late in the Kenyan evening about her work at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. She’s telling me how the technology she’s working on hits on all these target issues — and it’s simple: sustainable agricultural fertilizer.

“If you break down all the complications and nuances, I would argue that we just want clean water…healthy, nutritious, adequate food, and clean air,” says Fusi. But how does fertilizer do this? She explains: It diverts the human waste stream. Fecal and organic matter are collected and burned down to biochar, then mixed with undiluted urine. Nutrients in urine, especially nitrogen, are recovered. This becomes a sustainable amendment that, when applied to crops, returns nutrients to soil. 

Fusi adds that it keeps pathogens from drinking water — and more. “If we’re recovering nitrogen from urine…that’s preventing degradation of water bodies,” she says. So, good for wildlife as well. This cheap fertilizer would also save — and make — money compared to current sanitation systems, and be affordable to low-income smallholders. Their livelihoods would also be improved: soil pH, microbial health, organic matter, and (of course) soil fertility mean better crops and better food security. Soil carbon is also sequestered — good for emissions.

Fusi is just one of many students, alumni, and faculty leading projects like this through the Blum Center, a nearly 20-year-old institution dedicated to combating poverty near and far via technological and policy innovation. Many disciplines come together here, most notably Development Engineering. Berkeley, the Blum Center, and its affiliated faculty can be credited for establishing this field, which combines engineering with other disciplines like human-centered design, resource management, social sciences, and business management.

Fusi’s work shows the Blum Center is — no pun intended — fertile ground for sustainability-minded academics and on-the-ground practitioners eager to make global social impacts. And not just through research: but through actualizing technological solutions to global poverty. It’s a crucible of possibility for those pursuing careers, higher academia, and entrepreneurship that could meet global demands for lowering carbon, while simultaneously improving quality of life in under-resourced areas. Other programs at the Blum Center overlap with the Development Engineering master’s program and PhD minor, including the Global Poverty & Practice (GPP) minor, the Big Ideas Contest, and the Health Tech CoLab. 

Without these resources Fusi feels she wouldn’t be where she is now: Kenya, by way of California, seeing this project’s real-life results. “The Blum Center…was really the gateway into implementing the work,” she says. “Both times that I’ve been to Kenya, they funded the travel, which is not a small thing. … To do work, you have to be situated in that context. [The Center is] going to put money into that.”

Fusi is not even from California, nor from Kenya: She’s from Cameroon. Another facet of the Center is its “melting pot” nature. U.S. and international students mingle and collaborate closely; so do undergrads, graduate students, PhD candidates, post-doc academics, and faculty. The Center itself suggests that, to find solutions to global poverty, we’ll need an equally global-diverse group to cross-pollinate within itself. This attracts many ambitious students from abroad to Berkeley — including Yicheng Wei, another international student from Xi’an, China and recent alum of the Master of Development Engineering program.

Wei works a different angle on global poverty at the Blum Center: epidemiology, targeting the COVID-19 pandemic. With her cohort, she studies ways to test wastewater for anticipating where the virus spreads through low-income communities, which often don’t have accessible testing sites. “It’s changed me a lot…especially my personality,” she says of the Blum Center’s international setting. “I had a lot of ideas, but didn’t know where to show them. … I’m also more willing to share my own opinions.” 

Wei is now applying for a bioengineering-focused PhD, with an offer already from the University of Tokyo. That said, Wei has also felt very challenged by fellow academics and faculty here — though in a good way. “The rest of the team are all PhD, post-docs, and scientists,” she says. “They have much more experience compared to myself, but they’re not like, ‘Oh, you know nothing!’” One of these experts is civil & environmental engineering Prof. Kara Nelson, the Blum Chancellor’s Chair in Development Engineering. Nelson is faculty lead for Wei’s project, and Fusi’s fertilizer project as well. “Professor Kara Nelson…guided us to a correct pathway,” says Wei. “She’s really passionate about every question I have.”

In fact, many Blum Center projects come under the purview of Nelson, who’s been at Berkeley for 22 years. Her academic focus has long been on water — but especially wastewater and the human waste stream. It greatly streamlines the whole water issue, she claims. “What always motivated me, since the beginning of my career, is how we can bring more attention and creative solutions to addressing this waste issue,” Nelson says. “Adequate sanitation is necessary to address so many issues that are linked — improving children’s health, protecting the environment, increasing food security, and creating respectable job opportunities. Also, if we aren’t adequately managing our waste, then we aren’t addressing one of the biggest threats to safe drinking water.”

Besides water there are other issues — Evan Patrick and Lambert Lin, two other Blum Center students, focus on forest restoration in low-income countries for capturing atmospheric carbon. Without the Blum Center’s international backdrop, it’s possible these two would have never met or worked together. Patrick — a PhD candidate in Environmental Science, Policy, & Management — is from the United States. Lin hails from Beijing, a recent graduate of the Master of Development Engineering. 

Patrick, Lin, and others on their team take reforestation approaches a step further than most: assessing how impactful plantings really are. While carbon programs may help offset climate impacts on vulnerable communities, they claim they must also be feasible, fair, and transparent to the smallholder landowners actually doing them — and more incentivizing. To achieve this, their work focuses heavily on remote sensing, data collection, and predictive “forest models” to improve these initiatives while “de-privatizing” the data, making it more openly accessible and affordable. 

It’s not easy — like Wei, Lin says faculty readily challenge their ideas. Says Lin of one faculty member, “He actually criticized the projects. … It helped us to fine-tune our conclusion.” Because of the possibility of policymakers using their work as an excuse to cut down natural forests, Lin and team were able to develop clearer and more airtight conclusions.

Lin’s and Patrick’s project faculty advisor, Prof. Matthew D. Potts, may have had a role leading them to think differently. Potts first established and funded this project at Berkeley. Referring to Patrick’s and Lin’s work, he says that it’s the data collection itself that allows for these kinds of projects’ impact assessments. “How do you assess the impact that motivates people to act,” he asked, “but also helps you design a better program?

Similarly, other faculty — like Nelson — pivot students away from the obvious towards issues people might not want to touch. “How we manage our waste is something a lot of people aren’t as interested in, or as comfortable talking about,” she says about focusing on the waste stream versus water alone. “It’s not, like, everyone’s favorite topic of conversation.”

That said, students also feel they get to challenge how things are done, both inside and outside the classroom. Patrick brought his own criticisms of reforestation work. “Some of the re-plantings…are like little pine matchsticks. … It feels like they kind of only do it one way,” he says. “I think that a lot of tree planting programs have huge trust issues globally. Having a larger data-driven approach to actually show what is working, and what is not — because there are good examples going on.” Lin concurs: “Planting trees is not the best way to sequester carbon. But there are co-benefits. … It could improve water quality, and bring less buildup of nitrogen, improve biodiversity, and improve soil erosion problems.”

Fusi feels the same about academia in general, where disciplines can be siloed and the technology can overshadow the human context. “We are told that research has to be done in a certain way to be considered ‘real science’” — as if it were a politically neutral endeavor, she says. “I think I would have conformed into what mainstream academia says is appropriate.” But her colleagues at the Blum Center with similar backgrounds to hers inspired her. Her cohort “was always like, ‘This is not okay. These things don’t have to be this way.’” 

While innovation and interdisciplinary thinking are important, so is scalability. For some this means narrowing one’s focus to the obvious for quicker results — like clean water, pure and simple. Jeremy Lowe, a PhD student in environmental engineering with a Development Engineering emphasis, helms a passive-chlorination water project through the Blum Center and the Pickering Lab that provides low-maintenance, affordable, and electricity-free chlorination that disinfects drinking water, and that any developing country could access.

It could also be brought to scale, and rapidly. “Two-point-three billion people use a water drinking source right now that could potentially be compatible with this technology,” Lowe says, referencing a study. But he is also realistic. “This is not going to be the end-all-be-all solution for water treatment,” he adds. “Chlorination is doing a great job at disinfecting pathogens from the water, but it doesn’t disinfect all pathogens effectively. And it doesn’t address chemical contaminants. This is where combining chlorination with other water treatment methods is helpful.”

For some Blum Center academics, taking aim at global poverty issues comes from a personal place — bringing solutions to problems they witnessed growing up. Says Lowe, “I grew up in rural North Carolina, and I grew up fairly poor. I think that ultimately shaped how I perceive the world, and how I interact with it. … There’s a lot of unneeded suffering caused by global poverty.”

For Fusi it’s personal too, tied to Cameroon and her home. “My aunt is restarting the farm she had lost because of the war,” she says. “All this knowledge I can use, in a more career sense…but it can also go back to the people that are closest to me, and not just family.”

The diverse figures at the Blum Center bring different criticisms, talents, and angles to global poverty issues that urgently need new perspectives. They come from all around a globe hurtling into the International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development. 

Besides the Blum Center as their home, something else seems to unite many of these voices: a desire to serve. “My ultimate goal is to be of service to people,” says Lowe. 

“I consider myself a servant,” Fusi adds. “Determining who I want to serve, and how I want to serve them.”

In California, it’s hard to overstate the impact of climate change–fueled wildfires: Over the last few decades, we’ve seen a 320-percent increase in burned areas, 268 lives lost, and in just the past five years, an estimated $60 billion in lost revenue.

At the national level, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development is also concerned about wildfires as it focuses on post-disaster recovery, and there exist a variety of wildfire-resilience toolkits meant to guide decision-makers’ efforts to help people prepare for and recover from wildfires. But according to Erica Anjum, there is not enough attention on low-resource areas. These communities are doubly vulnerable: not just at greater physical risk from wildfire but also facing “intersectional social vulnerabilities,” says Anjum, a city and regional planning graduate student. Indicators of these can include, but aren’t limited to, income, housing status, age, and disabilities. “Different vulnerabilities render people vulnerable in different ways — all of which are relevant in planning resilient communities,” she says. 

Enter “FireTools,” an online toolkit prototyped by Anjum and her graduate-student teammates in DevEng C200, “Design, Evaluate, and Scale Development Technologies.” Their toolkit brings a wide array of resources under one umbrella for local decision-makers to use to improve disaster preparedness, response, recovery, and resilience — with a particular emphasis on doubly vulnerable communities. 

FireTools is a hub for resources such as community- and fire-mapping tools, funding sources, landscaping best practices, evacuation preparedness and resilience centers, and data-privacy considerations — all things decision makers rely on when assisting and preparing communities before, during, and after catastrophes.

“Apart from the very crucial impact on loss of lives and property, the intervention will lead to more collaboration between stakeholders in the fire preparedness, resilience, and recovery spaces,” said Master of Development Engineering student Titli Thind. “The process of building the toolkit has spurred conversation between previously disconnected key decision makers, and we hope that this continues.”

DevEng C200, a core MDevEng course open to grad students from a variety of backgrounds, provides an opportunity for students to partner with professionals to tackle problems that require the skills of Development Engineers. That process requires understanding the focus area’s stakeholders, end users, and their contexts; testing hypotheses for effective technological intervention; iterating these solutions’ designs; evaluating their efficacy; and proposing a way for scaling up their use. 

Professors Amy Pickering and Mathieu Aguesse lead the class. Class projects have included an app for farmers to engage with one another, build community, and monitor the health of their wetlands; a comprehensive handbook for more efficient greenhouses for farmers in the climate change–impacted eastern Himalayas; expanding and diversifying the products and market for plastic-recycling social enterprise Takataka Plastics; a mobile platform, focused on data-governance management, that allows for the collection, sharing, and analysis of data from low-resource settings; analyzing and modeling the widespread deployment of a water-chlorination device; a simple-to-use, easy-to-carry solar-powered water pump; an affordable, foaming soap dispenser; improving the outcomes of unhoused people with a better online platform that’s used by both unhoused folks and San Francisco caseworkers; and the improved integration of frontline public health workers in a platform that provides primary-care services in Guinea. 

Along with Thind and Anjum, FireTools was developed by Xuan Huang (MDevEng), Kanyawee Srikulwong (development practice), and Ashley Woodward (civil and environmental engineering).

The team started with research data on wildfire resilience, practices from other fire-prone regions like Australia, and 14 case studies of communities and their decision makers who have faced fires before. They spoke with first responders and planners from previously hard-hit California communities. Their due diligence brought to light specific problems that the team sought to address, such as multiple authorities or organizations collecting the same data in the same communities post-fire (which risks retraumatizing vulnerable fire survivors) as well as some neighborhoods’ lack of accessible evacuation routes. 

“This project is a great example of how valuable it was to interact with the wildfire toolkit’s end users to create a product that addresses their needs,” Pickering said.

The tools in the kit — such as a post-fire data-collection process and landscaping best practices — evolved and grew with further stakeholder interviews and feedback, culminating in the website, a toolkit distribution plan, and a business model. The plan is to provide the toolkit to primarily local decision-makers and planners for free, with the team proposing funding for growing, improving, and testing it from primarily federal agencies with a stake in disaster-resilient communities.

The team built its toolkit as a “living document,” where the at-risk communities themselves can share their own insights and experiences to further refine authorities’ ability to help them. Those same authorities can use the toolkit to further inform their disaster planning and coordinate with other agencies with whom they’ve historically had limited collaboration. 

This whole process of producing a technological intervention in accordance with end users’ needs, however, is not over once the toolkit is put to use; it won’t be much good if it’s not sufficiently achieving its goals. 

So, the team plans to measure their solution’s efficacy by, among other standards, the number of planners who take up the toolkit, collecting feedback from decision-makers in places hit by wildfires, examining whether its use has streamlined data collection, and whether doubly vulnerable populations’ trauma associated with collecting sensitive data after a catastrophe — worsened by duplicative surveying — has been reduced. 

Researchers from UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC Merced will continue working on the toolkit, Anjum says. But regardless of how the toolkit may have to be adapted, its goals continue to be reduced loss of life and property, improved data collection and interagency dialogue, and all-around better wildfire preparedness and resilience. 

“We want to share our experiences and expertise,” one local planner and survivor of the record-breakingly deadly and destructive 2018 Camp Fire had told the team, “so others don’t lose as much as we did.”

Yordanos Degu Zewdu clearly remembers the moment she decided to become a changemaker helping those most in need: as a young kid in Addis Ababa, on the way home from shopping with her mother, right before the start of the school year.

Degu Zewdu and her mother came across a father and his two children. He appeared ill and was begging desperately for food for his hungry kids. The suffering and desperation moved the young Degu Zewdu deeply.

“But as a kid, I had no means to help. So I stood there, overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness,” she recalled. “My mother, the kindest person I’ve ever known, generously gave the father money to buy food for his kids, brightening their faces with joy.”

In that moment, she realized that “when I grew up, I wanted to be in a position to help communities and families in need.”

Degu Zewdu, who continues fulfilling that promise as a Development Engineer, recounted the story to her peers and their families last Friday evening at the commencement ceremony of the UC Berkeley Master of Development Engineering program’s Class of 2023 — the second-ever cohort of what is likely the world’s first such degree program. The group of 30, hailing from 13 countries, crossed the stage at Banatao Auditorium following three semesters, an internship, and a capstone project.

“We are here to celebrate the hard work you have put into this program and to honor your commitment, your courage, your tenacity, and your compassion,” said Prof. Kara Nelson, chair of the Graduate Group in Development Engineering. “And we thank you for the work that you are doing to make this world a more just place, a more equitable place, and more peaceful. You are an inspiration to all of us.”

The Class of 2023 worked on projects ranging from tracking and optimizing plastic waste collection for recycling in Uganda, to household sanitation and hygiene in Ethiopia, to policy needs as California transitions to greater renewable energy.

Despite impressive accomplishments in the classroom and out in the world, the variety and magnitude of the world’s problems can make DevEng work feel “like planting a singular seed in a vast desert and hoping for a forest to grow tomorrow,” said the evening’s other student speaker, Anjali Ravunniarath.

“I stand here, with the same big problems and no easy solutions. However, I have found solace in this community in the last year and a half,” she said. “Together, we’ve dissected a lot of systems, understood parts of it, and occasionally tried to see if we could fix a few. The problems may not have disappeared, but our collective efforts make it seem less daunting, and that’s truly what I’m grateful for.”

This constant change-making journey won’t always be smooth sailing, counseled the evening’s commencement speaker, Ranjiv Khush, a water scientist, member of Marin County’s water board, and co-founder of Aquaya, a nonprofit producing data and tools to support universal access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene. Even the most accomplished development engineers, like Prof. Amy Pickering, don’t get it right every time, he said.

“Here’s the thing: Amy and all of our other heroes, they make embarrassing professional mistakes. They mess things up. They feel ashamed,” he said. “Just like us.

“The difference,” Khush added, “is that they’re really good at rolling with it. They shake it off. They refuse to let their mistakes define them. Be the same: Shake it off. Please, do not let your mistakes and your embarrassments dissuade you from anything or get in the way of your success.”

Prof. Dan Fletcher closed out the ceremony with a challenge to the newly minted master’s-degree holders: “I want to challenge you each day after this program, as you move on with your careers, as you find your passions, as you live your passions, to be the best person that you imagined you could be while you were in this program.”

It was a sentiment with echoes of advice Degu Zewdu had offered earlier in the evening.

“As we set forth on our individual journeys,” she said, “I urge each of you to embrace life’s unpredictability, step out of your comfort zones, show resilience, remain open to the countless opportunities that await. It is in these moments of growth and uncertainty that we will unveil the authenticity of ourselves.”

Development Engineering is a field of research and practice that combines the principles of engineering with economics, human-centered design, entrepreneurship, natural resources, and social science to create technological interventions in accordance with and for individuals living in low-resource settings. It’s a technical field, one often rendered in blueprints, lines of code, and physical devices.

But depicting DevEng to lay audiences is vital not just to raising the field’s academic profile but to growing the capacity of a discipline that tangibly improves lives as well as to highlight the richness and complexity of the communities DevEng aims to serve.

Each summer, students in UC Berkeley’s Master of Development Engineering program and the PhD designated emphasis in DevEng implement DevEng interventions close to home and far away, documenting their work and their environment as they go. This year’s DevEng Photography Contest highlights the best of this summer’s photos and videos, from the sometimes-precarious state of electrical power in rural places to novel technologies for delivering medicines and medical supplies. (Coincidentally, the three winners were captured in the same country.) Jacob Seigel Brielle and Isaac Seigel-Boettner, the talented Cal-alum duo behind Pedal Born Pictures, joined DevEng staff in judging this year’s submissions.

1st place

“The fragility of rural power”

Samuel Miles, PhD student, Energy & Resource Group; DevEng designated emphasis

“This is a picture of a young boy carrying out his chores in rural Rwanda,” says Miles. “The background shows rural infrastructure — in this case, a sagging power line held up by a local tree. It encapsulates the opportunities and challenges of modernity — the possibility that the boy grows up benefiting from electricity, but also the dangers poor planning represents to safety.”

Judges commended the great intersecting lines in the composition and how the photo’s symbolism deepens the more one dives into the image.

2nd place

“Zipline Drone Landing”

Rachel Dersch, Master of Development Engineering student

Dersch’s video depicts a medical delivery drone landing. The company behind it, Zipline, is a Silicon Valley start-up operating in various African countries, including Rwanda. “They make deliveries constantly to all the hospitals in Rwanda that contain blood, medicines, and supplies,” says Dersch. The company provides “quality employment” for their staff in Muhanga, Rwanda, she adds, and is being considered for her research team’s sites for solar power and water filtration units, since they require a landing pad for deliveries. “The drones are a really cool adaptation for developing countries when the road infrastructure makes time sensitive deliveries like blood difficult to accommodate,” Dersch says.

Judges appreciated the depiction of a fascinating new technology being used for good — and the importance in DevEng of testing tech first.

3rd place

“Rural health clinic energy transitions in Rwanda”

Rachel Dersch, Master of Development Engineering student

“I like this photo because it showcases the complexity of working in rural locations where cows are grazing on hospital grounds next to new technology implementations,” Dersch says. “This photo was taken in a very remote location in the ‘Thousand Hills’ of Rwanda, a gorgeous place. We were at the location conducting qualitative interviews on the energy transition at the health clinic and picking up power monitoring sensors.”

Judges recognized this photo for the deeper story and symbolism behind it. Plus, “these sorts of juxtapositions help explain more of the why behind DevEng,” Seigel Brielle says.

By Mengyuan Dong

With his passion for design and cars, studying automotive engineering came naturally for Pun Praphanphoj when he started college. Originally from Thailand, Praphanphoj spent his college years at the HAN University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. There, he equipped himself with knowledge and skills in mechanical engineering and gained practical experience, from building a racing car for Formula Student Competition to interning in the fuel cell industry in Europe. 

Praphanphoj was determined to work in the car industry when graduating from college. However, after returning to Thailand and working at Toyota on developing embedded systems and autonomous vehicles for almost two years, he reconsidered. “I wanted to have more impact and not be like a cog in a machine,” Praphanphoj says, recalling why he was motivated to leave the car industry for a while and try something new. 

This led him to Energy Absolute PCL, a renewable energy service provider in Bangkok. Praphanphoj worked as a project manager designing greenhouses for farmers in the local area to grow organic vegetables, as well as designing battery-powered locomotives. The company had a dozen greenhouses where it partnered up with the farmers and sponsored them with equipment, seeds, and a market to sell these vegetables. For one particular project, Praphanphoj programmed a farming system that could control each crop’s condition individually and report plant conditions online, helping farmers better monitor and manage their crops. The experience taught him the importance of engaging with people and learning about their needs when designing projects. It also prompted him to pivot from an engineering role to pursuing a growing passion for bringing technological solutions to societal and environmental problems.  

“This experience also made me realize that engineering and tech alone will never solve any human complex issue without considering other aspects of the problem,” he says. “It converted me from truly believing in the power of tech alone to be more humble and holistic in my approach towards problem solving.” 

This passion has led Praphanphoj to join the Master of Development Engineering program at UC Berkeley, where he focuses on sustainable design innovations. In his third and final semester now, he says he has enjoyed learning global development history and issues. Through taking classes including DevEng 202: Critical Systems of Development, he became more aware of the more nuanced aspects of global development — and the long-lasting impacts development engineering could have on people and their communities. 

“They ground you in the knowledge that there are people not only working for monetary purposes, but for improving other people’s lives as well,” he says. 

Whether it’s with professors who’ve been doing the work of development engineering for decades or with fellow students from different backgrounds and countries, Praphanphoj says he values having conversations about how things should be done to create impact and change the status quo. With the MDevEng’s wide range of elective classes, he also took courses in other departments, learning innovative finance for development and natural climate solutions and global change. 

For a project-driven class, Praphanphoj took part in a project with Maia Africa, a Burkina Faso company specializing in producing mosquito-repellent products. Such products are particularly essential in regions of West Africa where the prevalence of malaria makes the local population vulnerable to mosquito-borne diseases.

The company had already introduced a mosquito-repellent ointment to the market. However, they sought a more innovative solution to disrupt the mosquito reproductive cycle directly. This is where Praphanphoj and his three teammates stepped in, devising a strategy to impede mosquito egg-laying, thereby curbing the growth of the mosquito population. They came up with a low-maintenance, low-cost, and water-based trap, which would lure female mosquitoes to come in and lay their eggs. While the product has not entered the production phase yet, Praphanphoj appreciated learning the process of designing this solution, along with the chance to present an economical and innovative technology to address a longstanding issue in the region.

Praphanphoj says growing up in Thailand and studying and working in Europe and the U.S. have shaped him into a flexible and open-minded person. “I think the ability to embrace and see things as they are and not imposing how things should be done is something that I’ve learned through traveling, studying and working in different places,” he says. “That’s a quality that I’m quite proud of.”

Such experiences enrich and shape Praphanphoj’s professional perspective as an engineer as well. He believes engineers should not only rely on their own past experiences and knowledge, but also listen to local people and learn from their experience about what the solution should be. 

“You need to make sure that you’re not playing the savior role here and trying to push whatever you think is best for them, but rather be someone who’s there to listen and accommodate what they want and make sure whatever you offer fits within the context of how they live,” he says. 

This summer, Praphanphoj was selected as an Engineering for Change fellow and currently works for Good Machine as a prototype engineer. He contributes to a project using observational balloons to track natural disasters in California. The team is now developing a system for balloon control at different altitudes while building additional testing capacity for system-level testing. 

And for his MDevEng capstone project, Praphanphoj is working with Takataka Plastics, a start-up co-founded by a Berkeley mechanical engineering and DevEng alum providing waste management solutions. His specific project addresses recycling issues in Uganda by optimizing the placement and frequency of the pickup locations of plastic collection bins around the city of Gulu. By the end of the fall semester, Praphanphoj will present the company with a recommendation to improve the program’s logistics and engage more residents to participate.  

Praphanphoj sees himself as a creator and designer who wants to use his skills to develop solutions or products that would be helpful to low-resource communities. After graduating in December, Praphanphoj says he’s interested in working in the renewable energy space, as well as in carbon capture and sequestration. Specifically, he wants to prototype and have fun in early-stage product development — something that hasn’t changed since his days building race cars.

“I do like working with my hands,” he says. 

Every August marks the arrival of fresh faces at UC Berkeley, and for the third year running, some of those new students will be earning the country’s — if not the world’s — first graduate degree in Development Engineering.

On Aug. 22, the third cohort of the Master of Development Engineering program convened at Blum Hall for their orientation and the start of the first of three semesters of an interdisciplinary curriculum that revolves around developing technology interventions in accordance with and for individuals living in low-resource settings. The Class of 2024 — 34 students in total — hails from 12 countries across four continents, but many arrived last week for breakfast and headshots already on friendly terms.

In addition to being students in the burgeoning field that first coalesced at Berkeley, the cohort will also be active practitioners and shapers of it. When digitally polled about what they thought “Development Engineering” means, “dignity” was the first reply to hit the giant screen of Blum Hall B100. “Flourishing” and “communities” were early leaders in the live word cloud, but “innovation,” “technology,” and “sustainable” became three of the class’ most dominant perspectives on their new area of study and practice. 

The appearance of “diversity” prompted a discussion that got at the heart of DevEng. Hussein Orekoya, a civil engineer from Nigeria, elaborated: Diversity in innovation, he said, meant recognizing that “a solution that might work here in California might not work in Africa.” 

In addition to working in civil engineering in Lagos, Orekoya is the founder and executive director of My Environment is Mine Initiative, a youth-led organization promoting sustainable development across the continent and guided by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. His classmates arrived in Berkeley having done everything from petroleum chemistry to AI and robotics in government.

Following a round of icebreaker bingo — filling in squares by finding new classmates who fit criteria like owning a pet or starting their own social venture — the cohort broke off into groups for a campus-wide scavenger hunt, a particularly important geographical orientation considering their elective classes this fall span 10 departments.

That interdisciplinary breadth — and DevEng’s focus on the big-picture context of complex problems — make the MDevEng “the program I wish I could have taken when I was a student,” Prof. Kara Nelson, chair of the Graduate Group in Development Engineering, told the new cohort, which started classes the following day.

But students, she said, will have to pair tenacity with working in interdisciplinary teams and digging deeply to understand the local contexts of the problems they’re solving for. It’s not easy work, she warned. “You have to be fearless and never give up.”

“It’s so daunting,” Nelson said, “but it’s so fun.”

By Alisha Dalvi

Health care is a basic human right and a core resource for achieving the UN-adopted Sustainable Development Goals. But fully sixty percent, or roughly 100,000, healthcare facilities across sub-Saharan Africa do not have access to reliable electricity, or to electricity at all. 

There is a well-documented correlation between energy access and positive health outcomes, a key reason why governments and development practitioners have committed to achieving universal electrification of health facilities by 2030. 

This problem is right up Ingrid Xhafa’s alley. Xhafa has worked in the development sector for a decade and graduated from the Master of Development Engineering program last December with a focus on energy and environment. The intersection of healthcare and energy was also the focus of another recent MDevEng graduate, Greg Berger. Together, Berger and Xhafa, both in the program’s Energy, Water, and the Environment track, examined the energy needs of healthcare clinics in one sub-Saharan country, Rwanda, as their MDevEng capstone project. 

Berger has always had a profound interest in energy. With a background in mechanical engineering, he plans to use his education to implement sustainable energy technologies in an equitable way. “Energy is pivotal to the foundation of modern human activities,” he says. “And it’s important to implement sustainable solutions by working with communities that did the least to contribute to the climate crisis but are hit the worst.” Xhafa, on the other hand, came in with a master’s in public policy and knows the impact policy has on resource allocation in energy and elsewhere.

In Rwanda, Berger and Xhafa worked with Daniel Kammen, Professor of Energy and head of Berkeley’s Renew­able and Appro­pri­ate Energy Lab­o­ra­tory (RAEL), who has long worked on evaluating the potential for off-​​grid power in the country and other nations in sub-Saharan Africa. Kammen became their MDevEng capstone advisor and helped kickstart the project by guiding research and remote work. 

During the spring of 2022, Berger and Xhafa examined how Rwanda’s challenges with access to energy in remote areas have led to the implementation of new infrastructure such as off-the-grid systems that rely on solar panels to power small and medium-sized needs. Standalone off-grid solar has the potential to improve health services in remote villages with insufficient grid infrastructure. However, historically, most of these interventions have happened as ad-hoc initiatives from outside development practitioners, and the infrastructure’s maturity and sustainability has to be vetted.

Trained as engineers, but now with training in low-resource settings, both Xhafa and Berger knew these solutions needed to be assessed from multiple perspectives: technical robustness and feasibility, business model sustainability, and socio-cultural impacts. “The MDevEng program played a huge role in how I look at development interventions, as well as challenges to look out for in implementation,” says Berger.  

Throughout their program, Berger and Xhafa worked with RAEL to analyze data from remote monitors placed in six Rwandan healthcare facilities to assess power quality and reliability generated by standalone solar boxes. PhD student Samuel Miles from RAEL had added remote sensors to them over a year ago to collect data on how well the stand-alone systems were operating in the country, without the need for someone to be constantly on-site to check. From there, Berger and Xhafa conducted in-depth analyses, asking questions like, “Does the existing energy system fulfill the needs of the clinic?” and “Are there more opportunities or challenges for more electricity?” and “Are there power disruptions throughout the day that are detrimental to the clinic?” 

But this technical analysis alone doesn’t paint the full picture of what leads to the success or failure of an intervention. Berger and Xhafa needed to have on-the-ground discussions with clinic staff and community members to gather insights about the impact of this technology in the day-to-day. Last summer, the researchers  spent a month in Rwanda examining eight health clinics, six of which had off-grid solar boxes installed with USAID support that provide solar power and clean drinking water to their facilities. The other two clinics were connected to the traditional power grid — a comparison point for understanding how the solar boxes’ electricity systems performed. 

The duo recalls their journey in the country filled with surprises, from four car breakdowns to the incredible hospitality of the Rwandan people and extremely easy collaboration with the local staff. On a day-to-day basis, Berger and Xhafa coordinated with locals to visit those eight healthcare facilities, and with the help of a local translator, they spoke with the head of each one, as well as their nurses and doctors, to grasp the specialized needs and testimonies of each clinic. They toured the clinics to conduct inventory, perform basic energy audits and analysis, and provided clinic staff with a survey to obtain measurable data. 

They found that most of these standalone systems provided quality power when operable, however differing clinic needs led to different levels of power consumption and down time. On top of that, the clinics were largely unable to fulfill their other objectives of providing electricity and water services to the community in a financially feasible way for the system operations. 

The RAEL team concluded that the intervention had poor site selection from the beginning; areas were not densely populated enough to earn revenue from the productive use of electricity. On top of that, these standalone solar solutions did not consider the arrival of government-provided grid infrastructure which would negate the need for standalone systems. Plus, Xhafa says, “one solution fits all” may not be the best approach for all energy projects in Africa. 

They also found the system sizing to be generic and that seasonal factors made a big difference in power adequacy. Involving the communities in the design and implementation processes could have avoided some of these problems. “We noted a lack of adequate training on system operation and uncertainty of how these systems will be sustainable once the equipment starts aging or when technical issues arise,” Berger says. 

By the end, Berger and Xhafa, in conjunction with RAEL, quantitatively showed the challenges of a one-size-fits-all power system, and they hope these insights can provide some crucial information for similar initiatives. Standalone energy systems can be vital in remote areas with no grid reach, they say, but alternative financial models have to be explored and the economics behind the productive use of electricity understood. 

Being trained with this mindset through the MDevEng program, the pair put a greater emphasis on the clinics’ communities, considering them as the customer of the solution and treating their testimonials as valuable insights alongside the hard data. Both Xhafa and Berger highlighted how valuable it was to have the community at the center of their research. 

“They are hardworking and ingenious people who can solve their own problems,” Xhafa says. “The solutions suggested by the locals have the highest opportunity to be successful.” 

Tisatayane had been a teacher, a nurse, and an unsuccessful social entrepreneur. Now, he’s using development engineering to provide his fellow Malawians clean energy and an opportunity to free themselves from economic hardship.

By Sam Goldman

Growing up, Mathews Tisatayane had few boundaries about where he could go and who he could see. His corner of Malawi, in southeast Africa, was multicultural, and he hung out with people from different tribes, who spoke different languages, and who practiced different religions. He didn’t have electricity or running water, and his family took him shopping for clothes once a year if he was lucky. But “growing up,” he said, “I didn’t feel like I was poor at all.”

As the third child and first-born son of his mother’s 12 children, he held a lot of responsibility and worked on his family’s farm growing tobacco — a major component of the Malawian economy. When he was seven, he used the income he earned to self-enroll in a school about five miles away.

Tisatayane, now 50 and finishing his final semester of UC Berkeley’s Master of Development Engineering program, says his family still grows tobacco “out of desperation, out of ‘what else can we do?’”

When he finally did get the chance to go to school, he encountered his first Peace Corps volunteer, which made him think the U.S. had something to offer the world. These ideas lodged in the back of his mind.

Tisatayane finished high school in 1994, but the introduction of college-entrance exams that favored elite kids halted his plans for college. It was already a dark time: His great uncle, who owned his family’s farm and had funded everything in his life, had passed away. He recalled trying to compose himself and asking what he could do in this bleak situation.

If there is one thing that defines Tisatayane, it’s resilience: “When I’m put in a situation, no matter how bad or good it is, I’m always trying to say, ‘How can I do better for myself and the people around me?’”

The mantra has guided him through famine, nursing school, full-time nursing, a deep but unsuccessful foray into social entrepreneurship, all the way to the inaugural cohort of the M.DevEng program. During his three semesters at Blum Hall, he parlayed new professional and peer connections to launch Umodzi with Sean Mandell, a recent graduate of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. The company is a reincarnation of Tisatayane’s failed attempt at social entrepreneurship, allowing women-led co-ops in Malawi to raise quail in a 100-percent sustainable, self-contained system.

“I’m almost happy I failed,” he said of his first attempt at sustainable development. “If I didn’t fail, I wouldn’t have come to Berkeley.”

From famine to the San Francisco Department of Public Health

After his great uncle died, Tisatayane found his way to a teacher’s training college, spent two years there, and returned to his village to teach kids — all while continuing as a subsistence farmer providing for 17 people as the elder man of the family.

But more hardship was in store. In 2001, a terrible famine hit Malawi. Tisatayane lost half his body weight and, at one point, while still teaching, went three days without food. The problem, he realized, wasn’t that there was not enough food in the country, but that it was not accessible to poorer people — including those who grew it. “That was the famine that changed my life for good,” he recalled two decades later. “It’s one of the things that pushed me to” apply to UC Berkeley — “to try to do something to relieve my people of that.”

Meanwhile, he had gotten involved in a government program where people planted trees for food. There, he met another Peace Corp volunteer. They married. And that was how Tisatayane made it to the country that, in high school, he started to realize had something to offer the world.

“When I came to the United States, I was totally useless,” he said. In Malawi, he had friends, family, a teaching job. “I had everything there. And then all of a sudden, I’m in a completely different situation.” He was lost. It was like the end of high school all over again.

But that spurred the same thought process: What could he do to help himself and those around him? Tisatayane enrolled in the City College of San Francisco not knowing what he wanted to pursue. But it reminded him of his youth, surrounded by folks speaking different languages, practicing different religions, displaying different personalities. It buoyed him.

While at CCSF, Tisatayane volunteered for six months in the unit serving patients with HIV/AIDS, learning about U.S. patient care. Many of them nearing the end of their lives didn’t have family, and he saw how the nurses became the closest relationships they had. “The passion, the love, and the dedication of the nurses who worked in that care unit,” he said, “inspired me to be like, ‘I think I want to be a nurse and do what these people are doing.’”

He studied intensely and improved his grades while at CCSF but did not get into the nursing program there, which used a lottery system. Persevering, Tisatayane later found a different school, and he became one of the very few men or Black people in the University of San Francisco’s undergrad nursing program, from which he graduated with a bachelor of science in nursing in 2011.

With the mission of helping the homeless suffering in the wealthiest country in the world, over the next five years, he worked at the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s Medical Respite & Sobering Center, aiding those who were discharged from the hospital and needing housing or social services as well as those passed out on the street and smelling of alcohol. Despite the 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. shift — and the beginning of a new family here — Tisatayane continued to support his family back home in Malawi.

“If you’re not going to do this, you’re going to regret it on your deathbed.”

Though he had spent years helping those in need in San Francisco, his family in Malawi continued to grow and need support. His sisters and their friends had started a cooperative, Yankho co-op in Kauma Village, and he gave them $5,000 to use however they wanted. Six months later, the group of women had started an informal microfinancing program among themselves; every Sunday, they got together to lend money to whoever needed it most that week.

Tisatayane found that many women, along with their children, were raising chickens and other small birds, but they couldn’t scale their efforts. The cause mirrored that of the famine: Bird-feed ingredients grown in the village were bought up by middlemen, who sold them to businessmen in the city to make the feed, and who then sold it back to the farmers. He wrote up a business plan and showed it to contacts of his wife, who secured him $35,000 in funding. He would bring to his community a self-sustaining bird-raising operation.

The key, he learned, was energy: ubiquitous in the U.S., scarce in his hometown. He studied microgrids — small-scale, self-sufficient energy systems — and reached out to friend and fellow Malawian William Kamkwamba, of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind fame, who put him in touch with someone who got him the solar panels and batteries that Tisatayane would assemble into bird incubators and brooders. The equipment was paid for using the funds Tisatayane had raised.

The incubators could replace a hen lying on her eggs for 21 days — not an easy model to scale — in order to hatch as many eggs as possible. The chicks would then stay in the brooders — warm rooms that mimic their mothers’ feathers. After two weeks, the birds would be ready to be sent to farmers.

If his community could raise their own chickens all on their own, then they would eat well, which meant better health. They could sell the ones they couldn’t eat for income. And building a system run by women and youth would empower them, too. One of “the most profound moments” in the process, he recalled, was being in the U.S. and receiving a video of incubated chicks hatching at his village — “life coming out of an egg, because of the invention that we made.”

The machines worked well for two months. When they started failing at night, he hired independent solar companies to check them out. The panels, it turned out, had come from different manufacturers, as did the wiring. Either they were put together improperly or the batteries were used too quickly and died. The endeavor was paused indefinitely.

Tisatayane said he felt like “a failed social entrepreneur.” He tried out some online courses on social entrepreneurship, but they didn’t help. Then, he discovered UC Berkeley’s Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab, run by Prof. Daniel Kammen. He spent a week on YouTube devouring Kammen’s talks. He wanted more. “How can I be part of people like this,” he asked himself, “because I truly, truly believe that I can do more in Malawi.”

In following the lab online, he came across Berkeley’s new Master of Development Engineering program, the first cohort of which was to start in the fall of 2021. “This is it,” he thought. “If you’re not going to do this, you’re going to regret it on your deathbed.” 

Investors and biodigesters 

Sure enough, he was accepted. He’d wake up at 6 a.m., take BART from his home in southern San Francisco to downtown Berkeley, and hike a mile up through campus to California Memorial Stadium for DevEng C200, “Design, Evaluate, and Scale Development Technologies,” at 8 a.m. He had started his dream program, a chapter in his life he hadn’t even considered not long before.

That first-semester M.DevEng course turned out to be pivotal. Tisatayane met Sean Mandell, a student at the Haas School of Business who had been a data scientist for four years at a health-tech start-up. Mandell had had a longtime interest in — but limited involvement with — global development and had come to Berkeley to pursue social entrepreneurship. The two chatted during class breaks. 

“We truly liked each other and respected each other’s views on what needs to happen in terms of development,” said Mandell, who graduated in May.

“Without Sean, my business wouldn’t be what it is,” Tisatayane said on a recent afternoon at a cafe on Euclid Avenue, near Blum Hall, home of the M.DevEng program. He described their blueprint: Solar panels heating multiple hatcheries incubating quail eggs, and biodigesters turning quails’ waste into fertilizer for the birds’ food as well as fuel to supplement the solar electricity. Once up and running, the circular system could address a panoply of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, including zero hunger, gender equality, affordable and clean energy, responsible consumption and production, and more. The whole enterprise, which they named Umodzi — “togetherness” in Chichewa, one of Malawi’s main languages — would be run by the women cooperative with whom Tisatayane had collaborated on his first try. The name reflected the unity with which Tisatayne’s community approached everything, from work to celebrations, as he grew up. 

Prof. Layla Kwong of the School of Public Health, his capstone advisor, gave him the idea to use biodigesters — mechanical stomachs that convert organic material, like quail poop, into biogas to heat incubating eggs, cook food, or make fertilizer to grow the quails’ food. Tisatayane read up on the process and discovered a biodigester maker already in Malawi. The country also had an incubator maker. “Talking to people, we found out all the systems were already there,” he said.

Eventually, Tisatayane and Mandell registered Umodzi as a public-benefit corporation in the U.S., with a subsidiary company in Malawi and a lawyer in each country, too. Tisatayane is founder and president; Mandell, co-founder and CEO. They went on to raise over $100,000 from individuals interested in supporting their project and even contributed some of their own savings. They bought a 25-kilowatt solar power system with a 60 kilowatt-hour lithium battery system from a Malawian supplier.

But getting a fully functioning enterprise off the ground required even more investment, and that’s where networking through the M.DevEng program came in handy once again. Prof. Alice Agogino, chair of the Graduate Group in Development Engineering, introduced Tisatayane to Stephen Isaacs, former president and CEO of Aduro Biotech and a member of the program’s advisory board, who then introduced him to his own friend Bob Reed, former CFO at Sutter Health. Reed immediately took to the idea. “What can I do for you?” he asked Tisatayane.

“I have an idea to change my community, but I know nothing about the money world,” he had replied. 

Reed enthusiastically obliged and became a friend and mentor to Tisatayane, introducing him to another potential investor. Umodzi’s circle of backers grew.

“Here for the indefinite future”

In the spring, Mandell surprised Tisatayane: He had bought a one-way ticket to Malawi, departing the day after his May graduation. “I’m here for the indefinite future,” Mandell told him. 

Tisatayane himself left for the country in June and stayed for two months, his longest trip to Malawi since moving to the U.S. Gut instinct told him to stay for a second month; it allowed him to be with family when his father passed away.

The batteries (lifespan: 10-plus years) and electrical equipment arrived in modular shipping containers and joined the hatcheries and biodigesters in Kauma Village. Solar panels (lifespan: 30 years) were installed, and a borehole was drilled to provide potable water to the birds. While drilling, they decided to install taps for the local community to access the water for free.

Umodzi’s fundraising efforts have netted just enough money to launch; Tisatayane estimated all the investment will be recouped in about a year of operations. As site manager, the pair hired Bernadetta Ndongera, a young woman from the community with experience working with farmers, raising poultry, and growing crops and with a degree in agriculture from Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources, in the country’s capital. “We didn’t want to bring in a man when both co-founders are men,” Tisatayane said. The Yankho co-op remains Umodzi’s backbone. In fact, it was the women’s cooperative that aspired to raise quail as a ticket to economic freedom and self-sufficiency in the first place. 

As his final semester in the M.DevEng program wound down, Tisatayane bought a one-way ticket to Malawi to be full-time hands-on. Before departing in mid-January, he’ll wrap up his current job as a health nurse at a San Francisco County jail, which he had been juggling alongside his studies, entrepreneurial activities, and parenthood. He expects to split his time between the two countries he calls home, with plans to come back to California later in 2023. 

With only a couple weeks left in the M.DevEng program, Tisatayane was sent a familiar type of video — the first sign that months of hard work, perseverance, and passion were beginning to bear fruit for his community. Umodzi hatched the first quail chicks from an initial batch of 900 — a mere fifth of the number all its incubators will hold. On his screen, he watched in awe as a few of them broke through their shells. 

“My goal is to relieve Malawi of its tobacco industry and replace it with clean energy, and from there, move on to the rest of Africa or the rest of the world, to the extent that we can,” Tisatayane said. “But I can’t clean up Zambia and other neighboring countries until I clean up Malawi, my backyard.”

After 16 months, three semesters, 44 internships, 26 capstone projects, and countless hours in the classroom and out in the field, the inaugural cohort of UC Berkeley’s M.DevEng program walked across the stage of campus’ Sibley Auditorium in the Bechtel Engineering Center on Saturday to receive the country’s — if not the world’s — first master of development engineering degree. The 44-student Class of 2022 — pioneers of the burgeoning discipline that originated at Berkeley — will leave Blum Hall for careers in social impact, technology, and sustainability or to further their educational careers.

Students and their families, many of whom flew in from around the world, gathered at dusk for an intimate ceremony and reception to celebrate a group hailing from 15 countries and with backgrounds as diverse as education, electrical engineering, finance, and nursing. During their three semesters, the graduates studied a multidisciplinary curriculum focused on design and management of technology, application of emerging technologies, evidence-based assessment techniques, economic development, social problem solving, cross-cultural collaboration, and community engagement. From their first class, they’ve been devising and implementing technological solutions to complex societal challenges in low-resource settings.

“Regardless of the path each one of us is taking, we all agree the world would be a better place if we all put our efforts together,” said student speaker Mathews Sapemba Tisatayane, who took the stage to raucous cheers from his peers.

He began by asking the room to take a deep, collective breath. That breath, he pointed out, is an interaction of, and made possible by, all sorts of elements, from air molecules to lung cells, tissues to organs. “Although all these cells are different in some ways, by working altogether they maintain life as we know it,” he reminded us.

If togetherness is so vital to making the world work, why, he asked, is modern society so resistant to working together to solve climate change and poverty? We’ve been taught to work as individuals and to think of our divisions as almost natural, he said. “But it’s not. I came to UC Berkeley to find minds who could help me challenge these divisions. And I’m happy to tell you I found them,” he said, gesturing to his erstwhile classmates in the front rows. “They’re right here. Through different interactions with each other, faculty, and capstone projects, we researched and found our differences are what bring us closer.” 

Tisatayane turned to Nelson Mandela for how the cohort could turn its togetherness into action: “‘Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity. It is an act of justice,’” he quoted. “‘Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is manmade. And it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. … Sometimes it falls on a generation to be great. And you can be that generation.’” 

“Let us be great. Let us be that generation that Nelson Mandela was talking about,” Tisatayane added. “Let our greatness blossom together. Let’s go out in the world to do actions to positively impact the planet and the lives of those living in poverty. In togetherness, we believe.”

Tisatayane cited his own capstone project as a product of togetherness. It was a reincarnation of an unsuccessful attempt at sustainable development in Malawi, where he was born and raised. He had teamed up with Sean Mandell, a Haas School of Business student he had met in his first DevEng class, to found Umodzi — “togetherness” in Tisatayane’s native language, Chichewa — which allows women-led co-ops in Malawi to raise quail in a 100-percent sustainable, self-contained system. His classmates’ capstone projects included a business for seamstresses in rural Ghana to sell their high-quality wares, a toilet that recycles the nitrogen from urine to use in fertilizer, advancing an initiative to bring arsenic-safe drinking water to rural cities in California, and a blockchain-certified recruiting platform enabling Nigerian students to close the gap between job seekers and employers.

“What you’ve done with your projects is remarkable,” said DevEng and Energy and Resources Group Prof. Dan Kammen in a recorded message to graduates. “You’ve launched this program with your passion and all the projects you’ve done.”

Civil and Environmental Engineering Prof. Maya Carrasquillo, the newest member of the Graduate Group in Development Engineering, which offers the M.DevEng, gave the commencement address.

“When I learned that this was the first cohort — the first cohort — for the Master of Development Engineering, I felt myself awestricken,” she said.

“You have become the precedent for what this program can and will become: a program marked by educating and equipping changemakers to develop innovative global solutions. What a powerful vision, and each of you embodies that so much,” Carrasquillo said. “It takes a certain kind of individual to step out into unproven, untested grounds. … You’re the ones who dare to do something different, in pursuit of something greater than yourselves. You are the ones not motivated by titles or prestige but by an inner voice that reminds you there has to be more than the way things have always been.”

Carrasquillo offered reflections shared at a book-tour event she attended for former First Lady Michelle Obama’s The Light We Carry: “To treat yourself and others with gladness.” 

“In a world and in a profession where we are constantly striving to do good, it is all too easy to forget to be good,” she said. “And more than just being good — being kind — and even then, it is far too often that we are kind to others and less kind to ourselves. As you all go out to do all the amazing, undoubtedly life-changing things that you have been prepared to do in this world, never forget to greet yourself and others with gladness.” 

Early in the ceremony, the M.DevEng program honored retiring Prof. Alice Agogino for her years of service in developing and guiding Berkeley’s DevEng programs, in which she chairs the Graduate Group in Development Engineering, serves as the Blum Center for Developing Economies’ education director, leads the M.DevEng’s Sustainable Design Innovations concentration, led DevEng seminars, mentored many students, and held innumerable office hours with both enrolled students and prospective ones. Director of DevEng Programs Yael Perez presented Agogino with a scrapbook of photos and messages from the DevEng community, and Kammen highlighted her career of developing opportunities for students, faculty, and others to collaborate across disciplines and focus their STEM work on social impact. “What an honor and pleasure to work with you,” he said.

Bioengineering professor and Blum Center faculty director Dan Fletcher closed out the ceremony by noting how clearly the commencement showcased the tight-knit and supportive community the graduates had formed over their three semesters. Each grad walked across the stage to not just a reading of a self-written, third-person statement detailing their accomplishments, but to the cheers of their fellows. 

Though classes are over, Fletcher said, “the connections among you continue.” He called out how fitting it was to conclude the students’ recognition with the ending of the final student’s statement: “And she loves you all very much.”

By Alisha Dalvi

When the pandemic forced Kristi Andono to move back home to Jakarta from Los Angeles during her undergraduate education, she was able to turn adversity into opportunity and take on a brand new role — the head of the Corporate Social Responsibility team for the Indonesian Energy Corporation. As she balanced taking classes online to fulfill her real estate and architecture degree, she was simultaneously designing shelters for victims of gender-based violence in remote villages, renovations for disintegrating orphanages, and infrastructure for water accessibility. “Growing up in Indonesia has exposed me to degrading environmental conditions and its constant battle with economic growth, where one has to be sacrificed for the other,” Andono said. Integrating her background with her education, Andono aims to center the environment when creating architecture, from its design process, construction, and operation, to create lasting, sustainable change.

Looking to equip herself with new skills to become a holistic changemaker, Andono applied and was accepted to UC Berkeley’s Master of Developmental Engineering program, housed at the Blum Center. This three-semester professional degree is a new program that attracts students across various fields, from business to engineering to economics, to develop technological advancements that address the needs of low-resource communities across the world.

Andono and 32 other students in the new cohort — the program’s second ever — attended the masked-up M.DevEng orientation on August 23. Through an interactive presentation, students gained insight into UC Berkeley as well as the program specifically. Afterward, students had the chance to mingle and meet for the first time, get to know M.DevEng staff, and go on a tour of Blum Hall — their new home for the next 15 months. This cohort is only the second in history, making them pioneers in the discipline and a fundamental group to shape the future of the program and the field.

“The M.DevEng program is the shining star of educational activities at the Blum Center,” said Dan Fletcher, the center’s faculty director. “It is about finding creative people with initiative, who support each other, bringing them together, and tackling real problems.” Students of the new cohort will take three semesters of development engineering classes as well as elective classes focused on their concentration area, along with one summer internship in between. But the development engineering classes don’t follow one discipline; rather they center around “research and practice that combines the principle of engineering with economics, entrepreneurship, design, business, and policy,” said Yael Perez, the director of Development Engineering programs.

That multidisciplinary element is essential to the program. During the orientation presentation, students were asked one word to describe developmental engineering. “Interdisciplinary” was the most common, appearing the largest on the computer-generated word cloud. The integrative approach of the program is especially important for Ash Seth, a product designer from Dubai who pursued a mechanical engineering undergraduate degree at Stanford University and who values the intersection of technology and social impact. As a designer herself, she has prototyped and tested affordable greenhouses for hundreds of smallholder farmers in India. But, as a strategist for an urban design nonprofit, Seth also understands the significance of dialogue across numerous disciplines, from scientists to policy specialists.

Diane Kabanyana, a business and economics major from Rwanda, is not only excited to learn from her peers through their previous academic endeavors, but from the various countries and backgrounds they come from as well. “I’ve only been here a week, but Berkeley is so diverse!” Kabanyana said. “I live at International House and it seems like every country is represented.”

The new M.DevEng cohort itself is composed of students from over 10 different countries. But being an international student is certainly not a prerequisite. Rachel Dersch is an energy engineer from Michigan. While Dersch has developed solar power projects in Peru and Tanzania, both still up and running today, she also found the need for energy consumption reduction in her own community. By spearheading pilot programs and technology demonstrations, Dersch has been able to work to reduce energy waste in Michigan. When looking to further her education in humanitarian engineering, Dersch found that development engineering is not just a new curriculum, but a new concept in colleges all together. The M.DevEng stuck out as one of the few existing programs that was truly targeted at creating impact in low-income communities. And it didn’t hurt that it’s offered at the top public university in the nation.

Yet for all the diversity in the cohort’s educational and cultural backgrounds, one statement seemed to unite them all: “The food in Berkeley is so good!”

With students already raving about Boichik Bagels, just a few blocks away from campus, and local coffee shops, the new cohort seems to know where to fuel up before tackling projects which will make a meaningful and measurable impact on low-resource communities across the world.