The Program on Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law seeks to actively integrate the on-the-ground experience of social entrepreneurs from around the world with cutting-edge academic research at Stanford University. Building a tangible bridge between academia and practice, the Program exposes students to new models of social change through innovative courses and provides practitioners the opportunity to build their individual and personal capacities as social change leaders.

Human trafficking is a global phenomenon that each year forces millions into lives as prostitutes, laborers, child soldiers, and domestic servants. Traffickers prey on the weak and vulnerable, targeting young victims with promises of a better life. This modern form of slavery impacts every continent and type of economy, while the industry continues to grow with global profits reaching nearly $32 billion annually. In spite of these mounting figures, prosecution and conviction rates are not increasing relative to the surge in these crimes. According to the U.S. State Department, for every 800 people trafficked in 2006, only one person was convicted.

As the size and scope of human trafficking increase, less is known about the root causes of human trafficking on this new scale. A better understanding of the conditions that give rise to human trafficking – income inequality, rural poor populations, cultural norms, and gender disparities – will bring the international community closer to curbing the growth of this criminal industry. Understanding how multi-lateral institutions – from the World Bank to the United Nations – may unwittingly encourage the industry will lead to more informed policies for its eradication.

The Program on Human Rights (PHR) at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law is launching a new research initiative on human trafficking to address these challenges and generate new knowledge on this issue of international concern. Working in collaboration with Stanford faculty and students, this project will draw on research underway across the university to create a forum on human trafficking. The goal is to produce collaborative research and policy recommendations to better address the multiple dimensions of human trafficking.

"This research collaborative will shift the agenda on human trafficking from one that has adopted a criminal-legal paradigm to one that focuses on all the pre-conditions for trafficking," said Helen Stacy, director of the Program on Human Rights. "Interdisciplinary tools drawing on law, health, gender, and psychology will introduce an integrated approach to this critical area of study."

The speaker series will begin Dec. 12 at a private research workshop featuring Madeleine Rees, the United Nation's representative in post-genocide Bosnia, and Laryssa Kondracki, director of The Whistleblower. Rees is known for her efforts to expose the U.N. for its failure to shut down brothels in Bosnia where they were actively used for human trafficking. The Whistleblower documents this story and helped ignite a debate at the U.N. over this problem.

The Dec. 12 workshop will bring together a multidisciplinary group of Stanford faculty, researchers, and students working on aspects of human trafficking in preparation for the launch of the 2012 speakers series offered in the winter quarter. The 2012 roster of speakers represent a diverse group of those advancing research, policy and activism on human trafficking.

Participants include: Rosi Orozco, Mexican congressional representative and anti-trafficking leader; Bradley Myles, executive director and CEO of Polaris-USA; and Dr. Mohammed Mattar, executive director of the Protection project at Johns Hopkins Univeristy. Stanford researchers will be paired with speakers to pursue original research on the causal factors impacting this field of study. 

The 2012 Human Trafficking is Global Slavery speakers series is funded by Diana Jenkins, founder of the Sanela Diana Jenkins Foundation for Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The series is free and open to the public. It will meet on Tuesdays from Jan. 10 to Mar. 13 at the Bechtel Conference Center at Encina Hall, Stanford. It is available to Stanford students as a 1-unit course cross-listed under INTNLREL 110, IPS 271, and POLISCI204.

Paul Kim, the assistant dean for technology & CTO at Stanford University's School of Education, led the Nov. 3 Liberation Technology Seminar Series on “Global Inequalities, Achievement Gaps, and Mobile Innovations.” Kim has been reconceptualizing the whole education system, with a particular focus on the education of children in deprived areas.

Kim firmly believes that education, as is expressed in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, is a basic human right that should be available to all children, but the fact is that a large number of children are out of school, and many receive a poor quality of education. In this context, technology could enable the realization of the right to education.

Kim argues that donation of computers in a large scale was the main mode of introducing technology in education, but this model has its problems. Often computers are donated to schools but are not used either because people do not know how to use them or there is no access to electricity. Kim emphasized the importance of creating tools that are simple and likely to work in highly challenging conditions. With this in mind, he has started focusing on the use of mobile phones as a learning tool, given their low power consumption, low cost, ubiquitous availability and increasing capabilities.

He also pointed out that there have been many initiatives such as one laptop per child, where even the distribution of 110,000 in a place like Rwanda has not made a major contribution to educational achievements. He argued that such projects are detached from curriculum, and are focused on technology. In order to be successful, you have to understand the ecosystem, not just particular pieces of technology. You have to understand the value perceptions of everybody in the ecosystem: teachers, parents and students and make sure that all of the values are aligned. Otherwise the project will not succeed.

Kim further suggested that there is often a block at the teacher training stage and that there is a problem of pedagogy. Kim suggested that we should focus more on student centered exploration based learning because if you merely teach, the students switch off. However, if you engage with them, they will be more responsive. He suggested that instead of using words such as ‘teaching’ and ‘students’, we should use words such as ‘coaching’ and ‘agents’ and Kim’s own innovations follow are based on the philosophy of enabling student-led learning with the teachers playing a supportive role.

When using technical devices, Kim argued, it is incredibly important to empower the children themselves to learn how to use them rather than just telling them what to do. Students will express their creativity and extensive knowledge when they are given the opportunity to do so.

This past Thursday, on the 10th of November 2011, former U.N. Secretary-General, Kofi Annan delivered a speech at Stanford University on the occasion of the launch of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies' Center on Food Security and the Environment. Citing UN estimates, more precisely the UNFPA State of the World Population 2011 report, he highlighted that the world population had recently reached seven billion and growing. Advancements in healthcare and technology have increased our life expectancy, affording 'man' the ability to escape a life that is, in Hobbesian parlance, "poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Yet this apparent human success story eclipses the "shameful failure" of the international community to address an indiscernible fact: that in the contemporary technological age, an astonishing number of people in the world go hungry each day. The marriage of a globalized economy and scientific innovation was supposed to - at least in theory - increase and spread wealth and resources to enhance the human condition. And yet today - talks of unfettered markets and the financial crisis aside -, we lay witness to close to one billion people around the world who lack food security (both chronic and transitory). Citing numbers from the World Bank, Annan stated that rapidly rising food prices since 2010 have "pushed an additional 70 million people into extreme poverty". Adding to these disturbing figures is the fact that one of the world's most ravenous culprits of infanticide is no other than hunger, which claims the young lives of 17,000 children every day.

Dwindling incentives to farm and increasing pressures on farmers are not helping the food insecurity crisis. Frequently, companies who contract local farmers to produce cash crops for export do not employ "strategic agricultural planning" or take into account the impact their policies and modus operandi may have on local farming communities and their immediate (food) needs. Artificially low prices for agricultural goods force farmers from their land and discourage investment in the sector, Annan warns. Agricultural subsidies in the US and Europe against farm produce injected into the market by farmers from developing countries have also added to the problem. Agricultural subsidies in Europe in particular have had a devastating impact on farmers from other parts of the world - mostly in Asia and Africa - who simply cannot compete with the existing market conditions and the low price tags attached to their goods. This phenomenon is most acute in Africa where a significant segment of the population lives modestly by working the land and these subsidies are choking the lifeline that feeds their families. To bring home the point of the sheer imbalance between the conditions of Western farmers and the 'rest', Annan stated that with a fraction of the funds generated by a reduction of subsidies, one "can fly every European cow around the world first class and still have money left over". Without a more balanced approach to international trade policy making, subsidies will continue to be a factor in food insecurity.

And it gets worse. The 'Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse' of our times - (i) an ever emerging global water crisis, (ii) land misuse and degradation, (iii) climate change, and (iv) kleptocratic governance - have combined to aggravate an already dire international food insecurity predicament. The hard truth is that without countering the forward gallop of these ills, food insecurity cannot be adequately addressed.

The facts on the ground and projections into the future do not paint a promising picture. Food prices are expected to rise by 50 percent by the year 2050, Annan warns, and this at a time when the world will be home to two billion more inhabitants. In 40 years from now, there simply isn't enough food to nourish and satisfy the world's population.

The growing world food crisis also stifles development. It is the cyclical brutality of poverty that keeps the hungry down. Without the means or access to proper and adequate nutrition, the impoverished who are always the first victims of food insecurity invariably suffer from poor health, in turn resulting in low productivity. This vicious cycle traps the less privileged to a seemingly inescapable downward spiral.

During the course of his poignant remarks, Annan stated that without addressing food insecurity "the result will be mass migration, growing food shortages, loss of social cohesion and even political instability". He is correct on all counts.

The fact is that a world which 'cultivates' and then neglects the hungry is a dangerous and volatile world. Since time immemorial, dramatic human migrations have had a direct correlation with changes in climate, habitat and resource scarcity. Survival instincts are engrained in our genetic make-up. When the most basic and fundamental necessities of life are sparse and hard to come by, our natural inclination is to look for 'greener pastures'. An unaddressed and lingering food insecurity crisis will mean the world will witness significant and rapid migration trends in the 21st century (a phenomenon very much in motion today). The injection of mass flows of people into other foreign populations will cause friction and conflict induced by integration challenges, both social and economic (surmountable, but conflicts no less).

Moreover, the desperation and unmet basic needs of the underprivileged can translate into open outbursts of conflict and violence. Tranquility and social harmony are virtues enjoyed by countries that can provide for their people. Leaving the growing food insecurity dilemma unaddressed will be to invite inevitable political instability and violence in countries and fragile regions of the world grappling with high poverty rates and concomitant food insecurity challenges. More often than not, history has shown a positive nexus between hunger and social upheaval (it bears noting that La Grande Révolution of 1789-99 was preceded by slogans of "Du pain, du pain!"). Further, it does not take too much of a forethought to recognize that it is precisely in environments of destitute and despondency where autocratic rule can easily take root and grow to inflict further suffering.

Food insecurity can also lead to wars, but similarly wars contribute to food insecurity by destroying both the land and the ability to cultivate the land. Conflict represents formidable barriers to the access and availability of otherwise usable land (countries like Somalia, Sudan, Burundi, Ethiopia and Liberia come to mind).

To be sure, "[w]ithout food, people have only three options: they riot, they emigrate or they die" (borrowed from the often cited words of Josette Sheeran, the Executive Director of the UN World Food Program).

How are we to tackle this grave problem in a realistic and effective manner? Annan rightly tells us that the "[l]ack of a collective vision is irresponsible". Implicit in Annan's remarks is also a lack of leadership to effectively tackle and untie the Gordian Knot of food insecurity. The nature and colossal character of food insecurity demands action and cooperation on a global scale. Climate change and its negative impact on the environment - e.g. diminishing arable lands, water resources, recurring drought -, one of the accelerators of food insecurity, requires robust and committed international agreement and action to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Strict adherence and compliance with the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Accord are a must in this regard. With strategic agricultural planning, knowledge transfer and investment, uncultivated arable lands - abundant in many parts of the world, including in Africa - can become productive and bear fruit, reducing in turn the hunger crisis. Efforts to implement more balanced international trade policies which make farming viable across continents as well as efforts to eradicate corruption (by promoting good governance) are also part and parcel of the fight against hunger. So are innovative ways of thinking about establishing, say rapid response mechanisms to preempt and effectively counter famine and other food emergencies by bolstering the capacities of relevant existing international and regional organizations. We could also reduce the threat of hunger by doing more than just pay lip-serve to the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and uphold our commitments to the MDGs through sustained funding and support.

The UN and other multilateral bodies and pacts are tools we have created to work collaboratively - as best as human frailties permit - to confront global challenges and ills that threaten the social fabric of human society (whether they be food insecurity, dearth in development, war and the crimes that emanate from aggression which threaten peace and security, inter alia). Our capacity to reason, innovate, communicate and cooperate is hence an indispensible tool in our struggle to keep the peace, to protect our fundamental human rights and to satisfy our most basic needs for survival. It's time to put these faculties to work in confronting the world's food security challenges.

It is only fitting to conclude these brief remarks by quoting from the man and the lecture that inspired them. "If we pool our efforts and resources we can finally break the back of this problem", stated Annan in his call for action to defeat food insecurity. If there's a will, history tells us, change is within grasp, no matter how daunting the task. It only takes the trinity of courage, commitment and leadership.

Sam Gregory, program director at WITNESS
 and Bryan Nunez, technology manager at Witness, delivered the Oct. 27 Liberation Technology seminar entitled, “Cameras Everywhere: Meeting the Challenges at the intersection of Human Rights, Video and Technology.” The speakers discussed WITNESS’ agenda to harness the power of video cameras in bringing out human rights issues into public attention. The speakers shared their story of working with human rights activists on using videos to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change.

Gregory and Nunez discussed the strategic use of video in human rights work and their engagement with activists around the world on this subject. They suggested that there are various protagonists that play an important role as witnesses: from those who are unexpected to those who are more purposeful. In order to understand the impact of videos, it is important to go beyond those who make the videos and also consider the role of aggregators and curators, as they provide a valuable role in the process of ‘witnessing’.

They discussed different ways of capturing information through videos while taking into account security and ethical issues, and the challenges in making videos more usable especially when their production is decentralized. Other challenges they identified include: too much that is competing for our attention; the problem of privacy and of verification. Notwithstanding the challenges, they have had success over the years, and they argued, “We’ve witnessed brave people of all ages coming together to effect a profound change in their country.”

Some specific recommendations were made, including: supporting curation of human rights videos, facilitating user education and understanding of human rights issues. They suggested that it is important to have autonomous sites and options for people for hosting content. In particular, it is essential to look at resources that are not controlled by governments.