Howard White, International Initiative for Impact Evaluation

About the speaker: Howard White is the Executive Director of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), co-chair of the Campbell International Development Coordinating Group and Adjunct Professor at the Alfred Deakin Research Institute, Deakin University. His previous experience includes leading the impact evaluation program of the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group and before that, several multi-country evaluations. Other experience includes leading large projects like the World Bank published report African Poverty at the Millennium, and developing the overall direction of poverty training for 2,000 DFID staff at country offices around the world. 

Abstract

The overflow of information generated during disasters can be as paralyzing to humanitarian response as the lack of information. Making sense of this flash flood of information, "Big Data", is proving an impossible challenge for traditional humanitarian organizations; so they’re turning to Digital Humanitarians: tech-savvy volunteers who craft and leverage ingenious crowdsourcing solutions with trail-blazing insights from artificial intelligence. Digital Humanitarians take online collective action to the next level—particularly when spearheading relief efforts in countries ruled by dictatorships. This talk charts the rise of Digital Humanitarians and concludes with their collective action in repressive contexts.

Speaker Bio

Patrick Meier is the author of the book " Digital Humnitarians: How Big Data is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response." He directs QCRI's Social Innovation Program where he & his team use human and machine computing to develop "Next Generation Humanitarian Technologies" in partnership with international humanitarian organizations. Patrick was previously with Ushahidi and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. He has a PhD from The Fletcher School, Pre-Doc from Stanford and an MA from Columbia. His influential blog iRevolutions has received over 1.5 million hits. Patrick tweets at @patrickmeier.

The final class will pose nine questions, each question digging into
each of the nine topics covered over the quarter.  Pizza at 6pm!

*Please note that the seminar begins with a reception at 4:00pm where you can meet and talk with Mr. Githongo, followed by a lecture at 5:00pm in Paul Brest Hall at Stanford University.*

Speaker Bio: 

John Githongo

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This event is co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. 

Abstract: 

What explains the variation in legislative strength in African states since the early 1990s? Strong legislatures are central to democratic consolidation and the emergence of limited representative government. Yet we know very little about contemporary legislative development, especially among countries that democratized over the last two decades. With novel data and qualitative analysis from sub-Saharan Africa, this paper investigates the sources of observed variation in legislative strength and capacity in Africa, and the policy implications of varying levels of legislative institutionalization. The findings show that strong states with elite party systems produce strong legislatures. These findings highlight the tension between political institutionalization and populist democratic representative government. The paper concludes with policy recommendations for ongoing legislative strengthening programs around the world.  

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Speaker Bio:

Ken Opalo is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. His research interests include the political economy of institutional development, natural resource management, elections and governance. His dissertation explains the observed variation in political strength, organizational capacity and general levels of institutionalization of African legislatures since 1990. Ken argues that strategies of political domination employed by ruling elites during the period of one party rule explain much of the variation in legislative development in Africa. Specifically, countries that had strong mass parties (as opposed to elite parties) were more likely to have weaker parliaments after the re-introduction of multiparty politics. In his research, Ken uses a mixed methods approach – including detailed case studies of Kenya and Zambia; a regression discontinuity design; and natural experiments to identify the causal mechanisms implied by his theory of endogenous institutional change.

Ken has done research and/or visited 10 different African countries in Eastern, West and Southern Africa. He is a former research consultant with the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy, and Security, a project of the Kofi Annan Foundation. Ken is currently a short-term consultant with the World Bank on the political economy of regional infrastructure development in East and West Africa. He maintains a blog at www.kenopalo.com and has written for and/or appeared on the BBC, Al Jazeera, the African Development Bank, and Foreign Policy Magazine.

This event has been cancelled. We will update our website once the new date has been determined.