Stanford University

HIV Development Assistance and Adult Mortality in Africa

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Context  The effect of global health initiatives on population health is uncertain. Between 2003 and 2008, the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the largest initiative ever devoted to a single disease, operated intensively in 12 African focus countries. The initiative's effect on all-cause adult mortality is unknown.

Objective  To determine whether PEPFAR was associated with relative changes in adult mortality in the countries and districts where it operated most intensively.

Design, Setting, and Participants  Using person-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys, we conducted cross-country and within-country analyses of adult mortality (annual probability of death per 1000 adults between 15 and 59 years old) and PEPFAR's activities. Across countries, we compared adult mortality in 9 African focus countries (Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia) with 18 African nonfocus countries from 1998 to 2008. We performed subnational analyses using information on PEPFAR's programmatic intensity in Tanzania and Rwanda. We employed difference-in-difference analyses with fixed effects for countries and years as well as personal and time-varying area characteristics.

Main Outcome Measure  Adult all-cause mortality.

Results  We analyzed information on 1 538 612 adults, including 60 303 deaths, from 41 surveys in 27 countries, 9 of them focus countries. In 2003, age-adjusted adult mortality was 8.3 per 1000 adults in the focus countries (95% CI, 8.0-8.6) and 8.5 per 1000 adults (95% CI, 8.3-8.7) in the nonfocus countries. In 2008, mortality was 4.1 per 1000 (95% CI, 3.6-4.6) in the focus countries and 6.9 per 1000 (95% CI, 6.3-7.5) in the nonfocus countries. The adjusted odds ratio of mortality among adults living in focus countries compared with nonfocus countries between 2004 and 2008 was 0.84 (95% CI, 0.72-0.99; P = .03). Within Tanzania and Rwanda, the adjusted odds ratio of mortality for adults living in districts where PEPFAR operated more intensively was 0.83 (95% CI, 0.72-0.97; P = .02) and 0.75 (95% CI, 0.56-0.99; P = .04), respectively, compared with districts where it operated less intensively.

Conclusions  Between 2004 and 2008, all-cause adult mortality declined more in PEPFAR focus countries relative to nonfocus countries. It was not possible to determine whether PEPFAR was associated with mortality effects separate from reductions in HIV-specific deaths.

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Journal of the American Medical Association
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Eran Bendavid
Grant Miller

Freshwater availability and water fetching distance affect child health in sub-Saharan Africa

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Currently, more than two-thirds of the population in Africa must leave their home to fetch water for drinking and domestic use. The time burden of water fetching has been suggested to influence the volume of water collected by households as well as time spent on income generating activities and child care. However, little is known about the potential health benefits of reducing water fetching distances. Data from almost 200 000 Demographic and Health Surveys carried out in 26 countries were used to assess the relationship between household walk time to water source and child health outcomes. To estimate the causal effect of decreased water fetching time on health, geographic variation in freshwater availability was employed as an instrumental variable for one-way walk time to water source in a two-stage regression model. Time spent walking to a household’s main water source was found to be a significant determinant of under-five child health. A 15-min decrease in one-way walk time to water source is associated with a 41% average relative reduction in diarrhea prevalence, improved anthropometric indicators of child nutritional status, and a 11% relative reduction in under-five child mortality. These results suggest that reducing the time cost of fetching water should be a priority for water infrastructure investments in Africa.

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Environmental Science and Technology
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Jenna Davis
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Ensuring Hardware Cybersecurity

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Despite the enormous amount of attention that has been directed to software security in recent years, relatively little attention has been given to hardware security. More than ever, the devices that are critical to everyday life and to the larger infrastructure are dependent on increasingly sophisticated integrated circuits (ICs). As the complexity and size of these ICs continue to grow, so does the risk of “Trojan” attacks, in which malicious circuitry is hidden within a chip during the design and manufacturing process. The circuitry could be triggered to launch an attack months or years later, with very significant consequences if carried out on a large scale. This presentation will explain the increasingly global nature of the semiconductor industry, and identify technology and policy steps that can be taken to minimize the likelihood of a successful, large-scale, hardware-based cyberattack.

John Villasenor is a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles and a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies and the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. His work addresses the intersection of technology, policy and the law . He holds a B.S. degree from the University of Virginia, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University, all in electrical engineering.

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John Villasenor Professor of Electrical Engineering, UCLA and Nonresident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution Speaker
Seminars

The Historical Dimensions of South Africa's Nuclear Weapons Program

A three-day conference in Pretoria, South Africa, to discuss the historical dimensions of South Africa's nuclear weapons program. CISAC was strongly represented at the event. Hosted by Monash University, Australia. 

The conference presentation, "The Vela Event of 1979 (Or The Israeli Nuclear Test of 1979)" by CISAC Affiliate Leonard Weiss, is available for download below. 

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David Holloway

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E214
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 723-1737 (650) 723-0089
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Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies
Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History
0820stanford-davidholloway-238-edit.jpg PhD

David Holloway is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor of International History, a professor of political science, and an FSI senior fellow. He was co-director of CISAC from 1991 to 1997, and director of FSI from 1998 to 2003. His research focuses on the international history of nuclear weapons, on science and technology in the Soviet Union, and on the relationship between international history and international relations theory. His book Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (Yale University Press, 1994) was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 11 best books of 1994, and it won the Vucinich and Shulman prizes of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. It has been translated into seven languages, most recently into Chinese. The Chinese translation is due to be published later in 2018. Holloway also wrote The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (1983) and co-authored The Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative: Technical, Political and Arms Control Assessment (1984). He has contributed to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Foreign Affairs, and other scholarly journals.

Since joining the Stanford faculty in 1986 -- first as a professor of political science and later (in 1996) as a professor of history as well -- Holloway has served as chair and co-chair of the International Relations Program (1989-1991), and as associate dean in the School of Humanities and Sciences (1997-1998). Before coming to Stanford, he taught at the University of Lancaster (1967-1970) and the University of Edinburgh (1970-1986). Born in Dublin, Ireland, he received his undergraduate degree in modern languages and literature, and his PhD in social and political sciences, both from Cambridge University.

Faculty member at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law
Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
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Leonard Weiss

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Leonard Weiss is a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). He is also a national advisory board member of the Center for Arms control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, DC. He began his professional career as a PhD researcher in mathematical system theory at the Research Institute for Advanced Studies in Baltimore. This was followed by tenured professorships in applied mathematics and electrical engineering at Brown University and the University of Maryland. During this period he published widely in the applied mathematics literature. In 1976 he received a Congressional Science Fellowship that resulted in a career change. For more than two decades he worked for Senator John Glenn as the staff director of both the Senate Subcommittee on Energy and Nuclear Proliferation and the Committee on Governmental Affairs. He was the chief architect of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978 and legislation that created the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board. In addition, he led notable investigations of the nuclear programs of India and Pakistan. Since retiring from the Senate staff in 1999, he has published numerous articles on nonproliferation issues for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Arms Control Today, and the Nonproliferation Review. His current research interests include an assessment of the impact on the nonproliferation regime of nuclear trade with non-signers of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and more generally the relationship of energy security concerns with nonproliferation.

For a comprehensive list of Dr. Weiss's publications, click here.

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Leonard Weiss Panelist
Frank Pabian Panelist
Conferences

Delivering Justice to the Poor: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Liberia

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Abstract: 

CDDRL post-doctoral fellow Bilal Siddiqi will address the question of whether progressive, statutory legal reform can meaningfully affect the lives of the poor, using observational and experimental evidence from Liberia in a new study co-authored with Justin Sandefur at the Center for Global Development. The authors develop a simple model of forum choice and test it using new survey data on over 4,500 legal disputes taken to a range of customary and formal legal institutions in rural Liberia. Their results suggest that the poor would benefit most from access to low-cost, remedial justice that incorporates the progressive features of the formal law. They then present the results of a randomized controlled trial of a legal empowerment intervention in Liberia providing pro bono mediation and advocacy services, using community paralegals trained in the formal law. The authors find strong and robust impacts on justice outcomes, as well as significant downstream welfare benefits—including increases in household and child food security of 0.24 and 0.38 standard deviations, respectively. They interpret these results as preliminary evidence that there are large socioeconomic gains to be had from improving access to justice, not by bringing the rural poor into the formal domain of magistrates’ courts, government offices, and police stations, but by bringing the formal law into the organizational forms of the custom through third-party mediation and advocacy.

About the Speaker: 

Bilal Siddiqi is a postdoctoral scholar affiliated with the Empirical Studies of Conflict project (esoc.princeton.edu). His research focuses on micro-institutions, formal and informal legal systems, peace-building and state accountability in post-conflict settings. He is currently involved in several field experiments in Sierra Leone and Liberia, including a randomized controlled trial of two non-financial incentive mechanisms in Sierra Leone’s public health sector; experimental evaluations of community-based paralegal programs in Liberia and Sierra Leone; and a randomized controlled trial of a community reconciliation program in Sierra Leone. 

Bilal received his Ph.D. and M.Phil. in economics from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to Stanford, he was based at the Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) at Stockholm as a Marie Curie / AMID Scholar; and has also spent time at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, where he worked on aid effectiveness in global health. He holds a B.Sc. (Hons) from the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan.

 

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Bilal Siddiqi

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow (ESOC Project)
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Bilal Siddiqi is a postdoctoral scholar affiliated with the Empirical Studies of Conflict project (esoc.princeton.edu). His research focuses on micro-institutions, formal and informal legal systems, peace-building and state accountability in post-conflict settings. He is currently involved in several field experiments in Sierra Leone and Liberia, including a randomized controlled trial of two non-financial incentive mechanisms in Sierra Leone’s public health sector; experimental evaluations of community-based paralegal programs in Liberia and Sierra Leone; and a randomized controlled trial of a community reconciliation program in Sierra Leone.

Bilal received his Ph.D. and M.Phil. in economics from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to Stanford, he was based at the Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) at Stockholm as a Marie Curie / AMID Scholar; and has also spent time at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, where he worked on aid effectiveness in global health. He holds a B.Sc. (Hons) from the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan.

Bilal Siddiqi Post-doctoral fellow Speaker CDDRL
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ICC Speaker Series- Shamila Batohi

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Ms. Shamila Batohi is Senior Legal Advisor to the Prosecutor at the ICC, and former Director of Public Prosecutions in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. In 1995, Ms. Batohi was part of a multi-disciplinary team mandated by President Mandela to investigate hit squad activities in the police during the apartheid years. As head of the Directorate of Special Operations, the unit that is better known as the ‘Scorpions’, Batohi was tasked with investigating serious organized crime. Famously, in 2000, Batohi was appointed to lead evidence in the King Commission hearings to investigate cricket match-fixing allegations involving Hansie Cronje.

Bechtel Conference Center

Shamila Batohi Senior Legal Advisor Speaker Office of the Prosecutor, ICC
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Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Series on the International Criminal Court
Program on Human Rights

ICC Speaker Series- Carla Ferstman

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Carla Ferstman is Director of REDRESS. She is currently on sabbatical leave and is a Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow 2012-2013 at the United States Institute of Peace. She joined REDRESS in 2001 as its Legal Director and became its Director in 2005. She was called to the Bar in British Columbia, Canada where she practiced as a criminal law barrister. She has also worked with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on legal reform and capacity building in post-genocide Rwanda, with Amnesty International's International Secretariat as a legal researcher on trials in Central Africa and as Executive Legal Advisor to Bosnia and Herzegovina's Commission for Real Property Claims of Displaced Persons and Refugees (CRPC). She has an LL.B. from the University of British Columbia, an LL.M. from New York University and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford. Ms. Ferstman has published and is a regular commentator on victims' rights, the International Criminal Court and the prohibition against torture.

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Carla Ferstman Director Speaker REDRESS -- Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow 2012-13 at United States Institute of Peace
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Sanela Diana Jenkins Human Rights Series on the International Criminal Court
Program on Human Rights

Electoral Integrity, Violence and Vote-Buying

This two day workshop will bring together scholars whose research actively engages problems of electoral irregularities.  Irregularities range from high levels of pre-election violence to electoral fraud to vote-buying and patronage. All these tactics potentially affect the outcomes of elections and all disempower citizens in their attempts to have their voices heard in the polity. On the whole, scholars who have concentrated on understanding patronage and clientelism have not interacted with those working on electoral fraud, and neither group has talked at great length to those expert in electoral violence. This workshop will bring together scholars with specific expertise in each of these topics in order to establish a new dialogue across expertise. 

 

Agenda (subject to change):

Day One: April 12, 2013

8:30-9:00 am Breakfast

9:00-9:10 am—Welcoming Remarks Beatriz Magaloni, Stanford University; Miriam Golden, UCLA

9:10-10:30 am—Panel 1: Electoral Fraud, Integrity, and Violence (1)

  • Karen Ferree, UCSD: “Violating the Secret Ballot: The Political Logic of Fraud in Ghana’s 2008 Elections”
  • James Long, Harvard University: “Scalable Information and Communications Technology Reduces Electoral Fraud in Fragile Democracies”
  • Discussant: Miriam Golden, UCLA

10:30-10:45 am Break

10:45-12:10 pm—Panel 2: Electoral Fraud, Integrity, and Violence (2) 

  • Isabela Mares, Columbia University: “The supply of electoral intimidation: Evidence from Imperial Germany”
  • Eric Kramon and Miriam Golden: “Electoral Violence and Fraud in the 2012 Ghanaian Elections: Polling Station Results”
  • Discussant: James Fearon, Stanford University 

12:10-2:00 pm Lunch

2:00-3:25 pm—Panel 3: Electoral Fraud, Integrity, and Violence (3)

  • George Ofosu, UCLA: “Transitional Multiparty Elections: Do Military Regimes Perform Better at Promoting Fair Elections?”
  • Joseph Asunka, UCLA: “Electoral investment through formal institutions”
  • Discussant: Beatriz Magaloni, Stanford University

3:25-3:40 pm Break

3:40-5:00 pm—Panel 4: Clientelism 

  • Mike Callen, UCSD, and Saad Gulzar, NYU: “Clientelism and Health Worker Absence: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Pakistan”
  • Nahomi Ichino, Harvard: “Crossing the Line: Local Ethnic Geography and Voting in Ghana”
  • Discussant: Barbara Geddes

Day Two: April 13, 2013

9:00-9:30 am Breakfast

9:30-11:00 am—Panel 5: Clientelism and Vote Buying 

  • Sarah Brierley, UCLA: “Buying votes or buying time? Gift giving as an extension of the political party network in Ghana”
  • Simeon Nichter, UCSD: “Voter Buying: Shaping the Electorate through Clientelism”
  • Discussant: Fred Finan, University of California, Berkeley 

11:00-11:15 am Break

11:15-11:45 am—Concluding Session and Discussion

 

 

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Beatriz Magaloni

Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA

(650) 724-5949
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
beatriz_magaloni_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.

Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.

Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.

Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.

She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

Director, Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
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Miriam Golden Moderator UCLA
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Finding common threads in global water crises

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What does drought in Kansas have to do with underutilized groundwater in sub-Saharan Africa? Potentially a lot, according to a new study by researchers with the Global Freshwater Initiative (GFI), a program of the Stanford Woods Institute. The study, co-authored by FSE senior fellow Scott Rozelle, is the first to systematically analyze and classify water crises around the world. It finds that water systems have a limited set of patterns or "syndromes" which can be classified into one of four categories: unsustainability, vulnerability, chronic scarcity or adaptation. These syndromes have their root causes in just a few factors that influence demand, supply, infrastructure and governance - a finding that challenges long-held views that freshwater issues require highly individualized solutions.
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