Stanford University

Grants support research on health care, violence and technology in poorest areas

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More than 500,000 people live in Mathare, the second-largest collection of slums in Nairobi, Kenya. Crime and disease ravage the population, and shanties have no electricity or running water. But there’s one piece of technology that everyone seems to have, one which promises to bring much-needed improvements: the cell phone.

Cell phones are central to two of the eight most recent Global Underdevelopment Action Fund projects funded by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Both projects will be led by Joshua Cohen, a professor of political science, philosophy and law and the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society.

The first of Cohen’s projects will examine whether texting private and accurate health advice will increase awareness of risky sexual behavior among Mathare’s younger residents who face high rates of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Cohen's second project involves teaching women to use mobile technology to meet up with larger groups while traveling at night, which Cohen believes can led to a decrease in the number of assaults, muggings and rapes. Eventually, the hope is that the program can be taken over by Kenya’s police and expanded.

 Cell phone charging station in Mathare

Six other projects are receiving support from the third round of Global Underdevelopment Action Fund awards, amounting to a total of $265,000.

The funds will enable multidisciplinary teams led by Stanford faculty from across the university to perform policy-relevant research focused on global underdevelopment challenges.

The funded projects will have real world impact. They will help target tuberculosis, which kills more than 1 million people a year and hinders economic development in the hardest-hit regions, like parts of India. They evaluate the amount of resources necessary to improve test scores and lower anemia rates among China’s rural schoolchildren. They ensure that health care is accessible to people in the Arab world where countries are undergoing political transitions. And they evaluate the challenges and benefits of bringing solar power to areas in Africa where electricity is a rare commodity.

As varied as the eight projects are, each will train Stanford undergraduate or graduate students, stressing the importance that Stanford and FSI place on training the next generation of researchers and policy influencers.

The projects were selected by a faculty committee chaired by Stephen D. Krasner, FSI’s deputy director and the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations.

The Action Fund is supported by FSI donors, matching funds from the Office of the President and FSI. The fund grew out of the institute’s 2010 conference on Technology, Governance, and Global Development. This year’s follow-up conference further showcased FSI’s commitment to challenges posed by global underdevelopment with a focus on food security and health.

The award-winning projects and their principal investigators are:

  • Texting for Sexual Health: Effects of Information Provision and Common Knowledge on Health-Seeking Behavior in Kenya
    Joshua Cohen
    In hopes of increasing awareness that could minimize sexual health risks, the team will promote a mobile health counseling service, which will enable young people in Nairobi’s Mathare slums to receive private and reliable answers from health counselors through text messaging.
  • Can Mobile Phones Coordinate Community Action to Improve Women’s Safety in Slums?
    Joshua Cohen
    The program uses mobile technology to measure whether the number of assaults on women will decrease if they travel in groups. The project will evaluate whether this “safety in numbers” program can be taken over by Kenyan police.
  • Crime, Violence and Governance in Latin America: Sharing Data and Building a Web-Based Research Network to Expand Knowledge
    Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar
    This project will build a systematically organized repository of research on crime, violence and citizen security in Latin America.
  • Tuberculosis Control and its Benefits to the Rural Poor
    Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert
    This study will determine the impact of improved TB control effects in India, which accounts for 20 percent of global TB incidence, and project economic outcomes from India’s TB epidemic over the next decade.
  • Paying for Performance to Improve Health in Rural China: Does Resource Scarcity Breed Innovation in Service Delivery?
    Grant Miller
    This study will evaluate whether large subsidies are necessary for improving social situations like lowering anemia rates or improving test scores.
  • Health and Political Reform in the Arab World
    Paul H. Wise
    Partnering with The Lancet journal and the American University of Beirut, the team will produce a series of articles on war, social change and health in the Arab world with a goal of improving health care in countries undergoing political transition.
  • Solar Lighting and Phone Charging in East Africa: Understanding Adoption, Business Models and Development Outcomes
    Frank Wolak
    This project will analyze new solar businesses in East Africa. Electricity is central to industry, health services and education, yet 1.5 billion people worldwide lack access. Recently, low-power solar energy sources in homes have appeared as viable options.
  • Understanding the Current Status of Medical Technology in Rural China
    Paul Yock
    This study will evaluate the use of medical technology in rural China in order to establish a baseline for future work and establish partnerships. The long-term goal is an analytical framework within which to understand the role of medical technology in Chinese health care.
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Cimate Change and Agricultural Adaptation

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This paper was prepared for Stanford University’s Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series, hosted by the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Food policy makers are increasingly faced with the question of how to adapt to climate change. The increased attention on climate adaptation is partly related to the fact that greenhouse gas emissions and climate change show little sign of slowing, partly because of prospects for large sums of money devoted to adaptation, and partly because of well publicized recent weather events that have affected agricultural regions and rattled global food markets. A common and reasonable reaction from the food policy and agricultural community has been to argue that climate variations have always been a challenge to agriculture, and that climate change just makes addressing these variations more important. A logical conclusion from this perspective is to emphasize activities that help build resilience to unpredictable weather events, as well as to focus on the types of weather variables that exhibit a lot of year-to-year variability and cause the bulk of farmers’ concerns in current climate.

However reasonable as a starting point, this perspective is misguided and risks taking a challenging problem and making it even harder. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is fundamentally different from the natural variations driven by internal dynamics in the climate system. Indeed, predicting the course of climate change is less like predicting the weather next week than it is like predicting that summer will be warmer than winter. Progress in climate science has shown that the most indelible hallmarks of AGW will be increased occurrence and severity of high temperature and heavy rainfall extremes in all regions, and increased frequency and severity of drought in sub-tropical regions. Changes in the timing and amount of seasonal rainfall also appear likely in some regions, but at a much smaller pace relative to natural variability. In all of these cases, predictions from climate science are most robust at broader spatial scales, with considerable uncertainty in predicting changes for any single country.

Meanwhile, progress in crop science has shown that most crops show fairly rapid declines in productivity as temperatures rise above critical thresholds, with as much as 10 percent yield loss for +1°C of warming in some locations. Both sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia appear particularly prone to productivity losses from climate change, in part because major staples in these regions are often already grown well above their optimum temperature.

Approaches to climate adaptation should recognize these realities, and should not equate anticipating climate changes with the considerably harder task of predicting next year’s weather. Predicting and building resilience to climate variability still remain important goals for agricultural development, but adaptation efforts should balance these activities with those focused more on the specific threats presented by climate change. Heat tolerant crop varieties and strategies to deal with heavy rainfall provide two examples of important needs. Similarly, balance is needed between the local-scale efforts that attract most of adaptation investment currently, and regional and global networks to develop needed technologies. Given the greater certainty of climate changes at broader scales, as well as the positive track record of international networks for crop breeding, investments in these global systems are very likely to deliver substantial adaptation benefits. Finally, given the downward pressures that climate change will exert on smallholder farm productivity in sub-Saharan Africa, and the critical role productivity gains play in catalyzing an escape from poverty, speeding the pace of investment in African agriculture can also be viewed as a good bet for climate adaptation.

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David Lobell

How Democratic Development is Curbed in Angola

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Since the very beginning of the state formation, Angolan political elites of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) agreed that liberal democracy would be the form of government. However, in 1975 MPLA inaugurated a formal authoritarian regime that lasted until 1991. From 1991 to 2010, Angola had a democratic interim constitution and in 1992 had the first national multiparty elections as well as presidential ones of its history. In 2008, Angola held its second legislative elections and in 2010 a new and definite constitution was approved. Nevertheless, democratic development did not lead to the end of a successful democratic transition process started in 1991 or to the consolidation of democracy. The answer can probably be found in the politics of curbing democratic development, which constitutes the aim of this presentation by Professor Fernando Macedo of the Lusíada University of Angola.

Speaker Bio:

Fernando Macedo teaches political science and constitutional law at Law Faculty since 2007 and Angolan constitutional law and human rights in the department of international relations since 2006 at Lusíada University of Angola. He is currently the coordinator of the department of international relations of Lusíada University of Angola.

Fernando Macedo has co-authored with Pedro Franco Romão a book named Anotações à Lei da Prisão Preventiva em Angola, printed by Livraria Almedina of Portugal. He wrote three articles, the first one, Human Rights and Global Security, was published in Revista Brasileira de Estudos Constitucionais in 2008. The second, Civil Society and Political Power, in Sociedade Civil e Política em Angola, organized by Nuno Vidal and Justino Pinto de Andrade in 2008; and the third one, Advocacy and Citizenship, in Encontros, by the Angolan Bar Association in 2011.

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Fernando Macedo Professor, Political Science Speaker Luanda, Angola
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The Arab Spring and Sudan

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Speaker Bio:

John Prendergast is an author and human rights activist who for over 25 years has worked for peace in Africa. He is Co-Founder of the Enough Project, an initiative to end genocide and crimes against humanity. During the Clinton administration, Prendergast was involved in a number of peace processes in Africa while he was Director of African Affairs at the National Security Council and Special Advisor to Susan Rice at the Department of State. Prendergast has also worked for two members of Congress, UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, and the U.S. Institute of Peace. He has also been a youth counselor, a basketball coach and a Big Brother for over 25 years.

He has authored ten books on Africa, including Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond, a New York Times bestseller and NAACP non-fiction book of the year that he co-authored with actor Don Cheadle. His most current book, The Enough Moment, also co-authored with Mr. Cheadle and released on September 7, 2010, focuses on building a popular movement against genocide and other human rights crimes. His other forthcoming book draws on his many years in the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program.

Prendergast has worked with a number of television shows to raise awareness about human rights issues in Africa. He has appeared in four episodes of “60 Minutes,” for which the team won an Emmy Award, and has consulted on two episodes of “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” one focusing on the recruitment of child soldiers and the other on rape as a war strategy. He has also traveled to Africa with ABC’s Nightline, PBS’ The Lehrer NewsHour, and CNN’s Inside Africa.

He has appeared in several documentaries including: "Sand and Sorrow," "Darfur Now," "3 Points," and "War Child." He also co-produced "Journey into Sunset," about Northern Uganda, and partnered with Downtown Records and Mercer Street Records to create the compilation album “Raise Hope for Congo,” which shines a spotlight on sexual violence against women and girls in the Congo.

With Tracy McGrady and other NBA stars, John co-founded the Darfur Dream Team Sister Schools Program to fund schools in Darfurian refugee camps and create partnerships with schools in the United States. He also helped create the Raise Hope for Congo Campaign, highlighting the issue of conflict minerals that fuel the war in Congo. John is a board member and serves as Strategic Advisor to Not On Our Watch, the organization founded by George Clooney, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, and Brad Pitt.

Prendergast’s op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, and The International Herald Tribune, and he has been profiled in Vanity Fair, Men's Vogue, Time, Entertainment Weekly, GQ Magazine, Oprah Magazine, Capitol File, Arrive Magazine, Interview Magazine, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Kenneth Cole’s Awearness.

Prendergast has been a visiting professor at the University of San Diego, Eckerd College, St. Mary’s College, the University of Maryland, and the American University in Cairo, and will be at Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh. He has been awarded six honorary doctorates.

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John Prendergast Human rights activist and co-founder Speaker Enough Project
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Fighting hunger in Africa with new methods of irrigation

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Rural farmers in sub-Saharan Africa live under risky conditions. Many grow low-value cereal crops that depend on a short rainy season, a practice that traps them in poverty and hunger.

But reliable access to water could change the farmers' perilous situation. Stanford scientists are calling for investments in small-scale irrigation projects and hydrologic mapping to help buffer the growers from the erratic weather and poor crop yields that are expected to worsen with climate change in the region.

The potential for increased irrigation is there, said Jennifer Burney, a fellow at Stanford's Center on Food Security and Environment at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Burney's team partnered with the Solar Electric Light Fund (SELF) to measure economic and nutritional impacts of solar-powered drip-irrigated gardens on villages in West Africa's Sudano-Sahel region. Burney will present the group's work on small-scale irrigation Wednesday, Dec. 7, at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

"Irrigation is really appealing in that it lets you do a lot of things to break this cycle of low productivity that leads to low income and malnutrition," said Burney.

Modern irrigation often means multi-billion-dollar projects like damming rivers and building canals. But Burney says that these projects have not reached sub-Saharan Africa because countries lack the capital and ability to carry out big infrastructure projects.

A different approach, gaining popularity in sub-Saharan Africa, involves cooperation. Individuals or groups, called smallholders, organize to farm small plots and ensure their access to irrigation. These projects allow farmers to grow during the dry season and produce profitable, high-nutrition crops like fruits and vegetables in addition to the cereal crops they already grow.

Still, only 4 percent of cropland in sub-Saharan Africa is irrigated.

Smallholder irrigation

Burney and her colleagues' work in two northern Benin villages is an example of successful investment in smallholder irrigation. They worked with women's cooperative agricultural groups to install three solar-powered drip irrigation systems. Drip irrigation conserves water by delivering it directly to the base of plants. The technique also reduces fertilizer runoff.

The team surveyed 30 households in each village and found that solar drip irrigation increased standards of living and increased vegetable consumption to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's recommended daily allowance. By selling the vegetables, households were able to purchase staples and meat during the dry season.

Successful smallholder irrigation projects have high investment returns, said Burney. Her team has seen real success from irrigation projects – like those in Benin – that provide enough returns for women to send kids to school or buy small business equipment like a sewing machine or market stall.

"That's when I think it really becomes a ladder out of poverty," Burney said.

Lessons for success

For solar technology projects to be successful, Burney said, just dropping in and giving people irrigation kits doesn't work. Communities need access to a water source and need to see the benefits of a project.

"You need the technology and management and the water access, all together," said Burney. "Our solar project incorporates all of that."

According to Burney, smallholders need not limit themselves to solar irrigation systems. "Solar is great if you have an unreliable fuel," she said. "But if you're someplace that's connected to the grid, an electrical pump would more economical."

"There are a lot of different solutions that involve many different kinds of water harvesting," Burney said. "Groundwater, rainwater, surface water, and there are a lot of places in the Sahel, like Niger, for example, where there are artesian wells." The Sahel is a transition zone between the Sahara Desert and the savannas further south.

Given the diversity of water resources in West Africa, Burney suggests that nongovernmental organizations and governments prioritize detailed hydrologic mapping in the region. Otherwise, the cost of geophysical surveys and finding water sources, especially unseen groundwater, could become an insurmountable barrier for farm communities.

"It needs to be really detailed, comprehensive, usable information that's out there for everybody to be able to take advantage of," she said.

Burney says that both of the benefits that farmers get from irrigation systems –growing outside of the rainy season and producing more diverse, profitable crops – are important for adapting to climate change.

"You can produce more value on less land in most cases and not be as beholden to the whims of the rainy season," she said. Having more disposable income also will reduce vulnerability to hunger and malnutrition. "Economic development can be a form of adaptation," she said.

Rosamond L. Naylor, director of Stanford's Center on Food Security and the Environment, and Sandra Postel of the Global Water Policy Project were collaborators on the project.

Sarah Jane Keller is a science-writing intern at the Stanford News Service.


 

Jennifer Burney is scheduled to speak at the fall meeting of the AGU in San Francisco on Dec. 7 in Room 2008 (Moscone West), in Session B32B, Feeding the World While Sustaining the Planet: Building Sustainable Agriculture Within the Earth System II, which runs from 10:20 a.m. to 12:20 p.m. Her talk, "Smallholder Irrigation and Crop Diversification Under Climate Change in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence and Potential for Simultaneous Food Security, Adaptation and Mitigation," is scheduled from 12:04 to 12:17 p.m.

 

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Vote Buying and Democracy in Africa: Lessons from Experiments in Kenya

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Vote buying is widespread during multiparty elections in many African countries.  Despite its prevalence, vote buying's secretive and sensitive nature poses a challenge to empirical research on the subject.  In this talk, CDDRL Pre-Doctoral Fellow Eric Kramon will present evidence from experiments conducted in Kenya that shed light on the extent to which vote buying influences vote choice, why it is effective, how it relates to ethnic voting, and what its implications are for government responsiveness and accountability to poor voters.

Speaker Bio:

Eric Kramon is a 2011-12 pre-doctoral fellow at CDDRL and a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. In his dissertation, he investigates vote buying during African elections. Using a set of field experiments and surveys conducted in Kenya, the project explains why vote buying persists and is effective, and examines its implications for democratic accountability and the political representation of the poor. Eric is also working on several projects about the impact of ethnic favoritism by politicians on public goods provision and general health and welfare in multiple African countries. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and published in the Journal of Democracy.

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Eric Kramon Pre-doctoral Fellow 2011-2012 Speaker CDDRL
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The Commitment to Public Services in India

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There is a wide diversity in the provision of public services in India. In some states one can go for miles without seeing a functional school or public health centre, where roads are poorly maintained, and electricity has not yet been introduced. In other places, governments tend to function remarkably in extending basic public services to all, with tremendous consequences to human lives. In this talk, Vivek Srinivasen will explore why some parts of India have developed an impressive social commitment to such services unlike others. In this context, he will also discuss the remarkable changes in Bihar and other parts of North India in the recent years.

 Speaker Bio: 

Vivek Srinivasen joined the Liberation Technology Program as the manager in February 2011 after completing his Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. Prior to this, Srinivasen worked with campaigns on various socio-economic rights in India, including the right to food, education and the right to information. Based on these experiences he has written (and co-authored) extensively on issues surrounding the right to food, including Notes from the right to food campaign: people's movement for the right to food (2003), Rights based approach and human development: An introduction (2008), Gender and the right to food: A critical re-examination (2006), Food Policy and Social Movements: Reflections on the Right to Food Campaign in India (2007).

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Vivek Srinivasen Program Manager Speaker Program on Liberation Technology, Stanford University
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d.school uses mobile technology for social issues in Kenya

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The November 17 Liberation Technology Seminar was co-hosted by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), a nonpartisan economic policy research organization that unites remarkable economic talent from all parts of Stanford University. This seminar featured four student-led design projects that were created in the Designing Liberation Technologies course taught each spring at Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) by professors' Josh Cohen and Terry Winograd. The class works in partnership with the University of Nairobi's School of Computing and Informatics to develop user-based designs that address outstanding challenges in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya. 

Josh Cohen described the three main elements of the design school class:

(1) There is a focus on user/human-centered design. Projects are designed based on a close engagement with end users: the people who will be using the solutions. (2) Courses are inter-disciplinary. The idea is to take people who are deeply embedded in a certain discipline and put them together with people from other disciplines. In order to come up with a solution to a real problem, team collaboration is necessary and (3) The approach to problem solving is about practice, not about theory. It is necessary to fail early and fail often in the process of creating workable solutions.

The panelists consisted of students who were working with partners in Kenya on how mobile technology could be used to address various social issues. A multidisciplinary team of students work in close collaboration with partners in Kenya, and some of these ideas are now being tested on the ground.

The first project that was described was M-maji (mmaji.wordpress.com). Sangick Jeon described how water in Kibera is scarce, costly and contaminated. Their aim is to use the nearly ubiquitous mobile technology to improve access to water. Vendors are able to advertise their water and then buyers can ask questions and provide feedback. This saves the time and resources that it takes to find clean water.

Nishuari, the second project, addresses the problem of inaccurate advice and rumors which lead to risky sexual behavior and often HIV and AIDS. They provide a mobile counseling service whereby individuals can submit health questions and receive responses from trained counselors using text messages. This helps to break down logistical and social barriers.

The third, Makmende considered the issue of serious crime in Kibera. Their aim is to look at how individuals can get safely from Point A to Point B. They set up walking groups so that people would not have to walk alone. Over 90% of people had a mobile phone and this was seen to be an effective way of building timely communication, so that groups of people can coordinate to walk more safely to reach their destinations.

The final project was Take Taka, which was the one project that was not focused on using computer technology. The team took up sanitation as the project and decided early on that the use of mobile phones adds no value to the issue. The focused instead of designing a special sanitary bucket that could be used instead of a toilet inside the home, and on developing a system of transmitting the deposits to a biogas unit. This project however has not been carried forward.

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