I was born and grew up in Uganda. I have also been lucky to travel and live in other African countries — Kenya and Botswana — as well as European countries, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. These adventures have helped me understand first-hand the diversities that exist between the Global North and the Global South. They have also taught me that in the journey to advance the socio-economic transformation of the Global South, international development partnerships play a vital role in complementing local development efforts.

Although the economic impediments that developing countries face are many, they are not impossible to address. Tackling them requires that we implement every viable intervention, national or international, big or small, private or public, that creates a positive change on people, systems and institutions. I have always been impact-driven and I would like to continue influencing the positive changes towards sustainable development from the international development perspective. This, in addition to my background career in the international development space, was a driving factor in wanting to join the Stanford community and pursue further studies in International policy.

Like many development economists, I am interested in a series of thematic areas but mostly, technology economics, energy, climate change, development finance, and the political economy aspects of developing countries. For example, I am interested in how we can use safe and secure digital solutions to promote financial inclusion, access to high quality education and health services, reduce inequalities, and create job opportunities in the Global South. This will be possible by bridging the gap between policies and practices, and by learning from the success stories already making an impact.

I am looking forward to both courses on technology policy and being able to observe the innovation ecosystem of Silicon Valley. I hope to learn how ideas in Silicon Valley might apply to developing the African digital economy, especially in supporting the African homemade digital solutions in a practical way.

To understand where I am now and why I’m so passionate about what I’m doing, it’s important to have some context about where I came from. I grew up in a really rough background. I was in foster care for most of my young life, and I only formally completed sixth grade before dropping out. I went to part of ninth grade, but when I was sixteen I became homeless with my young son.

Eventually, I did get my GED and tried going to community college for a while. But the processes for getting financial aid and registration were so difficult and frustrating to navigate that I became disillusioned with the entire system and dropped out. The systems weren’t just unhelpful; they were actively hurting. I got my resources together and got a van, and we went back on the road.

One day, I stopped in a Walmart parking lot to rest, and I saw some people passing out flyers and gathering signatures for a petition. I was so curious; I had never seen anything like that before! They invited me to their meetings to learn more. That lit a fire in me that changed everything. It was so much more than having an income for the first time in my life. It was about representation and having a voice. It was about voting to change things. It was about people having power.

My goals now are focused on food security and creating policies that prioritize basic needs. After my experience with working in canvassing, I went back to community college. Once there, I started to find students who were hungry and struggling with food. After doing some investigating, I learned that almost 60% of the student body had experienced some level of food insecurity in the last 30 days. That realization turned into a campaign to provide $20,000 in emergency food aid and serve hot meals on campus twice a week. The work we started was eventually adopted and transformed into the state-wide Hunger Free Campus initiative in Minnesota.

So many problems facing our societies have their roots in poverty, want, and broken systems that fail to serve people. There’s a real divide between people who need help from systems and the policymakers and people in power who are making the systems and moving things forward. I’ve lived the reality of one side of that equation. Everything I’ve done since at Yale and Cambridge, and what I’m doing now at MIP, is to try and build bridges and bring a different kind of context and perspective to the other side. I’m excited to work and learn from faculty like Marshall Burke and Roz Naylor at the Center for Food, Security, and the Environment, and to keep learning how to make policies and that work for people.
 

My interest in cyber started where it does for a lot of kids: with video games in high school. I found a coding modification for one of the games I liked playing that allowed me to get unlimited money. It was great for my success in the game, but it also made me really interested in how the software and programming worked. That got me into coding, which gave me the background I needed to eventually co-found Firo, which is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency.

That emphasis on privacy is important. Blockchain technology is very secure, but it still has some privacy issues that we need to think about more. We don’t want to be in a situation where in twenty years, cryptocurrencies and blockchains have the same kind of privacy concerns we’re currently seeing in our social media data.

Most people have probably heard about blockchain in the context of cryptocurrency, but it has the potential for many more other applications. One of the big issues in the world right now is finding ways to make it easier for more people to participate securely in democracy without interference from regimes or with questions over election integrity or voting security. Secure and private blockchains could be used in those situations.

The Stanford MIP program was actually the only program I applied to after I made the decision to come back to school, because of its unique focus on both cyber policy and cybersecurity, which are equally important, but not the same thing. I have technical experience in cyber security from my time in the military and my study at Johns Hopkins. The piece I’m missing is the cyber policy and thinking about how cyber interacts with society and government. MIP felt like the best place to learn about those kinds of issues and decision-making processes.

I’ve been cultivating a focus on West Africa and development in that region for a while now. Before coming back to school, I was working with Chemonics International, USAID’s largest implementing partner, on programs aimed at improving Haiti’s judicial sector, countering violent extremism in Mauritania, and facilitating agribusiness investments in the DRC.
 
Before Chemonics, I was in Benin as a Princeton-in-Africa Fellow, where I worked for the African School of Economics’ Institute for Empirical Research on impact evaluation of donor-funded programs. Being involved with the end results of a project made me more curious about the earlier phases of program development. How do donors choose where and how to intervene? Can programs truly align with both U.S. policy and host countries’ goals and priorities?

As a U.S Pickering Fellow, I am on my way to becoming a Foreign Service Officer (FSO), and I am excited to apply the knowledge I gain from Stanford professors with expertise on policy development and African affairs to obtain answers. I plan to study and work within West Africa’s economic sphere, hopefully collaborating with entrepreneurs, governments, and the private sector to improve the business-enabling environments in various countries, bolster the sustainability of private supply chains, and amplify the voices of women experts working within this realm.

There’s a freshness and flexibility at MIP that really appealed to me, as I wanted to tap into a network of people who have diverse interests and can provide a holistic perspective on these issues. Groups like the Stanford African Entrepreneurship Network have connected me to other like-minded individuals who are working towards Africa’s growth and sustainable development.
 
I’ll be working as an FSO for at least five years after my graduation, and I know I want to keep focusing on West Africa and Haiti. As a Nigerian-American, I am excited to approach my studies at Stanford through a lens that not only reflects African Studies with humility and interconnection, but also amplifies the voices of young continental Africans pushing these questions forward.

I had the opportunity to work for about four years at the Embassy of Mexico in the United States. It was while I was in Washington D.C. that I really started to think about and realize what a big topic cyberspace is. It’s so common in our lives, but we still don’t really understand a lot of the specifics about it. If you were to lose your phone, for example, you’d also be losing your bank account information, your email, and your contacts. Everything is so connected, the world is deeply embedded in the cyber domain, and because of this, we need more insight into how intersections between social phenomena and new technologies work.

Cyberspace and technologies come with this duality. On the one side, they are tools for growth and for progress, but on the other side, they can be very dangerous. For example, parallel to the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw digital platforms become key avenues for political engagement as electoral campaigning went completely online. But all of this misinformation and lies about elections, and the pandemic itself, came out of that space. There’s a gap and a disconnect, sometimes, between what’s happening in the private sector in the companies that are building and running this tech and what’s happening in the public sector with understanding and responding to and regulating. These things evolve so fast that it can be hard for the legislation to keep up.

I’m particularly interested in understanding how online misinformation relates to political participation and influences vaccine hesitancy among minorities, especially Hispanics, Mexican Americans, and Mexicans living in the United States. Because Mexico is a very interconnected country in terms of access to social media, I seek to understand how communication technologies influence public issues in my country. There is already data showing that traditional policy issues like migration, gender violence, healthcare hesitancy, and civic participation are migrating from the physical world and changing and morphing in digital spaces. It is urgent that we understand that a lot better than we do.

There are a few places in the world that do what the Cyber Policy Center here at FSI does. We have these toolkits for traditional policymaking and solution finding, but we’re going to have to develop new toolkits for these new challenges, and places like the Cyber Center are actively trying to do that. To paraphrase Dr. Erin Meyer’s work, in a world that’s ever more connected, you cannot do things just the Mexican way, or the U.S. way; you have to figure out how to lead in a global way. We’re not going to opt out of interconnectedness, so let’s figure out how to work better together in these spaces.
 

I started my undergraduate career later than most, and because of that, I had an outlook to be very purposeful in how I spent my time. I wanted to work on something that was challenging and that I would find endlessly interesting. I chose political science and the Middle East, which led to an internship in Jordan. That turned into six years of work experience with a technology company that was using data and analytics to understand and quantify what was going on in digital spaces.

Through that work, I really started to appreciate the full implications that AI and other emerging technologies have in foreign policy. These technologies aren’t just something we need to contend with as threats and opportunities out there in the world. We need to understand how they’re changing the way we perceive others and ourselves.  

Six hundred years ago, the Gutenberg printing press completely transformed societies. The internet is doing the same thing today, we just don’t have a very clear understanding of what that process is creating. But based on what we’ve seen politically and geopolitically the last few years, it’s obvious we need to get our hands on the reins more and get better answers to these questions. 

I’m particularly interested in how technology is shaping the ways we’re learning to think about China and other emerging geopolitical powers. The international system is changing. It’s becoming less hegemonic and moving toward something much more multi-polar. How actors perceive one another is increasingly consequential. Technology is shaping those perceptions at multiple levels. 

Part of the appeal of coming to MIP was that the leadership and faculty here seem to align a lot with having a cross-disciplinary understanding of the full geopolitical system. And like others have said, being in Silicon Valley and having that proximity was a big draw for me as well. It’s another window into how the bleeding edge of technology is having an impact on policy and other aspects of the world, so coming here seemed like the natural choice.

I’m coming to the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy program from the Department of Personnel and Training, Government of India. Even though I’ve been out of university for about ten years, my process of learning has never stopped. I bring a lot of experience through interaction with people in public leadership, using negotiation and leadership skills, but I want to better understand the process of making data-driven policy. The flexibility of the MIP program and the manner it encourages students to learn across disciplines is, therefore, very appealing to me, as it allows to frame my own learning goals.

I’ve always had a great amount of respect for the environment and an interest in natural resources. Energy touches all of our lives in some way. In my culture, we consider the environment and its resources to be divine. These are gifts given by generations after generations to human beings, and as such we need to conserve them and find ways to ensure a more equitable distribution of energy, so that everybody has access to this necessity.

These are global issues that are going to need global participation to address. When I see places like the island nations, they contribute so much less to the greenhouse gasses, but they are most affected by climate change issues. I want to put myself in a position where I can help visualize policies that mitigate these regional disparities and create more equity.

These are big challenges, but it is possible for people to make a difference. There are so many inspiring stories from all over the world of ordinary people taking the initiative to help conserve and preserve their local resources and educate their communities. When we’re thinking about our policies and how to make them, we have to remember that the data and number crunching are only part of it — it’s people that give them life. Many people are already doing the work. It's our responsibility to learn from them and value their experience.
 

Yeseul Byeon (PhD student, History) and Michelle Ha (PhD student, Modern Thought & Literature) were awarded the 11th annual Korea Program Prize for Writing in Korean Studies for their papers: Byeon on her paper "Shrine in Every Village: Legacies of Religious Reform in Cheju, 1702-3"; and Ha on her paper "Beyond Diaspora: Racial Capitalism and Empire in Kim Young-ha’s Black Flower."

In Byeon's own words on her paper: "My essay delves into the question of regionality in premodern Korea, taking as a case study a religious purge that took place in Cheju in 1702. Instigated by scholar-official (and magistrate of Cheju at the time) Yi Hyŏngsang, the incident has been regarded as something of a puzzle and an anomaly. Yi’s persecution of popular religion goes far beyond the scope of the social reforms we typically associate with the 'confucianization' of Chosŏn. What explains the extraordinary zealotry? Why here, and why at this time?”

“I find the keys to this question in Yi’s accounts of the purge, which I analyze alongside Yi’s writings on the human geography and history of Cheju more broadly," Byeon comments. "I identify the purge within a larger struggle over the territoriality of the Chosǒn state, arguing that Yi’s actions and words connote a paradigmatic shift regarding Cheju’s place in the Korean polity, from foreign 'other' to wayward insider, politically contiguous with the peninsula, yet utterly distinct in terms of its cultural and physical landscape. My question also extends to the evidentiary basis upon which scholars today reason about and narrate the history of the 1702 purge — I argue for a recognition of the archival silences that surround this incident, and a broadened outlook on the sources of truth for Cheju’s past." For more information about the paper, please visit the CEAS website.

In Michelle Ha's own words on her paper "Beyond Diaspora: Racial Capitalism and Empire in Kim Young-ha’s Black Flower": "I am researching early twentieth-century Korean indentured labor migration to Mexican agave plantations within the frames of racial capitalism and empire. These frames are certainly relevant to understanding the story of Koreans in Mexico; however, most South Korean scholarly and artistic works tend to present this migration in bilateral terms, explained by push and pull factors between the Korean and Yucatán Peninsulas. ” “Kim Young-ha’s historical novel Kŏmŭn kkot (Black Flower) uniquely seems to break out of this binational mold, incorporating themes of race and racialization as well as transpacific imperial competition into its narrative," Ha comments.

"In my paper, I argue that Black Flower takes up an imperial turn — against dominant trends in South Korean scholarship that tend to narrowly focus on issues of adaptation and ethnic identity between countries of origin and destination. By analyzing the novel’s understudied narrative features, I demonstrate how Black Flower contextualizes Korean migration to Mexico within European settler colonialism in the Americas and Japan’s transpacific settler empire. In doing so, I suggest that Black Flower provides a model of narrating migration history with a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the political, legal, and economic structures that shape human movement — one that helps place the Korean experience in global and comparative perspective." For more information about the paper, please visit the CEAS website.

Sponsored by the Korea Program and the Center for East Asian Studies, the writing prize recognizes and rewards outstanding examples of writing by Stanford students in an essay, term paper, or thesis produced during the current academic year in any discipline within the area of Korean studies, broadly defined. The competition is open to both undergraduate and graduate students.

Past Recipients:
10th Annual Prize (2021)
9th Annual Prize (2020)
8th Annual Prize (2019)
7th Annual Prize (2018)
6th Annual Prize (2017)
5th Annual Prize (2016)
4th Annual Prize (2015)
3rd Annual Prize (2014)
2nd Annual Prize (2013)
1st Annual Prize (2012)