Stanford students belong to the first generation that could witness the end of extreme global poverty — in what would be one of humankind's greatest achievements — the head of the World Bank said during a recent talk on campus.

But their generation, he said, is also likely to experience the first global pandemic since the 1918 influenza that killed more than 50 million people.

Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, said innovations in health, education and finance are behind the World Bank's twin goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity for the bottom 40 percent of the global population.

Speaking at the inaugural conference of the Stanford Global Development and Poverty Initiative on Oct. 29, Kim lauded faculty and students for their multidisciplinary approach in tackling poverty and improving public health. He is an infectious disease physician who oversaw World Health Organization initiatives on HIV/AIDS.

"Seeking transformative solutions to challenges of development and poverty that are necessarily cross-disciplinary is exactly what a great university should be doing," Kim said in his speech at Stanford.

The World Bank announced last month that the number of people living on less than $1.90 a day is expected to drop to 9.6 percent of the global population by the end of the year. That is down from 36 percent in 1990.

The bank has pledged to cut that rate to 3 percent by 2030.

"We expect the extreme poverty rate to drop below 10 percent for the first time in human history," he said. "This is the best news in the world today. And this is the first generation in human history that has been able to see that potential outcome." 

Promoting prosperity

One of the co-founders of Partners in Health, Kim was the keynote speaker at the daylong conference, "Shared Prosperity and Health," which drew together Stanford faculty and researchers, plus government and NGO officials from around the world.

Stanford's global development and poverty effort is a university-wide initiative of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies, known as Stanford Seed, and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. The conference was held at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, which was a partner in the event.

Kim's talk was optimistic about the newly adopted U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, with an ambitious agenda to end poverty and hunger, ensure healthy lives, empower women and girls and attain quality education for all children by 2030.

While those goals seem lofty, Kim pointed to the accomplishment of bringing down extreme poverty to 10 percent, a figure many had once said was impossible.

Ninety-one percent of children in developing countries now attend primary school, up from 83 percent in 2000, he said. And the number of people on antiretroviral drugs for treatment of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa has increased eightfold in the last decade.

"But we're humbled by the challenges ahead," Kim said. "Rising global temperatures will have devastating impacts on poor countries and poor people – and, as we saw with Ebola, major pandemics are likely to disproportionately affect the poor."

Pandemic threats

Kim said that most virologists and infectious disease experts are certain a pandemic will sweep the world in the next 30 years. He said that would lead to more than 30 million deaths and anywhere from 5 to 10 percent of lost GDP.

He blasted the global community for taking eight months to respond to the Ebola crisis in West Africa, noting that Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia had among the fastest growing economies in Africa before the outbreak killed more than 11,000 people – most of whom were poor.

In an effort to speed up financial aid the next time such an outbreak occurs, the World Bank is developing the Pandemic Emergency Facility, which would disburse funding immediately to national governments and responding agencies.

Rajiv Shah, the administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development from 2010-2015, spoke earlier at the conference about his work leading the U.S. efforts to contain Ebola.

"Three small countries with total population of maybe 30 million people had such weak health systems with so little domestic investment – in one country $6 per capita health investment per year – that when Ebola became a crisis there was no first-line of defense," he said.

By October 2014, the U.S. was pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into containment efforts, including the establishment of a 2,500-personnel military deployment to hit Ebola on the ground. Shah said President Obama "stayed extraordinarily true to the science" of containment at the source.

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Stunted children 

Moving beyond containment of epidemics, Kim said the most important investment developing countries could make in their people starts when a woman becomes pregnant. Using a combination of health, nutrition and education will have lifelong benefits for each child, as well as for the country in which each prospers.

The World Bank estimates that 26 percent of all children under age 5 in developing countries are stunted, which means they are malnourished and under-stimulated, risking a loss of cognitive abilities that lasts a lifetime. The number climbs to 36 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, giving those children limited prospects in life."This is a disgrace, a global scandal and, in my view, akin to a medical emergency," Kim said. "Children who are stunted by age 5 will not have an equal opportunity in life. If your brain won't let you learn and adapt in a fast-changing world, you won't prosper and, neither will society. All of us lose."

From 2001 to 2013, the World Bank invested $3.3 billion in early childhood development programs in poor countries. Kim said innovative policymaking and financial tools allowed the bank to help Peru cut its rate of child stunting in half to 14 percent in just eight years.

"Progress is possible – and it can happen quickly. But we must do even more,"he said.

Kim said the world set a target in 2012 to reduce stunting in children by 40 percent. But that would still leave 100 million children malnourished and undereducated. The bank and world leaders should pledge to end stunting for all children by 2030, he said.

"With partners like the Global Development and Poverty Initiative and the entire Stanford community, I'm full of hope that we can indeed be the first generation in human history to end extreme poverty and create a more just and prosperous world for everyone on the planet."

Read more here about another innovation to improve health in the developing world.

Pilot program was designed to first ground students in the basics of empirical research, then provide an opportunity to apply that knowledge while conducting fieldwork in an international setting.

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and Office of International Affairs (OIA) launched a pilot collaboration last year to provide a rigorous, immersive teaching and training program for students interested in international fieldwork.  The result was a program that included a quarter-long course in the spring of 2015 followed by three weeks in Mexico during the summer to design and conduct a field research study. OIA spoke with Frank Wolak, the Holbrook Working Professor of Commodity Price Studies in Economics and Senior Fellow at FSI, to learn more about the project, titled International Field Research Training: Energy Reform in Mexico.

What was the impetus for designing a program for students with a field research component?

While students at Stanford have many opportunities to pursue independent research projects, they rarely have the opportunity to receive first-hand training in conducting interviews, research design and field implementation. With that in mind, we set out to design a program that would carry the students through the basics of empirical research and then give them the opportunity to apply that knowledge under close faculty supervision. Taking students out of the classroom and giving them the opportunity to see textbook methods in action is invaluable.

Our hope is that this training equips the students with the academic and logistical skills they need to execute their own robust research, be that for an honors thesis, a capstone project or an advanced degree.

How did the prerequisite course prepare students for working in the field? 

The Stanford course taught the basics of the design, implementation and interpretation of social science field research. Building on a basic knowledge of statistical methods and economics, the course first introduced observational field research and compared it with experimental field research. Significant attention was devoted to explaining what can and cannot be learned through each type of field research.

Topics covered included sample size selection, power and size of statistical hypothesis tests, sample selection bias and methods for accounting for it. Examples of best practice field research studies were presented as well as examples of commonly committed experimental design and implementation errors. Practical aspects of fieldwork were also covered, including efficient and cost-effective data collection, data analysis, teamwork and common ethical considerations.

After completing the quarter-long course on statistical research methods, the students, under the guidance of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development's research team, adapted an education-based research intervention for the Mexican electricity sector. The purpose was to see if providing individuals with information about how their energy bill was calculated and simple ways to reduce household electricity consumption would cause household energy bills to go down.

What was a typical day for the students gathering research?

Research was carried out in the city of Puebla, a city of 1.5 million people about 150 kilometers (93 miles) southeast of Mexico City. The Stanford students collaborated with students from the Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla (UPAEP). For the first few days, the students all met at an UPAEP classroom space to design and review the survey tool, making revisions and conducting practice interviews.

Once oriented in Puebla, the students set out daily in research teams to interview randomly selected households in middle-income neighborhoods in Puebla. The students branched out from a central meeting place in teams of three, pairing two Stanford students with one UPAEP student.

In the field, the students all wore nametags and UPAEP baseball caps to make themselves identifiable as surveyors to households. They worked in the field for eight to 10 hours a day, taking about an hour break for lunch. In the first few days, they were able to collect 15-20 surveys a day, but as they became more comfortable with their pitch and knocking on doors, they were able to increase their yield to a high of 44 surveys in one day. At the end of two weeks, they completed over 260 surveys in just 10 days of fieldwork.

The students were also active on social media documenting their daily activities. For more on the student perspective, their activities and impressions of the project, check out their blog on the FSI website. 

What are the benefits for getting in-country field research experience?

There are a variety of situation-specific problems that are hard for any researcher to know fully without being immersed in the field. For example, one of the students' recommendations to improve energy efficiency was to switch household light bulbs from incandescent to compact fluorescents (CFL). This is a valid recommendation in the United States where most people still use incandescent bulbs in their homes, but – surprisingly to the team – most of the people interviewed had already converted to all CFLs in their home.

I was amazed with the students; the level of intellectual curiosity and engagement was impressive with ongoing discussions into the evening at times. The students were not only getting an in-country immersive experience while conducting research, but they were also developing critical thinking skills along the way.

Research aside, the in-country experience gave the students a keen understanding of how local residents live. The methodology employed for gathering data allowed the students to connect with many types of families, ranging from senior citizens living alone to multi-generational families living under one roof. Through direct contact with the community, the students developed an understanding of the local culture and learned local customs. 

Conducting international research at Stanford can be challenging. Where did you turn to for advice on how to structure your activity?

At FSI, we have a great wealth of experiential knowledge on conducting field research all over the world. In addition to consulting with faculty and research managers at FSI, OIA had been enormously helpful in connecting us with resources across campus and facilitating some of the trickier logistics, such as processing stipend payments to our international collaborators and navigating the human subjects approval process. OIA was also able to discern that Puebla was a viable option as a research site.

How would you characterize the success of the pilot program? 

The pilot program exceeded our expectations in the best possible ways. Much of its success was due to the work of Elena Cryst ,'10, program manager for FSI's Global Student Fellows Program, who also accompanied us on our trip. She was an invaluable team leader and organizer and worked tirelessly to ensure that both the research and logistical aspects of the trip ran smoothly.

We will definitely be offering the field research course and research project again. We hope to go to another part of Latin America next, such as Chile or Colombia. We are also still active in Mexico, with three of the students that went on the trip working for us as research assistants this academic year, analyzing the data as it comes in and developing a self-administered online version of the survey instrument with which we hope to reach thousands of households in Puebla.

In addition, Elena will be using our experiences from the Mexico pilot to inform other FSI field research programs in China, Guatemala, India and potentially new sites for next year.

This article was originally published in The Stanford Report on October 27, 2015.

South Korea and the United States are “completely aligned” on North Korea strategy, the chief American diplomat in South Korea said to a Stanford audience on Monday.

Mark Lippert, who assumed the role of U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Korea in 2014, delivered remarks at a public seminar, “Perspectives on the U.S.-Korea Alliance,” organized by the Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

Arriving from the Washington summit of President Obama and Korean President Park Geun-hye, Lippert spoke of the success of the state visit. The U.S.-Korea relationship is in “as good a shape as it’s ever been,” and that secure foundation is allowing the two countries to forge ahead on shared challenges, including North Korea, trade and global health.

Mark Lippert expressed optimism about the U.S.-ROK alliance at a Stanford talk on Oct. 19, 2015.

He said the United States and South Korea are invested in getting to a place where the North Koreans will “come back to the table” for discussions on ending their nuclear program, noting the continuing viability of the Six Party Talks mechanism which has been stalled for more than five years.

Lippert also cited U.S.-Korea strategic cooperation on sanctions against North Korea, and defense capabilities aimed to deter the threat of a North Korea with nuclear and long-range missile capacity.

Looking ahead, “The United States strongly supports calls for reunification of the Korean Peninsula,” he said. Human rights, a free economy and a democratically elected government in the North would be a priority in that pursuit.

Lippert said the United States is supportive of inter-Korean talks and reunions for families separated by the Korean War, both announced earlier this year. On Tuesday, hundreds of South Koreans crossed the border to meet with North Korean relatives, who have been separated for more than six decades.

Partnering on the economic level was another key aspect of the summit, Lippert said, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was among items discussed. The United States, as one of 12 TPP member nations, would welcome an application from South Korea should they choose to pursue it, he said.

Lippert acknowledged that South Korea already has bilateral trade agreements with 10 out of the 12 TPP member nations, including one with the United States. The U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) came into force in 2012 and is moving toward full implementation, he said. The United States’ sixth largest trading partner is South Korea.

Following his formal remarks, Lippert took questions from the audience.

Michael Armacost, a Shorenstein Distinguished Fellow, asked Lippert how Japan and China figured into the summit discussions following recent developments. In September, President Park attended a military parade in Beijing that marked the 70^th anniversary of the end of World War II. She was the only leader from a democratic country at the event.

Responding on China, Lippert said the United States is supportive of South Korea engaging with China. “We don’t view this as a zero-sum game,” he said, likening South Korea’s regional relationships to a situation where “all boats rise” together.

Dafna Zur, a professor of Korean culture and literature, asked Lippert to talk about how his education informed his career in public service.

Lippert attended Stanford and studied political science and international policy studies.

His education, he said, was invaluable in preparing him for the diverse situations and people that a diplomatic career brings.

Lippert encouraged students to savor conversation and debate in the classroom. Participating in that kind of forum not only “makes you a more informed person” but also “sharpens your analytic skills,” he said.

Prior to becoming ambassador, Lippert held senior positions in the Department of Defense and the White House and served in the U.S. Navy.

Following the event, Lippert met with faculty members of Shorenstein APARC and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies for a roundtable discussion, chaired by Kathleen Stephens, a distinguished fellow at Shorenstein APARC and former U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Korea (2008-11).

Embedded photo: Mark Lippert speaks at Stanford on Oct. 19, 2015. Photo credit: Heather Ahn.

Stanford students worked together to pitch marketing ideas to a major Japanese airline at an event last Tuesday. The event, called an “ideathon,” is part of a series of events seeking to strengthen the U.S.-Japan relationship through exchange of ideas.

The ideathon was the first of its kind at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, led by the Japan Program under the rubric of the Stanford Silicon Valley-New Japan Project (SV-NJ). The project is supported in part by All Nippon Airways (ANA), the Japanese airline featured at the event.

Nineteen students participated, from both undergraduate and graduate levels and across disciplines – including students from the Graduate School of Business, and other majors including economics, mathematics, computer science, philosophy and East Asian studies.

Placed on a team with others they had just met, students were encouraged to assemble quickly and generate solutions to the challenge: how can ANA strengthen its brand awareness in the United States?

ANA is seeking to double in size in the next three years, yet it faces a few obstacles in this endeavor, including a customer base that is mostly in Japan and low brand visibility internationally, according to a senior employee that presented at the event.

“Who had heard of ANA before this event?” asked Hiroyuki Miyagawa, a marketing executive at ANA. Few hands raised in the audience.

Organized into four teams, each student team was joined by an ANA employee who listened in and offered guidance and a chance to learn from a longtime practitioner.

One and a half hours later, with Post-it notes and scribbled diagrams sprinkled across tables, each team emerged ready to present their 3-minute pitch to a panel of judges. The panel included executives from ANA, the World Innovation Lab (WiL), a venture capital firm in Palo Alto, and bTrax, a San Francisco based design firm.

Below are a few pictures from the event.

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Team Three acts out a skit.  |  They proposed that ANA establish lounges for the general public to gather in and purchase goods from Uniqlo and Muji, two Japanese lifestyle retailers. The lounges would offer a place to reinforce ANA's brand outside of the airport, they said.

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Team Four puts their heads together to generate ideas.  |  In their pitch, the team noted that baseball is a popular sport among Americans and Japanese. They recommended baseball be a focus of the marketing campaign, and said television and social media would best reach the target audience.

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Team Five explains their marketing approach.  |  Flying can lead to some unpleasant experiences, and a way ANA can set itself apart is to make those experiences manageable, and even enjoyable, they said. Their proposal was to bring new amenities to the in-flight experience such as a care package for people who sit in the middle seat.

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Team One poses for a picture after their presentation.  |  In their pitch, they recommended using ANA’s association with Japan to differentiate from other global airlines. Their approach included creating a film that features an American celebrity traveling on ANA.

The winning team was Team One whose concept was to use a celebrity figure – Ellen DeGeneres – in their advertising. They said that the target audience could relate to DeGeneres, and her already-established following would be an advantage.

The judges commended Team One for the creativity of their idea and its level of feasibility. Team One consisted of students Yaqian Fan, Michael Hong, Sam Ide, Lu Li and Adelbert Tan.

Kenji Kushida, a Stanford alumnus and project leader of SV-NJ, said:

“When I was a student, I craved for an opportunity to brainstorm solutions to real-world challenges and to do it in an environment that provided instant feedback,” he said, “We were able to make that happen here with the support of ANA and WiL, and are thrilled with the outcome."

Read the original post on Medium.com:

A Global Perspective on Food Policy

I applaud Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, Ricardo Salvador, and Olivier de Schutter for advocating the introduction of a national food policy in the U.S. Greater emphasis in our current farm legislation on nutrition, health, equity, and the environment is clearly warranted and long overdue. As the authors note, Americans’ access to adequate nutrition at all income levels affects educational and health outcomes for the nation as a whole. Poor nutrition thus plays a role in determining the level and distribution of economic and social wellbeing in the U.S, now and in the future. It is surprising that no one within the large circle of Presidential hopefuls has raised the topic of food, not just agriculture, as a major political issue for the 2016 election.

The U.S. is not unique. Virtually every country with an agrarian base has, at some point in history, introduced agricultural policies that support farmers and provide incentives for them to produce major commodities. At the time, governments have been able to justify these policies on several grounds: national security (avoiding excess dependence on foreign nations for food), economic growth (using agricultural surpluses as an engine of economic growth), and social stability (keeping its population well-fed to avoid social unrest). Once agricultural policies are implemented, they typically give rise to institutions and vested political interests that perpetuate a supply-side orientation to food and agriculture. In the U.S., the political institutions that govern food and agriculture have their roots in historical political precedents that date back to the 1860s, and later to the 1930s when the New Deal was promulgated. Farm interests have been entrenched in the U.S. political system for quite some time, and they cannot be easily removed.

There is a general rule for successful policies: Align incentives with objectives. A corollary to this principle is that objectives change over the course of economic development. For the United States in earlier eras, and for many developing economies in recent decades, meeting basic calorie needs has been the first order of business. This objective has been largely achieved through public investments in infrastructure (irrigation, roads), research and development, commodity support programs, incentives for private agribusiness development, and other supply-side measures.

With successful agricultural growth and rising incomes, many countries face a new set of food and nutrition challenges: eliminating “hidden hunger” (deficiencies in iron, vitamin A, calcium, zinc and other micronutrients), and abating the steady rise in obesity that results from a transition to diets rich in energy-dense carbohydrates, fats, and sugar. Hidden hunger affects some three billion people worldwide. It is prevalent among low-income households in almost all countries, impairs cognitive and physical development (especially among infants up to two years of age) and thus limits a nation’s educational and economic potential. Meanwhile, rates of obesity now surpass rates of energy-deficient hunger throughout the world, even in developing nations.

The objectives of food and agricultural policies in virtually all countries need to shift, on balance, from promoting staple food supplies to enhancing nutrition. I am not suggesting an abandonment of agriculture, but rather an enrichment of agriculture with more crop diversity to support the nutritional needs of all people. If improved nutrition is the objective, what are the correct incentives? Proper incentives will differ among countries, but will inevitably require a fundamental change in institutional structure. With a shift from supply- to demand orientation, there needs to be a transition from Ministries of Agriculture to Ministries of Food. After all, the main goals of a Ministry of Agriculture are to increase the volume of agricultural production and to improve economic growth in the agricultural sector. The main goal of a Ministry of Food, by contrast, is to enhance the nutrition and food security of the entire population.

Bittman, Pollan, Salvador, and de Schutter emphasize that replacing the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) with a “U.S. Department of Food, Health, and Wellbeing” would be difficult at best. It would require unprecedented political will and cooperation among parties. The same can be said for institutional change in agricultural ministries throughout the world. Regardless of the challenges, however, nothing will change until the conversation surrounding food policies, politics, and institutions takes a major turn.