Month: April 2013

SIPA Team Competes in Policy Challenge

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Blog reposted from the Columbia – SIPA website.

SIPA was one of four newcomers in a field of nine schools that took part in the 2013 National Public Policy Challenge, held in Philadelphia on March 16 and 17.

The invitational competition, hosted by the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania, asks teams of students representing some of the nation’s leading public policy schools to develop and present a policy proposal and civic campaign plan to achieve significant change in their home communities.

Earlier this spring, the Office of Academic Affairs solicited proposals from students interested in competing. Selected to represent SIPA was a proposal for more efficient disaster-relief management, developed by a team comprising Lakshmi Balachandran MPA-DP ’13, Jesper Frant MPA-DP ’14, Eric Smyth MIA ’13, and Seisei Tatebe-Goddu MIA ’13.

The proposed initiative, known as ReliefMap, had been conceived by Frant in Professor Anne Nelson’s class on New Media for Development Communication. It would respond to large inefficiencies in matching donations by volunteers and organizations to the actual needs of citizens in the aftermath of disasters such as Hurricane Sandy.

Advised by faculty members Ester Fuchs and Sarah Holloway, the team prepared an in-depth implementation, marketing, and finance plan for presentation to the competition judges. While the team did not win the competition, members said they received positive feedback and valuable comments on how to take the idea forward.

“The process of developing an idea that was not only technically feasible, but would also ensure interest and large scale adoption by government agencies, disaster relief organizations and common citizens was extremely valuable,” said Tatebe-Goddu.

Meeting team members to solicit feedback, Associate Dean Dan McIntyre of Academic Affairs praised them for their efforts in a tight timeframe and noted that SIPA had received word of the competition relatively late. McIntyre said his office would make sure participating students have more time to prepare for the competition in 2014.

“We’re already looking forward to next year,” he said.

—  Lakshmi Balachandran MPA-DP ’13

Pictured above (L-R): Professor Ester Fuchs, Seisei Tatebe-Goddu, Eric Smyth, Lakshmi Balachandran, Jesper Frant. Not pictured: Professor Sarah Holloway.

In Global Food Systems, MPA-DP Students Get Their Hands Dirty

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Blog reposted from the Columbia – SIPA website.

Against the backdrop of the rolling hills of Pennsylvania, Professor Glenn Denning’s class in  Global Food Systems took a break from classwork to visit the Rodale Institute, an agricultural research organization specializing in organic farming.

Having studied food systems and farming methods from around the world all semester, the students welcomed the opportunity to explore agricultural practices in person. “It’s rare that we actually have the opportunity to be on a farm,” said Olivia Snarski MPA-DP ’14. “Our academic brains were buzzing because we were able to visualize the application of our agricultural development knowledge.”

Welcoming the students to the farm, the associate research scientist Dr. Gladis Zinati gave a review of the research being conducted by the Institute. While organic matter only accounts for 5 percent of the soil, it is critical for maintaining overall soil health, she explained. In order to maintain healthy soils the biological components must be kept in balance. Particularly, one can predict the health of the soil by the types of protozoa present – too many ciliates could mean trouble.

After an organic lunch of oven-baked pizza, the students got their hands dirty. Pitchforks in hand, the students helped to aerate compost — decayed plant material used as organic fertilizer. Many of the students were shocked to see steam rising from the center of the musty dark-brown pile. Well-maintained compost, Zinati and her colleagues explained, has a high internal temperature and, if aerated properly, produces an entire world of beneficial fungus and bacteria that can be used to improve farm soil quality.

Rodale is at the forefront of research into farming best practices. Rodale’s Farming Systems Trial is America’s longest-running study comparing the effects of organic versus conventional farming practices. “It was very interesting that organic farming methods were shown to have equal yield as conventional agriculture,” said Marissa Strniste MPA-DP ’14.

The trial also found that conventional farming has a negative impact on soil health – reducing the carbon content of the soil. Denning argued that this finding does not hold true in all situations, especially in a resource-poor setting with highly degraded soils. “The idea that chemical fertilizers are universally bad for soil health is simply not correct,” Denning said.

“Used incorrectly, chemical fertilizers can be bad for soil health and the wider environment,” he continued. “Used correctly, they can help restore degraded soils, achieve higher yields, improve food security, and save lives.”

Among the agricultural innovations that the Rodale Institute demonstrated to the SIPA students were the use of compost tea and zero tillage. Compost tea is made by steeping a bag of compost in water. The solution is then sprayed on farmland as fertilizer and to improve the biological content of the soil. Zero tillage avoids the disruptive use of tills and plows, which can lead to soil erosion. Instead of plowing, a leguminous cover crop is rolled with a metal barrel leaving an organic mat that suppresses weeds and fertilizes the soil. Both innovations could be used in resource-poor settings to extend the impact of limited available compost and reduce the cost of agricultural inputs such as fertilizer, herbicide and labor.

With 1,000 Days Left to Reach MDGs, A Look Back and Forward

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Blog originally posted on the Millennium Villages website.

The 1,000-day milestone to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) was on the minds of presenters and audience alike at the Earth Institute’s Sustainable Development Seminar. The seminar gathered professors Jeffrey Sachs, Prabhjot Singh, and Vijay Modi to take a critical look at how far the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) has come in the eight years since its founding and analyze what still needs to be accomplished.

Sachs kicked off the seminar with an overview of the MVP, which he described as showing a pathway to achieve the Millennium Development Goals in very poor settings in sub-Saharan Africa.

Given the time-bound nature of the goals, Sachs noted, “part of our self-assignment in this project is to run, to hurry, to try to meet a timetable, to try and promote action.” In a project like the MVP, where the goal is to break the cycle of extreme poverty, Sachs argued, “it’s better to try and miss than to slow down and not try.”

The MVP built off the epistemic community knowledge of development best practices, and initially started with the implementation of quick-wins – which include long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets and improved agricultural inputs to boost crop yield. The quick wins, however, while important are only part of the equation. As the project moved forward, ideas about how to meet the MDGs evolved along with the Millennium Villages themselves.

Sachs described the next phase of the MVP as falling into four categories: moving from demonstration to design, expanding beyond interventions to systems-based approaches, harnessing the unprecedented expansion of information and communications technology, and integrating public investments with business.

This next phase can create an environment of innovation in the MVP that has fostered the creation of new approaches to development. The health sector, in particular, has experienced a sea change.

Singh explained that moving to a design and systems-based approach forced the MVP to rethink the delivery of healthcare in poor, rural settings. Improved primary health facilities, the project realized, only get you about half the way to achieving better health outcomes due to constraints on access.

Community health workers (CHWs) extend the reach of primary healthcare systems expanding access for the rural poor. The growth of mobile telecommunication has allowed the MVP to develop platforms to enable managers to monitor the CHWs they oversee in real-time. Actionable data not only empowers managers and health workers, it provides critical information on how to improve the health system and make it more adaptive.

CHW programs have been implemented across the Millennium Villages, but the CHWs must be scaled across Africa in order to have a measurable impact on global development. The One Million Community Health Worker campaign aims to do just that.

With the 1,000-day MDG countdown underway, many countries are still far from achieving the MDGs, but new approaches to development born from the MVP have put ending extreme poverty within reach.