Student Stories

Overview

I am currently working for DIL as a GSR for the Spring 2014 semester. My two main responsibilities have been to provide support to DIL’s current project teams, and to do outreach to students, faculty and development practitioners who may want to get involved with DIL in the future. Doing outreach is about building connections with other people in the Berkeley community who are passionate about development, which is quite fun. Supporting current teams has involved a wide range of tasks including providing feedback on grant applications, arranging mentoring relationships with Bay Area entrepreneurs, and identifying resources for undergraduates who would like to develop their own social enterprise ideas.

What I’ve Learned

One thing I have really enjoyed about this position has been getting to see a side of international development that’s outside my own ambit. As a first-year political science PhD student, I am interested in the creation and evolution of political institutions in African countries, especially those that have previously had civil wars. Technology is sometimes discussed in this context – for example, biometric IDs for voting, or using SMS to allow people to easily contact their representatives – but it generally doesn’t receive much attention. Through my work at DIL, I’ve been able to explore technological innovations that could be quite relevant to political science research in post-conflict countries, such as the Distance Mobile Survey Project. It has been very valuable to have a structured way to learn about interesting work that’s going on outside of my discipline.

What’s Next

After another year or two of coursework, I will begin my dissertation research in the DR Congo. Thanks to the time I’ve spent at DIL, I’m now considering adding a larger survey component to my research using low-cost mobile data collection.

Overview

Big Ideas is an annual year-long contest that provides funding, support, and encouragement to interdisciplinary teams of students who have “big ideas.” This year, the Big Ideas Contest turns 10 years old! Over the course of a decade, the contest has inspired innovative and high-impact projects aimed at solving challenging social issues around the world.

Over the past two years, I’ve supported and advised undergraduate and graduate level student innovators to develop their ideas into viable projects. I’ve seen proposals that describe innovations of various shapes and sizes, tackling issues ranging from poor market access for East African farmers, to something as massive as climate change. Every time I think our Big Ideas contestants couldn’t be more brilliant, passionate, and hardworking, I am proven wrong!

What I’ve Learned

While working for the contest, I’ve realized that a good idea is often times not enough– even the most creative and smart solution won’t go far without the hours of work poured into research to develop a compelling project. Even if a proposal doesn’t advance into the final round one contest year, if a team continues to dedicate efforts to build upon that idea, it’s likely they will be successful in the future. Perseverance is key!

What’s Next

With Big Ideas turning 10 and this being my last semester as a student working on the contest, I’m excited to celebrate a decade of innovation with more resources, prize opportunities, and exciting events. After I finish my program at UC Berkeley, I will be pursuing a career in international development with a focus on agriculture. Serving as a Big Ideas advisor has actually encouraged me to search for positions that involve project implementation (in addition to evaluation), so if I secure such a job, I will need to thank all of my advisees for the inspiration.

Overview

Power grids around the world experience frequent service failures. This is due to limited monitoring of grid performance at the periphery (i.e., at the household level); poor understanding of grid topology, architecture, and dynamics; and misappropriated resources for maintenance, repair, and extension of aging infrastructure.

Along with collaborators from the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions group (TIER) and DIL, I am developing a new low-cost crowd-sourced method of monitoring power outages and restorations through the use of unmodified smartphones. The key insight is that smartphones can detect power outages by monitoring changes to their own charging state, locally verify an outage using a variety of existing on-phone sensors, and corroborate sensed outages with other phones through cloud-based services. We hope that the resultant data stream, combined with advances in machine learning, distributed data-stream processing, and complex network analysis, will allow us to make both immediate and longitudinal determinations about the state of the power grid, potentially providing a generational improvement in the data available to utility companies and their ratepayers, regulators, and researchers around the world. We call our system GridWatch (http://grid.watch).

What I’ve Learned

DIL has placed the GridWatch project in front of decision makers in government and industry, leading to productive partnerships both domestically and abroad. These partnerships have given me first hand experience with some of the many moving parts of a large scale development intervention. The opportunity to work not just on answering interesting technological problems, but also to address economic and policy based interests of other involved parties has led to invaluable lessons with the cultural complexities of development interventions.

What’s Next

My project is lucky enough to have received a seed grant from the Siebel Energy Institute, a new consortium that supports innovative and collaborative energy research. This funding will help us perform a pilot deployment of GridWatch in Kenya in collaboration with local utility companies and IBM Research Africa. Data generated by this pilot will be key in validating our approach before attempting greater scale.

Overview

As part of the Higher Education Solution Network initiative between USAID and partner schools, the Blum center has been encouraged to develop programs to facilitate direct engagement of students with USAID missions. The first pilot program, launched in the 2013 spring semester, focused on partnering Berkeley students with USAID or related development organizations to complete policy analysis reports. The majority of these projects are being implemented as part of the Goldman School of Public Policy Advanced Policy Analysis/Introduction to Policy Analysis client-based project course. As the project coordinator, my role is to facilitate communication and collaboration between Berkeley students and their clients in development organizations, to track progress and provide regular updates to the Blum Center to keep relevant parties informed of the status of these projects, and to serve as a resource and provide feedback to students throughout their research and report writing.

What I’ve Learned

Working with different students focused on different research areas in development and working with different USAID groups and organizations has highlighted the breadth of topics and approaches in development. Watching students learn to apply their classroom knowledge to provide real-world analysis and recommendations also illustrates the importance of flexibility in approaches and work-plans as well as the ability to align and clearly define expectations. Berkeley students are capable of producing very high-level and quality work, and adding in relevance to academic exercises through these student engagement projects is an invaluable opportunity for both students and clients.

What’s Next

I hope to continue to be a part of the Blum Center team focusing on student engagement and improving collaborations in science and technology for development between UC Berkeley and USAID.

Overview

Thanks to the Development Impact Lab, I found a great opportunity to work with USAID as an intern in the Securing Water for Food (SWFF) Grand Challenge for Development. The contest garnered proposals of scientific and technological innovations from all over the world, designed to more effectively use and manage the water required to produce food in low income countries (securingwaterforfood.org). SWFF is focusing on three areas critical to reducing water scarcity in the food value chain: water reuse and efficiency, water capture and storage, and salinity.

My role has centered on rating concept notes according to their applicability and technical and business viability. It is rewarding to be part of one of the leading new mechanisms in international development for discovering breakthrough solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.

What I’ve Learned

I am astounded by the sheer quality of innovative ideas that have the potential to change the world. However, the innovations that stand out and have the highest chances of changing the world have two key factors in common – scalability and sustainability.

What’s Next

After working as an Innovation Consultant at UNICEF Guatemala, I came to Berkeley to learn how the corporate environment operates and how it can boost emerging markets towards a more sustainable economic future. After finishing my MBA degree at Haas, I want to work alongside businesses, advising them on how to do “good” on top of doing well. Companies need to realize that social responsibility is no longer an addendum to their models, but an integral part of doing business in today’s world. My aspiration is to align development efforts with social priorities, and pool resources together to create evidence-based international development plans that reach the most vulnerable people. The lines between the private, public, nonprofit, and academic sectors must continue to blend in order to achieve social progress. I want to facilitate this process so that we can bend unsustainable paths in the developing world towards a brighter, more sustainable future.

Overview

As a member of the new DIL Idea Team, I am part of an inter-disciplinary group of graduate students developing and implementing strategies to engage the campus on issues at the intersection of technology and development. Our team includes environmental engineers, economists, planners, and computer scientists. This diversity has led to incredibly exciting ideas that, for me, really illustrate why DIL’s emphasis on interdisciplinary work is so vital for the field of international development. One of our primary projects this year was producing an interactive map for DIL’s open house that allowed participants to share their development projects with the wider DIL community. The Idea Team’s resident computer scientists are now moving the map online to expand the DIL network worldwide. This tool will not only allow development scholars and practitioners around the world to learn about relevant projects in their region and connect with other researchers, it will also allow the UC Berkeley community to gain an understanding of the incredible work being done across the campus.

What I’ve Learned

Students in every department on campus are committed to generating game-changing innovations in the field of international development. By working across departmental boundaries, we have the potential to become far more than the sum of our parts.

What’s Next

This summer I will be interning with USAID’s Global Health Office for Population and Reproductive Health, helping analyze and disseminate the best practices in mobile health strategies. This work will build on my interest in researching the role of technology in advancing sustainable, community-centered development strategies, with a particular emphasis on using rigorous analytical tools to produce evidence-based program evaluations.