Dear Friends and Colleagues,
This year the Center has focused on deepening a few key partnerships with NGOs, City governments, and private sector actors. Our work has an increasing focus on improving the resilience of communities in the face of climate change.
The Center provided analysis of food security interventions done by a large NGO in Afghanistan and Ethiopia. Water security is a primary challenge in these countries—increasing climate change has meant that periods of drought have grown and are offset by short periods of flooding. Both of these are harmful to farmers who need consistent rainfall in order to have strong harvests. The flooding issues in Afghanistan sadly became more prominent this summer as hundreds died from flooding in Eastern Afghanistan. Our evaluation, provided in partnership with the hydrology group from UVA’s engineering school, provided information on the overall impact of the interventions as well as the success in targeting of the interventions. We found that remote sensing holds promise for evaluation of water and food security interventions—particularly in areas with heightened security concerns.
We solidified our partnership with the City of Cape Town and received a grant from the International Growth Centre for our work optimizing utility interventions to reduce cases of blockages in open sewers. Open sewers are common to many fast-growing cities in developing countries, but they have substantial drawbacks as they can cause flooding and the spread of diseases. We are working with the City of Cape Town to find solutions that should reduce these blockages and improve local health.
This collaborative research with NGOs and governments serves several functions: it provides high-quality low-cost consulting work to NGOs that would not otherwise be able to carefully evaluate these projects, it provides experience for MPP and undergraduate students in working directly with NGOs, and it creates a partnership between the Center for Social Innovation and the NGOs and government offices which has translated into large grant applications based on research questions that have become salient based on our work together.
Our policy reach is extensive: In November we held the First Annual Economics of Sustainable Development conference in collaboration with the World Bank and George Washington University. This will be an annual conference to promote transformational research on environmental quality.
Our student programs have also been highly successful over the past year. The Center had four research assistants managing Center research programs and collaborations with NGOs. In addition, we ran “Invest Appalachia” a 10-day J-term experiential course taught by Stephanie Randolph, an expert in impact investing in Appalachia. The group traveled around Appalachia interviewing small businesses and NGOs. They observed the unique challenges faced by social entrepreneurs in Appalachia thanks to generous funding by the Tadler family. In addition, Faculty fellow Christine Mahoney is the Principal Investigator on a large new grant to develop ways to increase community participation in developing renewable energy projects in Appalachia.
I hope you will join me in developing and participating in new and exciting opportunities for the Center, both in terms of student programs and research opportunities.
Best,
Molly Lipscomb