Needs and Opportunities for Technology in Developing Regions workshop

at the United Nations-Berkeley "Bridging the Divide" conference
April 23, 2005 (Saturday), 8:00am to 5:30pm
354/360 Hearst Memorial Mining Building, i.e. the Berkeley Institute of Design lab

Co-organizers: John Canny, Gregory Wolff and Matthew Kam, with lots of help from Divya Ramachandran, Jane Chiu, Melissa Ho, Brent Bushnell and Anand Raghavan

Thanks to Drew Isaacs, the conference co-chairs and the conference support team for generously providing their support

Matthew Kam > Community Design Workshop > April 23, 2005 

Notes

Disclaimer: Notes contributed by workshop participants do not necessarily reflect what presenters said.  Their notes are posted here to provide a more complete account of the workshop, as interpreted by the respective note-takers. 

• Melissa Ho's notes: http://www.melissaho.com/research/talks.php?talk=bridge-needs 

Agenda

With the exception of registration, all workshop events took place in the Berkeley Institute of Design lab, i.e. room 354/360 in the Hearst Memorial Mining Building. 

8:00 Registration and Breakfast (Garbarini Lounge, Bechtel Engineering Center)

8:45 Welcome and Introduction

9:00 Panel 1: “Bridging Formal and Informal Economies”

• Lessons from Market Research in Informal Economies in Asia and Eastern Europe (Jessica Rothenberg-Aalami, Research Scholar, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley)

• Experiences from Microfinance and Micro-enterprises in Mexico (Steven Hardgrave, MBA Candidate, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley)

• Experiences from Microfinance and Micro-enterprises in India (Emily Tucker, Technical Project Manager, Grameen Foundation USA)

9:30 Breakout Discussions

10:30 Break

11:00 Panel 2: “Education”

• Challenges in Providing Access to University Education in South Africa: The Story of CIDA City Campus - A Case Study on Innovative Approaches to Mass Scale Higher Education Provision in Developing Nations (Taddy Blecher, CEO and Founder, CIDA City Campus, South Africa)

• An After-School Program for Low-Income Students in Oakland, California and a Travel Diary from India, Vietnam and Cambodia (Glynda Hull, Professor, Graduate School of Education, UC Berkeley)

• Meeting the Distance Education Challenge Across the Divide: Bangladesh Perspective (Yousuf Mahbubul Islam, Director, Research and Advisory Services, BRAC University, Bangladesh)

• Education for Rural and Urban Slums Students in India (Urvashi Sahni, Founder and Executive Director, Study Hall Foundation, India)

13:00 Lunch and Breakout Discussions

14:30 Panel 3: “Energy and the Environment”

• Experiential Ecological Sanitation and Water Treatment Education in Rural Haiti (S. Brownell, Engineers for a Sustainable World) - slides

• Sustainable Development and Micro Hydro Electric in Panama (Nathan Gray, Founder and Chairman of EarthTrain; Co-Founder of Oxfam America)

• Water Quality and Access in the Baja California Peninsula, Mexico (Fermin Reygadas, Ph.D. Student, Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley; 2005-06 MOT-UNIDO Fellow)

15:30 Break and Breakout Discussions

16:00 Wrap-up and Next Steps

17:00 Social and Networking

(cancelled) Panel 4: “Challenges Ahead: Barriers and Alternatives to Formal Economy Institutions”

• Agricultural Product Market in Mali (Moulaye Ely Diarra, Reuters Digital Vision Fellow) - slides

• Employment and Income Generation Projects in Bangladesh (Zillur Rahman, Advisor, BRAC University Enterprise Development Forum, Bangladesh) 

Speakers

The invited panelists include development professionals, social entrepreneurs, academics and researchers who work in the areas of microfinance, informal sector economies, education, energy and the environment.  Several panelists have worked in these areas for at least a decade.

Overview

This workshop aims to bring together development practitioners and technology researchers to speed progress in addressing pressing social needs. Our goal is to identify a small set of important but inadequately addressed social needs in the areas of education, natural resources, micro-enterprises and related areas. 

The idea is to get people with deep experience working “on the ground” in the same room with world-class technologists in the hope of establishing good working relationships and defining a few potential joint projects with realistic expectations of success.  The workshop goal will be a small set of key unanswered questions that could be addressed experimentally. The approach includes defining some testable hypotheses, e.g.:

• Interactive distance learning can improve education in Bangladesh.

• Making rural outreach of microfinance more cost-efficient can improve access to credit in Uganda.

• Regular reminders to take medication can reduce tuberculosis in Kenya.

• Putting buyers and sellers of used cellphones in touch with one another can reduce electronic waste.

We aim to help workshop participants design practical experiments and metrics to test their hypotheses.  The experiments would be carried out as joint efforts between community leaders, practitioners and technologists.

I can be contacted at mattkam@cs.berkeley.edu  

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