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
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
With
the exception of registration, all workshop events took place in the Berkeley
Institute of Design lab, i.e. room 354/360 in the
8:00
Registration and Breakfast (Garbarini
Lounge,
Bechtel
Engineering
Center)
Lessons
from Market Research in Informal Economies in Asia
and Eastern Europe
(Jessica Rothenberg-Aalami, Research Scholar, Haas
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
10:30
Break
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,
Education
for Rural and Urban Slums Students in
Experiential
Ecological Sanitation and Water Treatment Education in Rural Haiti
(S. Brownell, Engineers for a Sustainable World)
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,
15:30
Break and Breakout Discussions
(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)
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.
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
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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