“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
—Nelson Mandela
It was the fall of 2004. Robert Birgeneau, chancellor of the Berkeley campus, and I were walking near the Campanile, the landmark bell and clock tower rising more than three hundred feet above the heart of campus. I can’t tell you why, but something clicked in my mind, and I asked him, “Is there any kind of global poverty program here?”
“Well, no,” he replied. “Not really.”
“This place hasn’t really changed much in forty years,” I said. You could still take an introductory course in art history or music appreciation, but you couldn’t take a basic course in global poverty. So we started thinking about how we might change that. The opening idea simply was to start a survey course anyone could take to learn about poverty. That was it.
Once we began exploring that idea with deans and faculty from different schools and colleges around campus, we realized that courses in business, engineering, public health, and other fields were deeply relevant to the topic. I started to think that establishing a program was a good idea.
Soon we had pulled together a planning group, including academic deans and faculty from the schools of law, business, and engineering and from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the UC Davis campus. As I’ve said before, I feel strongly about including business to teach management of development projects. Then, too, Berkeley Lab was essential for its world-class stature in science research. So was the UC Davis campus, with its excellent programs for improving the health and nutrition of the poor around the globe. All these schools, departments, and people helped take on the challenge of creating a strong curriculum on poverty and income inequality.
A brilliant and lovely man who was dean of the engineering school at the time, Richard Newton, told me one day he thought engineering would be the logical partner for a program in global poverty. I had been thinking the business school would be the right partner, but Richard changed my mind in about ten minutes. You help bring people out of poverty with innovation, he said, adding, “And that means engineering.” Sadly, he passed away suddenly from pancreatic cancer only months later and so was not able to see the impact this insight soon would make.
Ananya Roy, a scholar and inspiring lecturer on international poverty and global development, and part of our initial team, reflected on the early discussions: “We had to ask ourselves, what is our competitive advantage? What is our role as a great public research university in these struggles in inequality? What do we do for students who are really passionate about development?”
We had no grand plan—only a goal, a willingness to experiment to figure out what worked best, and a desire to keep things moving. It was very much blue-sky thinking. The answers to the questions we asked helped us develop guiding principles, such as “to teach the ethics of global citizenship.”
The deans and faculty members working with me suggested we put together a center. I realized it would take a few years to get it going, and agreed to commit funds to bring our plans to life. It turned out that what we were creating—what would become the Blum Center for Developing Economies—was innovative in many ways.
My work on the Blum Center has been some of the most rewarding in my life. Students from a variety of disciplines come together and talk about global poverty issues and then go out in the field and actually do something about it. Our goal is for them to think and collaborate across disciplines and sectors—an approach I know is necessary to solve these problems.
As far as we knew when we began in 2005, no university had a multidisciplinary center like this for undergraduate students who wanted to take on global poverty issues. Now, many universities do, and our approach has been replicated at universities in the United States and around the world. Nothing could make us more hopeful for real solutions to the complex problems of poverty.
We started the Center with a two-pronged approach: enlist Berkeley faculty and students in finding technological solutions to the most pressing needs of the poor, and educate students who are motivated to make a difference in the lives of the poor, through the Global Poverty and Practice (GPP) minor. Our goal is to educate them so they can make a difference.
Even though poverty studies could certainly be a major, we decided to offer a minor because knowledge from every field can be a factor in alleviating poverty. We wanted our students to bring what they were learning in a diverse set of majors into our classes and out in the field. Our GPP minor is rigorous: a comprehensive, demanding introductory course followed by two courses bracketing an eight-week field experience. Time in the field is key. Most students volunteer with nonprofits, governments, or community-based organizations in a developing country, but increasing numbers are helping similar groups that serve poor communities in the United States. A few sign on with advocacy groups in Washington, DC, or the Bay Area.
My own study-abroad and travel experiences in Europe and North Africa opened my eyes to global poverty when I was a Berkeley undergraduate. And I learned the value of listening to people many times over in Nepal, starting with Sherpas in the Khumbu. I knew that opportunities to live in the villages alongside local people could show our students how these people usually know better than any “experts” from Western governments or NGOs how to improve their living situation.
Two key priorities at the Center are to educate students to be global citizens and to take cutting-edge technology (which Berkeley is famous for) and put it to work in the service of the poor. We want students to have a better understanding of problems people face in the developing world and of how to find their place as global citizens in a post–Cold War world. In their field practice, students get a Peace Corps–like experience before they begin their careers—the sort of real-world education experienced by many volunteers in the twenty-first-century Peace Corps, who are often mid- or late-career individuals recruited for special talents and expertise.
We want students, when they work with poor people, to think of themselves as apprentices. We want students to approach their field experiences with modesty and humility, and to reflect more deeply about their place in the world. That mind-set can only come from living among the poor people we hope to serve. As John Hardman of The Carter Center pointed out (and described in chapter 4), people in poor circumstances know how to improve their living situation. They just lack the resources, training, and tools to do it.
In a speech at the US Naval Academy in 2014, former president Bill Clinton echoed the Dalai Lama’s message about the need for empathy in human relations and, in effect, articulated why we at the Blum Center believe field experience is so essential:
I believe a very important leadership skill in the twenty-first century is the ability to remember that no matter how alien somebody looks to you and no matter how deep the conflict is, they have a story, too. They have their hopes, they have their dreams, they have their disappointments, and they have their nightmares. I think we have undervalued the ability not just to tell stories, but to listen to them. Once you know somebody else’s story, it then becomes possible against all the odds to build some measure of trust. For all the high-tech solutions to the world that make us think we can quantify all this in big numbers, personal trust still counts for something, and its absence is devastating.1
The course that students take before heading into the field—Ethics, Methods, and Pragmatics—is a deep-dive into the countries and cultures where they are going to work. When they hit the ground, they need to know the sociopolitical situation and to avoid being naïve. Students in that course read widely on all that might be relevant to their experience. They learn how to take a survey; how to document their experience with photos, videos, blogs, and so forth; and how to respect the place they are going and the people with whom they will live and interact.
When students return to campus, they enroll in the Reflection Course Group Seminar. The focus is just as the title suggests: Students are required through a rigorous process to reflect on what they learned in the field, what mistakes they made, particular circumstances they encountered, and any contradictions they observed. The seminar is important, instructive, and powerful.
We find that after a field experience, students dive into their classes. They say they liked the fieldwork, and want to stay connected somehow while continuing their campus studies. Often, they find a local organization in the Bay Area that provides experiences similar to what they found during their weeks in the field.
Since 1975, the number of people living below the poverty line in the United States has been steadily rising, according to statistics from the US Census Bureau.2 And while the percentage of our population living in poverty hit a low in 2000 of 11.3 percent (about equal to the low seen in the early 1970s), it has been rising fairly steadily ever since. In 2014, the poverty rate was 14.8 percent, which means 46.7 million people in our country are living in poverty.
The statistics on children living in poverty are more gruesome. In 2012, child poverty in the United States hit a staggering 24.2 percent, according to a UNICEF report.3 Between 2008 and 2012, when 1.8 million more children fell into poverty in our country, Norway, Australia, Chile, Finland, and Poland reduced child poverty by about 30 percent. Given all these sad statistics, it’s not surprising that an increasing percentage of the Blum Center’s students are doing their fieldwork in the United States.
Is poverty increasing in our country because of an increasing inequality of wealth and income? And if so, is it really a problem? These are the two core questions Bob Reich explores with students who flock to his Wealth and Poverty lectures.4 They are the most popular on campus, filling the seven-hundred-seat Wheeler Auditorium to overflowing. Bob’s answer to both questions: a resounding yes. A strong middle class is vital for a stable, growing economy and engaging citizens in our democracy, but you won’t have a strong middle class if the equality of income and wealth continues to deteriorate.
Bob covers several key themes in his lectures:
If you can invent a better metering system for distributing affordable electricity in rural India, or figure out how a smartphone can see and transmit images of tuberculosis cells from a blood smear on a slide taken from a finger prick of someone in rural Vietnam, you can help people in poor, remote areas by the tens of thousands and, over time, maybe millions. In fact, these two innovations are not “ifs.” They were both invented by Berkeley faculty and students.
One characteristic that makes the Blum Center unusual is that engineering has been integral from the beginning. “When you involve an engineering school in poverty studies, you appeal to a class of students who want to figure out how to do something,” explained our longtime friend George Shultz, former secretary of state.
Exactly.
We encourage and support inventions created in science and engineering research labs at Berkeley that address this imposing challenge of global poverty. Similarly, we fund applied research in the field that faculty and research experts believe will improve the lives of poor people. We do this because regular feedback from people on the ground early in the R&D process helps experts in the engineering lab keep the iterations of their inventions practical and accelerates the process. In many development research programs, collaborations among team members in the field and in the lab typically come too late, after prototypes are created. We also fund students’ travel to remote areas internationally, where they can and do help researchers connect with poor people during early stages of ambitious R&D projects.
One of my ambitions is to harness the tools and creativity of venture capital investing to rapidly scale these inventions. After the inventions are proven in the field, we help students and faculty pursue funding from government agencies, interested NGOs, private and corporate foundations—and eventually private investors. We want to get these inventions into the hands of millions of people who can benefit from them as fast as we can. This sense of urgency is part of what is required to eliminate extreme poverty.
By early 2015, among our successes at Berkeley was CellScope, an invention I mentioned at the start of this section. CellScope transforms the camera of a standard smartphone into a diagnostic microscope that can transmit detailed images of blood cells magnified many times. The invention, greatly advanced from the first prototype in 2007, brings the imaging capability of a $150,000 lab microscope to any rural village that can be reached by backpackers, at a cost of less than $1,000 with potential to fall further.
Trained technicians can draw blood samples from villagers with a simple pinprick and then transmit sample images to labs thousands of miles away. A diagnosis of tuberculosis, malaria, or river blindness can be made within hours instead of weeks. Field tests supported by the World Health Organization in health clinics and small hospitals in rural Vietnam and Cameroon proved CellScope’s effectiveness.
The CellScope team, led by engineering professor Dan Fletcher, has raised substantial funding from prestigious donors such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Vodafone Americas Foundation, Microsoft Research, and Intel.7 At my urging, the university filed for patents for CellScope in the United States, Canada, China, India, and the European Union.
As the CellScope team worked through their first year of field tests in Vietnam, they brought on an undergraduate assistant who had studied Vietnamese in high school. Anh-Thi Le, a political science major with no experience in technology or real lab work, had just completed her GPP fieldwork in India, helping a women’s organization that aided traditional artisans and connected them to consumers in the US fair-trade community. Anh-Thi had been struck during those months by the myriad ways public health problems held back poor women in India, and she quickly grasped why the CellScope project could be significant. In an essay for the Center’s publications, Anh-Thi explained what it was like to make an unexpected leap into the lab from social sciences:
I remember feeling intimidated during my first meeting with the CellScope team. It was my first time stepping foot in a lab at Berkeley. While I was extremely excited about the opportunity, I was nervous about my qualifications. I was a social sciences student with little experience in global health. I remember being lost when computer programming terms were tossed around, and having to review how to properly wear and take off my latex gloves in the lab (sounds silly, but it’s important!).
Yet for many clinicians in the field, working with CellScope would be the first time they had ever used a computer. In many ways, if I could not understand how to use a part of the CellScope device or software, neither would a clinician.
Despite the challenges, I can’t remember a time I did not love working in the lab. Neil Switz, a postdoctoral scholar in the Fletcher Lab, and I conducted weekly Skype calls late at night with physicians in Hà Nôi to troubleshoot the device; spent hours replicating, testing, and solving problems; reviewed hundreds of images to check on quality control; and created countless manuals/instruction guidelines on everything from computer usage to reading sputum slides.
I had never imagined myself working in an engineering lab, let alone collaborating with physicians in Vietnam on a clinical study with the potential to impact thousands of lives, but Neil taught me that I didn’t necessarily need to be an expert in global health or engineering to contribute.8
Student projects originating on the Berkeley campus often amaze and inspire us before they are even in the field. Many are vetted, advised, and supported through Big Ideas@Berkeley, a campus-wide competition for interdisciplinary teams of undergraduates and graduates. Big Ideas is an incubator for students to pursue genuine positive change in the world. Two of our trustees, Andrew and Virginia Rudd, provide key funding.
Big Ideas is a brilliant process. Mentors and judges have included leaders from the World Bank, USAID, Google.org, Intel, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and Grameen Bank, and many outstanding Berkeley professors—among them, Dr. Arthur Rosenfeld, emeritus professor of physics at Berkeley Labs and winner of the Enrico Fermi Award for lifetime achievement in energy research. The program demonstrates how a prize competition offering students the barest amount of seed capital can stimulate projects we never would have imagined, such as mentoring high school women in Oakland who are dreaming of a college education, and training staff in rural hospitals with no access to electricity how to use a solar-powered lighting device in their delivery rooms. Project categories have included global poverty alleviation, clean and sustainable energy alternatives, creative expression for social justice, open data, promoting human rights, and scaling up big ideas.
Big Ideas winners are Blum Center heroes. We always fund top-ranking entries. We want winners taking the next steps that in time can lead to amazing benefits for people in poverty and attract millions of dollars in private capital to keep building. We push for innovation, field tests, ongoing iterations, and ultimately scaling to dimensions that will bring the results of their genius to help millions of people. Our message to students is they don’t have to get a PhD before their ambitious ideas are taken seriously. If they have an idea and a plan, they can get started right away.
Our center is a hybrid. We don’t compete with departments for the standard spoils of career-building in academic institutions: research grants, faculty positions, and graduate programs. We offer an array of programs and opportunities, leveraging the resources that already exist within the university and adding some of our own to the mix, to help students and faculty pursue their dreams and apply their talents to alleviating poverty.
The progress of the Center and the students and faculty involved would not have been possible without the work of some very capable leaders.
Berkeley’s College of Engineering dean, Shankar Sastry, has built his career at the intersection of technology and social impact. Shankar studied at the prestigious India Institute of Technology in Bombay before completing two graduate engineering degrees at Berkeley and heading an institute on campus called the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS). He became the Blum Center’s chief academic officer, or faculty director, in 2007.
Shankar led the charge in establishing the new field of academic study for PhD students known as development engineering. In his words, development engineering promotes “high-quality research and development that more reliably advances sustainable social and economic welfare.” In 2013, we made him the chief scientist of a new program, the Development Impact Lab.
Laura D’Andrea Tyson headed the Council of Economic Advisors in the Clinton administration and now chairs the Blum Center’s board of trustees. Former dean of the London Business School and of Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, she is a professor at the Haas School and head of its Institute for Business and Social Impact. Laura has worked with me and the board to build the Blum Center’s teaching and research programs. “You almost always find there is an outsider when these things are created, because insiders tend to look at problems from their disciplinary perspective,” she has said. In other words, business professors see business problems and solutions, law professors see legal problems and solutions, and few see the bigger picture. What does she think is necessary to break through siloes in thinking? “An outside agitator with capital. It would be very hard to get faculty from different disciplines to come together, hang out, and create an interdisciplinary minor on poverty alleviation unless there were resources to support the research interests of their different disciplines.”
My commitment to provide private funding obviously has helped keep the Center’s progress on a fast track. Because we are a multidisciplinary center, not a college or school with a specific academic focus, we have more freedom to manage the Center’s programs and to be a catalyst of many talents and academic fields that can help people out of poverty. Our center is a source of funds for the fourteen schools and colleges across campus.
With two strokes—outside funding and cooperation from Berkeley’s Office of the Chancellor—we sidestepped many predictable departmental rivalries. Money for research, for faculty positions, and for graduate students to support research is the currency of major universities. Too often, jockeying among deans within limited university budgets inhibits or blocks interdepartmental collaboration. Collaboration increasingly is necessary.
Great universities must encourage collaboration. Just as businesses do in competitive markets, great universities need to keep pace with and respond to a rapidly changing world. They owe this to their students both to make the college experience more valuable and to better prepare students to take on the major challenges of the twenty-first century.
“In the world college students live in today, problems can’t be solved by any one discipline,” said Maryanne McCormick, executive director of the Blum Center since 2008. “Students have to understand the social, technical, economic, and cultural aspects of a problem to begin to address it.” This is why the Center has a multidisciplinary structure built around new technologies with great potential for the developing world. We aim to bridge gaps that often lie between innovations in the lab and actual effective deployment, to help tens of millions of the more than two billion people who live on less than $2 a day.
Even our trustees—their background, credentials, and areas of expertise—reflect our mission. I have already mentioned Laura Tyson; Steven Chu, President Obama’s first energy secretary; and Mark Yudof, president emeritus of the University of California. Two of my valued business partners who helped drive Newbridge Capital’s great success in Asia, Dan Carroll and Weijian Shan, also are trustees. So are two humanitarian leaders who have been at my side for many years: Dr. John Hardman, of The Carter Center, and Erica Stone, of the American Himalayan Foundation.
The diverse backgrounds of our trustees helps ensure that the mission of the Center is fulfilled.
I always tell people to think of the Center’s innovation program, the Development Impact Lab, as a venture capital model adapted to academia. The lab had an impressive start, with fifty projects funded and impacts in twenty-five countries, due in large part to strong backing from Rajiv Shah. In late 2012, USAID committed $20 million to the Center to support Development Impact Lab projects.
Raj and his colleagues at USAID were so impressed by Development Impact Lab that a year later they established a university consortium modeled on the lab, to promote new technologies that improve the lives of poor people. An incubator for start-ups, the Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN) includes seven universities—Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, College of William and Mary, Duke, Michigan State, Texas A&M, and Makerere University in Uganda—plus two research institutions. The universities were chosen from nearly five hundred applications from forty-nine states and thirty-three countries. HESN was funded with $137 million over five years from USAID and matching funds from participating universities. The mission is to leverage great research in universities to address problems of global poverty.
Late in 2014, forty students showcased fascinating technology innovations—all targeted to developing economies—through brief pitches as individuals or small teams before more than four hundred students from these universities as well as speakers and potential investors representing Facebook, Google, Apple, and other Silicon Valley giants and venture capital firms.
The three-day conference, TechCon 2014, was thrilling to watch—absolutely some of my most exciting days ever at the Blum Center. Many teams competing for top honors received standing ovations. Here are a few examples of their work:
It won’t be long before promising business ventures emerge from HESN’s Global Development Lab. Raj predicted a few years ago that the collaboration will enable the federal government to “recapture the legacy of science, technology, and innovation as core drivers of development.”10 I couldn’t agree more. Global leaders in development must embrace the inventors of scalable new technologies—and investors or private foundations willing to back them—if we are serious about continuing to reduce extreme poverty in the next twenty years.
Raj Shah led the way for USAID on this. A former executive at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he headed a strategic opportunities effort and managed a $1.5 billion fund for vaccine innovation, Raj markedly improved the focus, senior management, and impact of the agency, opening it up to broader collaborations with entrepreneurs, scientists, inventors, and financiers. In HESN’s Global Development Lab alone, these networks extend beyond more than one hundred partner institutions in academia, civil society, and government across thirty-eight countries.
Center students also participate in a nationwide conference each year, organized by the Clinton Global Initiative, that includes potential financial backers—NGOs, government agencies, and other groups—for the students’ ideas. The purpose is to spark and then scale innovative solutions to global challenges in education, environment and climate change, peace and human rights, poverty alleviation, or public health.
In 2014, the second year our center sponsored Berkeley’s participation in the Clinton Global Initiative, thirty-four Berkeley students from a wide range of majors (biology, math, neuroscience, political science, and business administration, among others) presented on seventeen different projects. Following are a few examples:
We had no idea how successful the Blum Center for Developing Economies would be—or how fast it would all happen. When Ananya Roy’s global poverty lectures were added to the course catalogue in 2005, we expected thirty students to sign up. A hundred came. Just a few years after we officially formed the Center in 2006, Global Poverty and Practice studies became Berkeley’s most popular minor. We were drawing more students than some majors. By the close of the spring 2015 semester, more than thirteen thousand Berkeley students had taken our courses and more than six hundred had completed the GPP minor.
All ten campuses in the UC system now have Blum Centers. Most focus on poverty issues in their regions, such as a cross-border initiative at UC San Diego; poverty and health issues in Latin America for students at the UCLA center; and community development at UC Merced, where more than 60 percent of students are the first in their family to attend college and many are sons or daughters of migrant workers.
Oftentimes when you think you are Thinking Big, you really aren’t Thinking Big enough. We also vastly underestimated the number of faculty already researching the problems of poverty, in disciplines ranging from engineering to business to architecture, and who were eager to join the Center’s network. In the past year, we expanded internationally for the first time with programs at Central European University in Budapest, partnering with investor–philanthropist George Soros, and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where my daughter Annette Blum was a matchmaker in helping faculty roll out programs tailored for Palestinians as well as Israelis.
Then, just as we were finishing this book, more than twelve hundred students from more than eighty countries came to Berkeley in the spring of 2016 for three days under banners of Clinton Global Initiative University, UC Berkeley, and the Blum Center to showcase and share brilliant inventions and concepts. It was a festival of youthful genius, hope, and commitment, hosted by President Clinton and his daughter Chelsea Clinton. Taking this all in, my thoughts for a moment drifted back to seeing JFK paint his vision for the Peace Corps at the Cow Palace when I was in my twenties decades earlier. How far we have come.
Today our center is organized around three pillars: First, a wide selection of hands-on, interdisciplinary courses in the edgiest (and hardest to fund) areas of engineering and the social sciences. Next, undergraduate and graduate student projects that have the greatest potential for impact and scale. And finally, a network of faculty, staff, and practitioners who serve as mentors.
By the summer of 2016, we had sent 822 students to sixty-nine countries for their field or “practice” experience since 2007. We funded travel and other expenses for nearly half of those practice experiences, with stipends collectively exceeding $700,000.
Eighty percent of our students have been women; many are the first in their family to attend college, qualify for federal Pell Grants because of their family’s low income, or both. Half the students enrolled in the College of Engineering’s PhD minor in development engineering are women. Their work includes “designing affordable solutions for clean drinking water, inventing medical diagnostic equipment for neglected tropical diseases, and enabling local manufacturing in poor and remote regions,” according to Lina Nilsson, the gifted former head of the Development Impact Lab, in her 2015 New York Times op-ed article “How to Attract Female Engineers.” She added, “Women seem to be drawn to engineering projects that attempt to achieve societal good.”11
Millennials are truly passionate about social change, particularly around questions of poverty and inequality. Yet until recently, universities had really not helped students channel that enthusiasm. They hadn’t given them a better understanding of how to work alongside people in the field on practical problems of public service, planning, and social justice. We were convinced the option to minor in global poverty issues would appeal to many students, especially if they could remain committed to majoring in any other field of study on campus, whether in physical or social sciences. And we were right.
Even for other students on their way to being teachers, business managers, doctors, or lawyers, taking our introductory course, “Global Poverty: Challenges and Hopes in the New Millennium,” or attending Bob Reich’s Wealth and Poverty lectures might reveal opportunities they otherwise would have overlooked to make a difference in the lives of the poor.
Many young people believe most politicians in Washington, DC, and state capitals obstruct solutions to the big problems millennials care most about, such as climate change and income inequality. Given the gridlock and rhetoric they’ve observed for years, who can blame them? “Their skepticism toward politics is very high,” Bob Reich has said of millennials, “but their desire to get involved in some form of public service is higher still.” The center taps and channels this enthusiasm for public service, and according to Bob, “It takes students seriously; it works with students.”
Our goal in founding and building the Center was to help educate the next generation of leaders who are passionate about reducing poverty in the world. “We are reaching a whole community of students who feel they are part of a movement,” Lina Nilsson once pointed out. “When you think you are part of something bigger, and you can build on past successes, that is really powerful.”
As we show through four stories of young alumni in the next chapter, we have every confidence this rising generation of activists in global poverty is off to a great start.
In 2010, when we held dedication ceremonies for the Blum Center’s new home—the old Naval Architecture Building, a National Register of Historic Places building that we renovated extensively but delicately—a big crowd of students, faculty, and friends gathered outside the building. In my remarks I said, “I had a dream of a place that could inspire a generation of young people who care about doing something about the world’s inequalities. We’ve achieved more than I ever could have imagined.” In many ways, we were just at the beginning.
