“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
—William Butler Yeats
Every day, more alumni of some program of the Blum Center for Developing Economies are tackling urgent and complex problems in poverty as entrepreneurs, scholars, activists, and global citizens. Following their accomplishments makes me and everybody involved with the Center very grateful and more hopeful. It is proof of progress, proof that we have helped prepare thousands of students to make the developing world—as Jimmy Carter aptly states the challenge—“work better for its people.”
For me, the four profiles that follow are emblematic of many remarkable alumni who are touching thousands of lives, and soon, perhaps, millions.
These projects and innovations are helping people now in cities or isolated rural villages recycle waste from landfills, experience the marvel of reliable electric power for the first time, understand consumer rights in microfinance, and use bicycles and bicycle shops to improve their daily lives.
We hope you will agree these four alumni illustrate the power of the Center’s multidisciplinary model—and those of other organizations and programs with similar approaches and goals.
Nearly all students come to us before their first class with a passion, energy, and intellectual drive to fight poverty. Our work is to give them the tools and the resources to do this effectively and with compassion. Our mission, in the broadest sense, is enabling them to carry on—in their own unique ways—UC Berkeley’s legacy of commitment, innovation, and social impact in the world.
Pronita Saxena lived in India’s capital, New Delhi, for the first ten years of her life. One day, at the age of seven, she was riding in a car when her mother stopped in traffic. A scruffy boy about the same age as Pronita came up to the window, pleading for money. Pronita looked away, grimacing. As they drove on, her mother scolded Pronita, saying, “Don’t ever forget; it’s sheer luck that you ended up on this side of the window and that boy ended up on the other side.”
The haunting image of the boy stayed with Pronita, and as the years passed she began to wonder: If it was just “luck” that that boy was on the other side of the window—or, as we might say—an accident of geography, then why shouldn’t every child have opportunity as she did? Family wealth or social status shouldn’t matter so much.
Pronita’s mother, a high school teacher of math, physics, and computer science, comes from generations of activists in India’s struggle for independence and democracy. Over the years she and Pronita’s father, a software engineer, inspired in Pronita a deep sense of civic duty. The family moved to southern California, where she learned about the American system of justice in her high school mock trial club and as an intern at a Glendale law firm. Curious about how the law worked in India, she interned one summer with a nonprofit group in Delhi that publishes manuals in Hindi about citizen rights. One project was attempting to simplify the law for prostitutes and girls even younger than Pronita who had been forced into prostitution through trafficking. “The law didn’t mean anything to a girl who had been trafficked from Nepal to India, hadn’t even been outside the brothel where she was kept, and was raped twenty-five times a day,” Pronita explained.
Pronita enrolled at Berkeley in 2005 and a year later found herself among the hundreds of students in our inaugural survey course on global poverty. She was mesmerized and wondered throughout the semester, How can I create enough impact to improve the lives of millions? Soon she joined the first wave of students to enroll when we added the Global Poverty and Practice minor to the undergraduate curriculum in 2006.
For her summer field experience, Pronita returned to India. Joining a Berkeley graduate student in public health, she conducted a survey of three hundred households in a Mumbai slum to identify why some households treated their drinking water with inexpensive chlorine tablets stocked in local stores and others did not.
Their findings? Shoppers seemed more interested in buying popular personal-care brands. For example, Garnier Fructis hair conditioner was much preferred by the slum-dwelling shoppers over the Pantene brand even though Garnier Fructis was pricier. And both were preferred over the chlorine tablets. The shoppers often did not understand that adding chlorine tablets to their drinking water would prevent illness. They believed that childhood diarrhea was just a normal part of growing up.
Why would people make these choices? Searching for answers, Pronita encountered the field of behavioral economics and discovered the subject of her honors thesis and field research: barriers to technology adoption.
“The Center taught me to have a lot more humility in any particular environment, to ask questions and seek to understand rather than to impose my own judgments and beliefs,” Pronita said. “This attitude of humility is embedded in the courses, how the professors teach and push your thinking, and how you outline your assumptions and actual experience.”
After graduating from Berkeley in 2009 with her degree in economics and a minor in Global Poverty and Practice, Pronita launched into a whirlwind of diverse professional adventures. She signed on with MIT’s Poverty Action Lab in Bangladesh, where she helped evaluate results of Save the Children’s effort to encourage adolescent girls in more than four hundred villages to delay the age of marriage and child rearing. She followed this with stints in policy research at a Washington think tank and as a strategist with a company promoting energy efficiency.
Pronita explained that her career choices were influenced by her experiences with the Center because it
made you think about the singular impact of your actions in a completely different way. It encouraged you to choose that unconventional path … I had this really fancy-sounding job in DC but was uncomfortable about the lack of impact and accountability. One night I was working on a paper on climate financing on a global scale. I just started Googling top clean-energy companies. I found EnerNOC, looked at some positions, and applied at around 9:00 p.m. The next morning, they called me and asked if I’d like to come in for an interview. I honestly don’t know if I would have done that without those conversations in my head from the minor to ask myself those difficult questions about choices and impact.
By the summer of 2013, Pronita was chief growth officer for a start-up in India, Next Drop, which alerts people over their mobile devices to pending deliveries of piped water.
Then, early in 2015, Pronita cofounded her own start-up in Bengaluru (known until 2014 as Bangalore, from early years of British rule) with a real-time platform that makes it easier for citizens to participate in how municipal services are managed. Most of the network’s mobile apps require no literacy, numeracy, or language skills to use. Housekeeping staff and garbage collectors enter data each day that helps communities and businesses track how waste is handled from doorsteps to processing centers. Pronita hopes the effort will demonstrate how technology enables citizens to make better choices and improve many services their local governments provide.
India’s venture capital community is taking interest: Inc42, a magazine for entrepreneurs, named her company, called Citizen-gage, one of India’s top five start-ups for 2016.1 “Civic engagement is really making citizenship mean something. I would love to make it my life mission to fill that gap,” she said, adding:
India is the world’s largest democracy. It’s high time we innovate and demonstrate what better governance could look like.
If you told me even when I was in college that I would be a technology entrepreneur, I probably would have laughed in disbelief. The Center showed me how valuable well-designed technology can be in solving deeply rooted social and economic problems. It is arguably more democratic and serves customers better than policy from the top … Technology is doing a lot more to create the right kind of ecosystem to reduce extreme poverty now than policy has been able to do for decades. That resonated with me: Just give people the choice, rather than shove some ego-fed proscriptive policy at them.
Citizengage was handling more than 100 tons of waste for customers each month by the spring of 2016 and had diverted more than 500 tons of waste from landfills to biogas plants, composting facilities, and recycling centers.
“Eight-five percent of India’s waste is recyclable but ninety percent is sitting in landfills,” she told India’s Economic Times. There is, she added, “a huge opportunity in building a better waste-to-resource management system.”2
Yashraj Khaitan grew up in the state of Rajasthan, where his family had run businesses for three generations. He knew the politics, the layers of social power and influence, and the extreme poverty that defined how millions of people existed there and in several other regions of India.
When he arrived at Berkeley in 2008 as a freshman engineering major, he worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on advanced designs for solar cells that could store the energy they generated. A trip to rural India the following summer (funded through Berkeley’s Engineers Without Borders chapter) gave Yashraj an unexpected education in how the rural poor were deprived of the simplest modern conveniences because they had no electricity. Solar energy, he knew, could change this.
Access to electricity can bring villagers into the twenty-first century. It offers light after sundown and on cloudy days, access to the Internet, and the ability to use time-saving small appliances. And it helps reduce the need to burn kerosene, a terrible pollutant. More than seven hundred million Indians live in rural villages, and nearly half use kerosene as a primary lighting source.
Yashraj returned to campus with the goal of designing and building a low-cost system to give tens of millions of people in the developing world access to affordable electricity, starting in India. He didn’t waste time.
Yashraj and fellow engineering student Jacob Dickinson invented a small, lightweight device to provide energy for basic lighting and power generation in villages where electricity is unreliable or unavailable. The stackable, portable storage system relied on circuitry they designed for efficient power management. By early 2013, in his article “When E.T. and I.T. Meet ID,” New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman was praising Yashraj for creating “the most exciting” energy innovation Friedman had seen on a trip to India.3
Maryanne McCormick and others on the Center staff kept an eye on Yashraj and Jacob’s progress and relayed to them well-timed alerts for the Big Ideas@Berkeley and other competitions. Yashraj and Jacob earned $8,000 in grant funding with their initial prototypes, including their award from a Big Ideas competition in spring 2011. USAID was starting its own version of Big Ideas then, a dazzling collaboration with NASA, the State Department, and Nike known as “LAUNCH: Collective Genius for a Better World.” Before the year was out, Yashraj and Jacob’s initiative was one of ten winners for energy innovations and the recipient of a $1 million USAID grant. “I had already graduated and was visiting the campus when Maryanne sent me the application for LAUNCH,” Yashraj said. “It’s always that one thing leads to another.”
Gram Power, the start-up company cofounded by Yashraj and Jacob, is in the vanguard of new technologies at the Center with potential to scale rapidly and help fight extreme poverty.
By mid-2015, Gram Power had raised its sights to help power distribution companies with two major service problems: theft of huge volumes of power and unpaid bills, which annually cost India’s power sector $18 billion. The amount is so large, it equals the cost of providing one-third of India’s population with electricity.
Helping power distributors sharply pare those losses is one of Gram Power’s goals. The money can be used to improve infrastructure, reduce the cost of energy across the country, and even provide free electricity to the poorest populations. Yashraj and Jacob created an advanced microgrid for villages that connects the smart prepaid meters they invented as Berkeley undergrads to the national grid. A total of sixty villages were targeted for installation by the end of 2015, with thirty completed and serving seven thousand people. (Microgrids typically connect to existing power lines but can operate as a separate power source during storms or power outages.)
Gram Power’s new system, an integrated metering platform, enables the entire electricity infrastructure to be managed simply, efficiently, and with much lower costs through the Internet, in the cloud. Blackouts should be sharply reduced, with far less energy wasted. Schools and hospitals can be given priority over other customers when supply wanes. Consumers can track their usage and expenses online in real time, spot any power-guzzling appliances, and even avoid overcharging by unscrupulous power suppliers.
“The challenges in the power sector are far different in India from the West,” Yashraj explained.
They include rampant theft, mismanaged infrastructure, inaccurate billing, poor reliability, and consumers who don’t pay their bills. We made a lot of design improvements but learned from our field research that the big challenge people had was controlling how much electricity they used and could afford. It was a metering problem, not a power access problem. They needed microgrids with smart meters.
The smart meters can be recharged as easily as cell phones. Customers can track how much money is left on their prepaid meters and which of their appliances are more or less efficient. With our system, they can prepay whatever they can afford, even as little as twenty cents at a time. Plus they don’t need to make a trip to a payment center, which before could mean the loss of two days’ wages just to pay a bill.
With smart meters, we’re giving the utilities an end-to-end solution to manage the entire infrastructure—billing, payments, load balancing, pricing, and planning—across the entire distribution network … Utilities see tremendous potential to bring more control, transparency, and efficiency to the power infrastructure. The smart meter has proven to be stable and is being certified to be deployed on the national grid. Our goal is to work with utilities to have one of these smart meters in every single house in India.
Gram Power is expanding into East Africa next, but with a different product. As Yashraj explained:
Homes are extremely scattered in a lot of African countries, too far away from each other to connect to a power grid. Even microgrids cannot reach them. We developed a prepaid solar home system for Africa that uses mobile money … Our plans are ambitious. Our goal over the next four years with our local partners is to get these systems into a million households in Kenya.
The cost to people in Africa for solar power will be about the same as the monthly cost of kerosene.
Access to affordable, reliable electricity helps raise the living standard for entire populations, and Gram Power’s mission is to help make this happen.
When Lauren Herman arrived at Berkeley in 2008, she was a transfer student planning to major in journalism. She had spent the previous year photographing displaced women and children for a nonprofit group in Managua, Nicaragua, and had helped organize a microfinance service for the group to support the local community.
Soon after she arrived on campus, she switched to the Peace and Conflict Studies major, with a particular eye on postconflict development, and then added the Global Poverty and Practice minor. “The minor became more important than my major,” she said. “I wanted to better understand the issues of poverty, wealth, and inequality in the United States and abroad. The courses and the faculty challenged me to look beyond what I thought I knew about the world and my role in it.”
A student volunteer for a nonprofit that supports microfinance lending in Latin America and Africa, she connected with another microfinance nonprofit organization for her two-month practice experience. This group provided loans to rural women living in the scenic Great Rift Valley in west-central Kenya, a mecca for trekkers and world travelers. “Working in Kenya was a life-changing experience that taught me the importance of community,” she said. There she encountered tough realities about the limits and occasional abuse of microfinance practices.
I met Lauren at the opening of the new Center building and again by chance one afternoon when she was walking out the door as I was heading in. She described for me then the problems in Kenya that infuriated her and inspired her to take action:
It’s ridiculous how the microfinance industry works in Kenya. All loan documents are written in English, which well-educated Kenyans in the cities read and speak, but the people I was working with have a limited educational background. Swahili and their native tongue are the common languages. Oral communication is key because most borrowers cannot read Swahili. I thought that if lenders or the government were not protecting consumers, networks of consumer education organizations needed to work in communities where clients lived.
One example Lauren shared was a woman named Mary. She had borrowed $30 to buy materials for her tailoring business but soon became seriously ill and needed expensive medical care. She couldn’t work, her business collapsed, and her personal debt soared—needlessly—because she did not know she could have requested a payment deferral.
Instead, facing pressure, resentment, and ultimately isolation from other members of her lending circle who believed they would be responsible for Mary’s unpaid debts, she kept up payments as long as she could.
“Mary did not understand the loan agreement, and the NGO was not protecting its clients,” Lauren says. Unfortunately, predatory lending is not uncommon in microfinance programs, something Lauren said she discovered in her postgraduate research in Kenya.
While microfinance services broadly have been considered successful in empowering women since they were initiated in the 1970s, Lauren said it is not unusual for micro-lending agencies now to be run by men who prefer dealing with borrowers’ husbands. “I am against how microfinance is practiced by many lenders,” Lauren said. “It has become commercialized, with the possibility of abuse and fraud. Lending programs too often make repayment rates, not clients’ welfare, the priority.”
Lauren began a determined journey that within a few years led to her winning a $20,000 Judith Lee Stronach Baccalaureate Prize. After earning her degree, she collaborated with some of the world’s leading consumer advocacy groups for microfinance in writing a user’s manual published in Swahili and English.4 She has said:
You tend as activists to see inequality as just part of your life, part of our world. But [in the Global Poverty and Practice Minor] you learn to be critical, patient, and persistent in your search for a changed world. The Center faculty and staff gave me the tools to do this … If you change a few people’s lives, that’s more than what you came into the world with. Don’t overestimate the power of one, but don’t underestimate the power of collective action and collaboration.
Living in Kenya opened Lauren to truths about how social change happens in communities. After graduation, she returned to her home city, Sacramento, and became an advocate for public health and safety, promoting better understanding and use of building codes in California. “Working in Kenya was a life-changing experience,” she said. “I realized how much I did not know about the city where I had lived my entire life.”
When Jacob Seigel-Boettner was born in Santa Barbara, California, in 1987, his parents brought him home from the hospital in a bicycle trailer. Twenty-one months later, Jacob’s newborn brother, Isaac, came home the same way. The two boys grew up taking long bike trips. Their parents, schoolteachers who loved cycling, organized ambitious student bike expeditions every summer in the United States and other countries around the world.
After his freshman year at Berkeley, Jacob and his father joined a few friends and other members of UC Berkeley’s mountain biking team on a road trip in the summer of 2007, pedaling through Rwanda to see firsthand how a nonprofit group called Project Rwanda had built and distributed sturdy cargo bikes to local coffee farmers. The program provided a welcome boost to the coffee farmers’ productivity. They now could transport heavy loads on muddy roads during the rainy season. Jacob had read about the project in a biking magazine.
That road trip lasted only three weeks, but it changed Jacob’s life. “It was very inspiring, but also forced me to look in the mirror,” he later recalled. “I had always seen the bike as this really fun toy … but here I saw what a bike could do for people who relied on it for more than just leisure activities.” Returning to campus, he declared a major in Peace and Conflict Studies and, just as Lauren Herman did, soon added Global Poverty and Practice as a minor.
What he learned on his second venture in Rwanda, this time through the Center, was unexpected. The nonprofit he picked for his practice requirement had a much smaller on-the-ground presence—essentially a one-man operation run by a student at the University of Rwanda. Jacob soon found himself in a crash course on project management, critical thinking, and the politics of international development.
At times, he knew, he was in way over his head, but he learned fast. And he discovered that, despite the brutal 1994 genocide, Rwandans were much more capable and knowledgeable than he had anticipated. What they lacked, he realized, were resources, institutional support structures, and opportunity. He later said:
If you don’t recognize people’s own agency in their own development, then you’re failing everyone. Some of the biggest roadblocks I witnessed eventually were solved by a local worker who saw something happening in the field and said, “Look, this is what the people want. This is what they’re asking for. We just need to listen.”
So he decided to help more people listen.
Instead of writing a field report about the experience to fulfill his course requirement, Jacob created a video telling the story of a coffee farmer named Mudahinyuka Pascal, the first recipient of a cargo bicycle in his region. “I knew that while a forty-page paper has academic merit, my friends would laugh if I asked them to read it,” he said with a smile. “The best way I knew to share with them what I experienced was to make a film. Video is how we consume stories and issues in my generation.”
His fourteen-minute documentary, Pascal’s Bike, was screened at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in 2009, and its enthusiastic reception inspired him to lay plans for a bigger project: a film showing the bicycle as a symbol of mobility and opportunity around the world.
The result was With My Own Two Wheels, a forty-two-minute documentary Jacob produced and codirected in 2010 with his brother, Isaac, to much acclaim. A well-timed Stronach Prize, then valued at $25,000, to cover expenses was awarded at a time when Jacob was desperate for money and about to begin shooting in faraway locales. In addition to his brother, then a Berkeley film studies major, the film crew included Ian Wexler, a friend studying cinematography at Emerson College in Boston.
For narratives in the documentary, the trio (collaborating as Pedal Born Pictures) focused on five people: a volunteer HIV/AIDS caregiver in Zambia whose new bike enabled him to visit distant patients more easily; a woman in Ghana who was able to overcome the stigma of being disabled after she learned to repair bicycles; a Guatemalan torture victim who converted the pedals and gears of old bikes to power small farm equipment; a fourteen-year-old girl in rural India who was able to attend high school after receiving a bike; and a young Santa Barbara man who escaped gang life by volunteering at a community-run bike shop.
The film’s 2011 premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival filled a 680-seat theater. The response was so enthusiastic that Jacob was invited to screen With My Own Two Wheels more than seventy times over the next year. He found fans at the Mountainfilm festival in Telluride, Lincoln Center in New York City, and the Barbican in London, and at many schools, community groups, and libraries. A screening at a park in São Paulo drew a thousand people.
For Jacob, the lessons from his Rwandan field experience still resonate:
I stop and pause now before I say I am going somewhere to help people. I may have gone over to Rwanda with that goal, but there is a question of who got more out of my field practice, them or me. A lot of people in the minor would tell you the same thing. People are much more multidimensional than the international development images you see in airport posters or on billboards. Our lives are not so different on a very human level.
If most students are learning this lesson from their work with us, I think we’re getting it right.
The Center operates with the conviction that today’s students want more than sage-on-the-stage pedagogy. Increasing numbers of students see themselves as change makers. They are idealistic, innovative, and civic-minded. They come from every possible major and school. Their family backgrounds are ethnically and economically diverse. Their interests range from clean energy to food security to cellular networks to microfinance. But in one way, they are the same: They want to use their time at the university to get started on projects with social impact, not wait until they are handed a diploma.
We applaud this impatience. In the Center’s first ten years, we witnessed a surge in low-cost innovations that are focused on solving basic problems in global poverty moving from engineering and science research laboratories into the field.
We are connecting many students with the new wave of younger philanthropists, many situated in the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley, who are committing more talent and financial resources in disruptive, innovative ways to combat global poverty. Other students at the Center consult directly with federal government agencies or international NGOs, or sign on with local government or community-service organizations. We encourage them all to ask these questions: What can we learn from the past? What should we be focused on now?
Our hope and our pledge is for the Center to continue to inspire students in whatever career they choose in order to be compassionate throughout their lives. No matter what their major is, no matter what they do later in life, our aim is to help them really think about their place in the world. Many will go on to solve the difficult problems of tomorrow—problems that have not yet made it onto the international agenda or that have not even been identified.
We hope all of them will take action—whether through their day jobs, as volunteers, or as philanthropists—to make a difference in the lives of the poor. We especially want our Global Poverty and Practice students to look back on their field practice and remember the needs of the people they got to know and tried to help in some distant land or right here at home. We intend for the Center’s interdisciplinary model to break down traditional academic silos and help transform higher education.
All of us at the Center have committed ourselves to becoming enablers—so that millions more people soon will have the opportunity to be educated, grow in confidence, and improve their lives, their families, their communities, and the wider world.