UC Davis Blum Center for Developing Economies

                    Knights Landing is a community of primarily migrant workers who have been struggling to provide health care to both their human and animal members. The Knights Landing One Healthy Clinic with the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine is the first medical clinic dedicated to providing both human medical and veterinary general wellness services.         Through the Blum Center, we were able to purchase and build a storage shed next to the Knights Landing Community Center where the clinics are held.   Previously, veterinary students stored medical and clinical supplies in their own apartments or garages.   This made running the clinics difficult having to carry the supplies back and forth from Davis to Knights Landing for every clinic.   It was also difficult when transferring jobs and titles from upperclass...

          We finally finished both of our prototypes! The prototype below is a passive solar in-trap dryer, which means that it dries bee pollen as it’s collected. The plastic covered sides of the trap fold down to let radiation from the sun in during the day, which heats the metal air duct on the interior.. The sides of the dryer can additionally fold up to make working with bees on these types of hives easier.  My passive solar dryer, my baby.     Our other trap is a hybrid solar dryer, which means that it uses energy from the sun to passively heat air and to actively move air over the pollen using solar powered fans. My passive solar dryer, my baby.          A few days ago we installed both of these traps in the apiary and are measuring moisture content reduction in pollen as well as trap temperature and humidity levels. Sadly, I am leaving the project at this point to explore more of South America, bu...

I`m taking a break from my proper project this post to talk about the innovation center in Bogota. The innovation center, or c-innova, is one of the buildings where we work on our project, and it’s a really cool center of design in Colombia. Its purpose to to help the design and development of technologies and plans to help improve communities in the Colombia that want the help. The center is additionally open to other projects that are in line with cinnovas vision. Cinnova has been a really helpful workspace where we can develop our project. My project partner David is one of the people that helps manage the space, and through him I’ve met the other cinnova stewards. They are really impressive people, and not only help create an atmosphere of innovation by lending their expertise but also make the space feel like friendly and fun environment to be in. Almost every week they host ‘build its’, which is a workshop where the stewards lead groups in the construction of some cool, ...

          This is my sixth week in Colombia working on a bee pollen dryer for campesinos, small farmers in Colombia, that live in an hour to two hour circumference of Bogota. I´m stationed in Bogota and working with entrepreneur, agriculturalist, and friend Salomon Saleh. Were working on two models for the dryer: An in-trap design where pollen is dried real time as it’s collected from bees, and a traditional dryer, where pollen is collected periodically from several hives and dried in mass.     The whole point of both designs is to prevent, slow, or stop bacterial growth as soon as possible. We’re going about this by removing water from the pollen, but this can also be achieved by lowering the temperature of the pollen and increasing hygienic handling processes as well as multiple other methods.  In-Trap Dryer     We´ve been mainly working on this design the past few weeks as we have the space and tools to work on this p...

What if you could save small amounts each day on your mobile phone? What if your savings also gave you a chance to win the lottery?         My research was motivated by the question: How can Haitian passion for lottery be harnessed to open more productive financial services? Given the lack of information available on traditional lottery and financial strategies, we undertook primary data collection to explore lottery and savings behavior in Haiti from June through November of 2015. In partnership with Digicel, the country’s largest mobile operator, we conducted a phone survey of over 700 individuals. Analysis of the data examines lottery play and saving statuses and behavior patterns and the relationship between them. The results suggest there is an opportunity for lottery-linked micro-savings via mobile money platforms.         An important finding in our data analysis is that savings and lotto statuses are complementary. This implies th...

             In lower Delmas, Port-au-Prince, four different lotto booths stand side by side.         Lottery is an enormous business in Haiti, occupying as many or more storefronts than the ever-present mini-market. The lottery stalls ubiquitous throughout the country are a brightly painted indicator of the familiarity and frequency of this transaction. Haitians spend as much as $1.5 billion per year at the over 35,000 independently owned lottery stalls in urban and rural areas. That comes to more than $220 per year for each individual over the age 15, a staggering figure in a country where the per capita GDI is $810. Deeply entrenched in Haitian culture, a wager represents the hope to win a transformational sum, a message from ancestral spirits, or simply the desire to avoid seeing one’s regular numbers drawn without having bought a ticket.         The tradition...

In June of 2014, I was bracing myself for my last few days in the Himalayan village I had come to call home. I had spent 3 months there, befriending a few women with whom I worked on various textile projects. As we wrung out the last of our skeins of yarn over a dye bath, Nirmala commented, “You will always remember the time you had only two students.” “No,” I countered, “I will remember the time I had two teachers.” “Three students, three teachers,” we agreed. This, to me, is the power of participatory action research: we are all students, and all teachers; all researchers, and all research subjects. And so I am thrilled to be back for further collaboration, with the support of the Blum Center. I am here in Kullu Valley working with some participants in a women's self-help group (www.whims.in) who produce textile goods as a way of generating some independent income and preserving traditional craft skills. Although the women have started working with the acrylic ...

This photo is Mohammed’s family, Alyssa, and I. As part of the gender assessment of agricultural technologies, my co-worker, Alyssa, and I interviewed beekeepers in the city of Gazipur. We met with Mohammed Ali, a local agricultural extension agent and co-owner, with his wife, of a beekeeping business. This family showed infinite kindness and provided us with a home cooked lunch the two days we were at their house. The food was delicious albeit incredibly spicy and we ate on the floor with our hands. We wanted to talk to Mohammed Ali in particular because he helps run the Bangladesh Small and Cottage Industries Corporation, which teaches people how to beekeep by using a Farmer Field School approach. Different types of honey from the lychee, mustard, and coriander flowers. We interviewed men and women beekeepers about their experiences beekeeping and selling honey. We asked them questions such as: Were you involved in the decision to become a beekeeper? Do you ...

This briquette machine was used to convert prilled urea to urea briquettes that are sold. My first stop after arriving to Dhaka was Jessore. Jessore is located close to the Indian border. I traveled with Sonia, my translator and cultural educator, from the International Fertilizer Development Center to interview 14 farmers and extension agents about their use of an agricultural technology called Fertilizer Deep Placement (FDP). FDP consists of placing urea briquettes underneath the soil once or twice during the growing season instead of broadcasting fertilizer. The placement underneath the soil decreases volatilization and provides the plants with nutrients at critical growth stages. This is a bag of urea briquettes that farmers place underneath the soil by hand or with a small push tool. We stayed in Jessore and traveled to surrounding rural communities during the day to interview farmers. Our interviews consisted of questions related to how women use FDP, their acc...

Last year I worked for the USAID funded project, Integrating Gender and Nutrition into Agricultural Extension Services (INGENAES, http://ingenaes.illinois.edu/) at the International Programs Office at the University of California, Davis. The aim of this project is to improve women’s access to agricultural extension services and human nutritional information by working directly with stakeholders in the Feed the Future countries where it operates. To better understand what the needs of Bangladeshi farmers are and what obstacles they face, I spent three weeks in Bangladesh meeting with and interviewing various farmers, Information Communication Technology organizations, and NGOs. These on the ground experiences and in depth conversations are the first steps to creating gender-sensitive approaches to assessing the efficacy of and improving agricultural technologies. Bangladeshi farmers, extension agents, and organizations use Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), such as ...

Knights Landing is a community of primarily migrant workers who have been struggling to provide health care to both their human and animal members.  The Knights Landing One Healthy Clinic with the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine is the first medical clinic dedicated to providing both human medical and veterinary general wellness services.  In the March clinic, we saw 35 dogs and 32 cats.  Through the BLUM association, we were able to purchase another “cat tent.”  Cats require a protected area away from dogs in order to adequately examine their health.  Now that we were able to purchase another cat tent, we have been able to enroll and examine more cats to better meet the community’s needs.  This month we did not have to turn away any cats that came to see us due to this expanded ability and space.   

Figure 1 . Hilario, vet promoter and project supporter, and I working on a chicken coop. It’s now three days before I leave Sabana Grande and I am unsure when I will be coming back. Next year I move straight into the clinical year of my veterinary degree, which means I have no summer break and no time to travel to Nicaragua. The projects we have worked on this year will pass onto other students who have worked with us throughout the year and are very familiar with our partnerships and objectives. I am very sad to be leaving this community; when I stepped off the bus this summer I felt instantly at ease. We had survived the bus journey (sometimes difficult to imagine for those of us who get motion sick) and arrived to a group of familiar faces. People in Sabana Grande have been incredibly open to new ideas, to the strange people walking around, and to a multitude of questions about their animals. With the workshop attendees and my homestay families I have shared many laughs...