UC Davis Blum Center for Developing Economies

Discussing the project with Feno at the UC Davis International House As the Spring Quarter at Davis was coming to an end, I felt like my solar project was beginning to fall apart. Until this point, all of my planning had been going rather smoothly, but I had a feeling that the weeks leading up to my departure would be the most stressful. A week or two prior to my final exams, Feno emailed me saying that other members of my host NGO were concerned with the cost of importing solar products from the Canadian-based KARIBU Solar Company. They said that while the political climate in Madagascar had mostly stabilized since the last major instance of political unrest in 2009, the Malagasy economy still hadn't returned to what it was. Because of this, if we stuck with our original plan to import solar products, the cost of shipping would have likely exceeded the cost per unit of the good. We knew that importing to a developing, island country would be very expensive, but this was w...

You cannot completely prepare for everything and it is incredibly rare when everything goes according plan. These are just a few of the lessons I have learned throughout my time in San Pedro la Laguna, Guatemala. It is quite funny that I mentioned this concept of flexibility to one of my mentors a few days before my trip to Guatemala. I talked about how even though I was preparing for the trip, I knew that things would most likely change or may not for necessarily to plan. I thought that I was prepared for flexibility. Then I realized that it is not really not something you can prepare for (at least that is my opinion). And it was quite difficult for me to come to terms with this realization. Flexibility is something that you learn through action and by doing...not by thinking. I could talk about flexibility as much as I wanted to, but that wouldn’t make me any more flexible in any way. It has been less than a week here and I already feel like I am becoming more comfortable with being...

A total of 95 children participated in this 5-day summer camp.       The rapid industrial development of Aguascalientes has made it urgent to protect its natural resources by educating children and teenagers. In this setting, La Piedra del Tesoro, an organization whose mission has been to offer human development activities to large groups, is planning to provide a crash course in sustainability with the generous support of the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Davis.       Concepts like sustainable, organic or eco-friendly can seem rare, foreign and unnecessary among children. Our sustainable farm provides a space to teach about the responsible use and protection of the natural environment through conservation and sustainable practices. Activities were tested for the first time on August 1-5, 2016 during a summer camp organized for the families of the employees’ of MAHLE.        MAHLE is one of the world’s larg...

I travelled from Arusha to Mbeya, Tanzania by bus. The trip took about 18 hours, but it felt like an eternity. Upon arrival, Alfred, my contact for Imara Tech, met me at the bus station. We spent the night in Mbeya at a small hotel where I fed on chicken soup and bathed with hot water out of a bucket. Bucket showers have been the norm here. The next day, Alfred and I took another bus to Vwawa, a smaller town about 30km from the Zambian border. This part of the country doesn't see many mzungu—white people—so I felt a little bit like the odd man out. People stared and whispered "mzungu" as I passed by. Alfred and I spent the next 10 days talking to farmers in and around Vwawa. We travelled by motorcycle to far-reaching villages whose lifeblood flows through the surrounding fields of coffee, maize, peanuts, and bananas. I'm investigating the impacts of a small threshing machine that the farmers have been using. Normally, taking the kernels off the cobs of maize take...

In 2012, Governor Brown made California the first state in the US to legally recognize “the human right to water” when he signed AB 685 that acknowledges that “every human being has the right to safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water adequate for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes [1].”  However, as of 2014, over 1 million Californians still do not have safe drinking water either because their publicly supplied water contains constituents over the regulated Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) or because they rely on insecure private wells that receive no treatment at all [2].  Improving the availability to clean drinking water enhances livelihood security, reduces health risks and promotes pro-poor economic growth [3].  The objective of this project is to further develop and test a robust, sustainable, and low cost UV based treatment system developed at UC, Davis specifically intended to meet the drinking water needs of rural communities. Figure ...