UC Davis Blum Center for Developing Economies

Here you will find updates on our organization, and blog posts written by each of our Blum Fellows about their experiences abroad. Make sure to check out our website at blumcenter.ucdavis.edu, and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/UCDavisBlumCenter to get regular updates and see our upcoming events.

Having surveyed for approximately two weeks and called 138 numbers, it was challenging to receive only 35 responses. However, the survey process as a whole reveals a lot about the community and is a jumping-off point for future surveying. In addition to writing a short report and an upcoming final report for the Blum Center, I will have a closing phone conversation with my project manager tomorrow. What has lingered closest to me since the completion of my IRC internship are certainly the profound, though completely foreign to me, challenges pointed out by multiple clients of the IRC. For example, one client impressed upon me the inaccessibility of affordable halal meat. He can only purchase it in specialty food stores and even there the price is unreliable. He noted that he should be able to buy it at large chain stores, where clients may otherwise shop, like Walmart. I had never considered how it may be restrictive to buy only halal meat and how larger stores should take that into ...

At this point in my project I have incorporated my supervisors notes into the first draft of the survey, asked questions regarding his changes, and begun to survey clients. Many of the changes he made were for the purposes of brevity and clarity. He removed the questions I had in place regarding favorite foods and whether the interviewee was the primary shopper, as well as an experimental question about community meals. He also managed to consolidate the multiple questions I had regarding food insecurity that were separated whether they interrogated price, unavailability or distance. I questioned these changes as I was concerned about the knowledge gap between shopper and interviewee that one report mentioned and elucidating rich responses to all aspects of food security. However, I ultimately incorporated each of his changes. At this time I have called 80 numbers intending to administer the survey with only 10 respondents. Their answers are so far similar in nature and offer good gu...

This August 2017 I am interning with the IRC to complete a project around food security and food preferences for the resettled refugee clients of the IRC. I will be designing a survey based on background reading in order to assess the primarily Afghani community of recent migrants. These surveys hope to address the potential location and offerings of a farm stand which would sell fresh produce and cater to the community. I will survey over the phone and collect responses which will lead me to make a results summary and recommendations going forward. Following months of thought and preparation, I am elated to experience this project come into being. The most surprising aspect of the experience, is, without a doubt, its seeming simplicity despite my previous conceptions that it would be much more complicated. In fact, its arc and development seems to hang, easily suspended before my eyes. It is so clear. I look forward to watching it unfold. Only a week into the process I have r...

Despite seeing and focusing on all the negatives that exist in the public school system in India when it comes to teachers, including teachers who didn’t understand the subject matter, and who were unenthusiastic and unsupportive of their students, there were many that I met who were extremely dedicated, and continue to be an inspiration to me as I work on this project. In the first school I visited on my first day in India this year, I met Savitha, a second-grade teacher who is incredibly dedicated to making sure her students have the opportunities that she herself did not have growing up. As a child, she went to a public Tamil-medium school and did not receive a comprehensive English education. Once she was ready to join the workforce, she found herself at a disadvantage for that reason. When she became a teacher, she learned English on her own time and developed a lot of her own English learning material, making sure every student understood each topic they covered before moving o...

When you look at big problems from a distance, it’s easy to think of a simple solution that should, in theory, work perfectly. However, it’s only when you actually talk to the people facing the problem, and put yourself in their place, that you realize how complicated it can really be. For instance, let’s take the issue of poverty in India. Through some research, I found that one of the many causes of poverty is the language divide that is created based on whether or not you know English. Around 60% of students who attend elementary school in Tamilnadu attend Tamil medium schools. Students attending public, government-run schools in rural areas have very little exposure to English, and often have teachers who themselves are not fluent. They do not have any extra reading material that are set in the context of their lives making it difficult for them to acquire even a basic proficiency in the language. This becomes a problem not just for pursuing higher education, but also severe...

When I was younger, my mom had the crazy idea to homeschool my brother and me for a year in India to experience the culture and to give us a chance to connect with our roots. As much as thirteen year old me was upset at the idea of missing out on the all-important social events of the eighth grade, it really was a life changing experience. During that year, I volunteered at Olcott Memorial High School , a school in Chennai that is funded by the Theosophical Society of India. To quote their website, the school’s goal is “social change through the education of the underprivileged.” I noticed while I was there how much the students were struggling to learn English because they did not have any exposure to the language outside of school, the teachers themselves were not very fluent, and on top of that, they didn’t have many resources, like books, that were actually relevant to their lives. Not learning English is a problem because while students can learn subjects in Tamil, an...