I am spending my summer in Sauri, Kenya. As a Masters in Development Practice student (MDP), we have a 12-week field training in a Millennium Village. The first 5 weeks consists of rotations in Agriculture/Business Development, Education, Health, Infrastructure, and Community Development. After the rotations, we will work as a team to draw up a…
With the blessing of two wonderful days of clear weather, all our equipment was moved into place this morning. The ice coring can now begin. We anticipate finishing the drill assembly today and drilling by mid-morning tomorrow at three sites on the Northwall Firn glacier: the two “domes” and the saddle, where the team will…
A primary component of the Millennium Villages Project education strategy is to improve the quality of education. But are MVP interventions such as school feeding programs, classroom construction, and teacher training truly having an impact on student performance? On Wednesday I attended a planning meeting for an evaluation designed to measure just that. The standardized…
Originally posted at karibusauri.wordpress.com My first week’s rotation at the Sauri Millennium Village was with the education sector. In three short days I observed MVP sponsored computer labs, school feeding program kitchens, gender separated latrines, a monitoring and evaluation planning meeting, rainwater harvesting, school livestock; the list goes on. The education team is constantly on the…
A CWC research team is analyzing a complicated issue in a highly conflicted part of the world, and trying to find a way forward. They are taking an in-depth look at Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan), and the environmental, political and economic crisis building there.
Circle of Blue recently reported on the results of a survey of sustainability experts, and listed their top 19 solutions to the world’s freshwater crisis. The survey was done by GlobeScan, a corporate affairs research firm, and SustainAbility, a strategy consultancy. Respondents, drawn from five sectors — corporate, government (including multi-lateral institutions), NGOs, institutional (e.g.,…
The climate of the Crotone Basin is marked by cold, wet winters and hot, dry summers. We arrived last year, on our first trip, in the middle of a six-month drought that lasted from April to September. I love how life figures out a way to flourish. Flowers in a riverbed; Snails on a thorn…
As we continue to see ever-more disturbing images on the shores of Louisiana from the gulf oil spill, it’s worth thinking again about the immense ecological importance of wetlands and why they must be protected. Oil from the leak has already filtered up from the beaches into Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, killing wildlife there. Ironically, last…
This morning we were at our staging area at the Grasberg mine at 5 am, and were able to use the B3 helicopter to get ourselves set up. First trip up, our colleagues Keith Mountain and Vladimir Mikhalenko went to what we call the “saddle camp”—a spot between two peaks—where we will stage the first…