Tag Archive for 'research'

More information on Peru, meetings galore, and marketing ourselves on campus

Published
by
Daniel Bachhuber
on 30 September 2008
in Team
. 0 Comments

Another Tuesday night, another meeting. Or conference call, rather. Shane and Adrien joined me for our weekly meeting tonight and we were quite on the ball with the agenda. Unfortunately, Kevin is no longer with us either. We’re going to canvas hard for people to fill Tech, Finance, and PR.

Well, we’re on the ball moving through the agenda at least. With all of the business going on in the past week, almost half of our action items ended up in varying stages of completion. Of the things we did accomplish, reading and meeting with people were at the top of the list. We’re slow on working on our fundraising, specifically working on the Youth Venture Social Entrepreneur grant application and combing through the grant databases, but that will ideally pick up after this weekend. Personally, I still need to read Diagnostico, which I plan on making a priority for the next couple of days.

The next month will be a month of a number of meetings for ODA. As I reported last week, I met with Bethany of the PPPM program who offered a number of creative ideas for us to seek the support of the community, and get them involved. On Friday, Shane, Adrien, and I also met with Megan of Allen Hall Advertising (AHA). We’re interested in collaborating with AHA to extend word of what we’re doing and, from the conversation, it sounds like they are too. Of the ideas we came up with thus far, these are the things they could help with:

  • Art installations of appropriate technology sculptures (including a Biosand filter, solar panels, a micro hydro setup, and/or a wind turbine)
  • Bringing FLOW: For the Love of Water to campus in November as a fundraiser
  • A lecture series in the month of January or February

Along all of these lines, we’re going to step up efforts to people aware online. Join the ODA Facebook Group, yo!

Also of importance from the meeting are a few things. First, the feeling Shane got from reading through the aquifer recharge and reforestation research was that the two are somewhat contradictory. I’ll let him clarify in a later post, but the understanding I have is that the more trees are in the ground, the less likely water is to percolate through and recharge the groundwater. I think this might be an extreme situation, though, as no trees at all means increased runoff and soil erosion. It’s all about finding the proper balance. Moving forward, he’s going to continue reading through EWB reports, and Adrien and I will continue working on the needs assessment. We’ve recently (i.e. today) received updated information from Anna that is very promising.

 
icon for podpress  Standard Podcast [56:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (16)

Notes from Participatory Rural Appraisal and Planning research

Published
by
Daniel Bachhuber
on 21 September 2008
in Partners and Team
. 0 Comments

Yesterday, I went in to Green Empowerment for a few hours to look though a rare, yet informative handbook. Participatory Rural Appraisal and Planning (PRAP), although I don’t remember whether that is the exact title, is a “methodology which helps to identify community problems and to plan solutions with the active participation of community members.” It focuses on the strategies of “participation, empowerment, and solidarity” to “strengthen the management capacities of community organizations and other development organizations.” The approach allows for rapid:

  • description and analysis of the community and it’s context
  • identification of problems and potential solutions
  • project design and programming of activities for project implementation

In short, it’s a way of identifying the issues in a community, and determining some ways to overcome them, by a series of community workshops. Contrary to what I thought before, it’s not a method of surveying in the traditional sense. You can achieve some of the same results, but it’s largely a group-based method of collecting data.

Several advantages in PRAP I found to be interesting:

  • Use of visual techniques: rural communities participate more effectively when they use visual techniques for gathering, analyzing, and presenting information. PRAP focuses heavily on getting the community to produce charts and diagrams in order to better understand their issues. A 21st century twist might be to get little Flip recorders and have the kids document the issues in the village!
  • Participatory community analysis, identifying problems and potential solutions together
  • Allows for the formulation of realistic proposals which can be presented to donors for financing. These proposals can be perceived to be more realistic because they’ve been developed by the community, not just development workers.
  • Similarly, development workers have less of a tendency to design projects from their desks, lending to the potential for greater success.
  • PRAP creates programs that are based on first hand information that is coming from the village or town.
  • The material from a PRAP (including maps, diagrams, matrices, and sketches) can constitute a kind of living “encyclopedia for the community, development organizations, and donors. I think geo-tagging information could fit here too.

Of course, there are interesting disadvantages as well:

  • False expectations of progress can be made. Community members sometimes think “after PRAP comes the money.”
  • Some of the information obtained can be incorrect.
  •  PRAP has largely been applied on the community level; there is very little experience in applying the methodology at the regional, provincial, or watershed levels.
  • Sometimes the community isn’t interested in PRAP.

A typical PRAP lasts about 3 full days. They are usually initiated by either the community asking a development organization, an organization initiating the PRAP because of past studies and/or knowledge, or a joint decision between the community and the organization based on mutual needs. A preliminary visit to establish contact with the community and leaders is critical to establish clarity and transparency.

Going through the workbook also provided a list of things I think we want to learn, either through PRAP or surveying:

  • Name of the community, parish, district, and province
  • Number of inhabitants and families (including men, women, and children)
  • Language(s) of the community
  • Existing services (i.e. health, post office, schools, church, and large businesses)
  • Migration patterns
  • Ethnic and religious groups
  • Means of communication available in the community (radio reception or transmitters? TV? internet? cell reception?)
  • Community works
  • Local crafts?
  • Division of labor within the family
  • What community work does everyone work on together, and how do they decide on splitting these up?
  • Identify the areas with specific problems (soil erosion, lack of water, etc.). It might be interesting to do this by having the PRAP group build a mock of the town in a pile of dirt and video recording the process
  • Learn about past NGO projects and whether they’ve “succeeded or failed”
  • Trend analysis of harvests, population of the community, deforestation, quality of life, etc.

Of course, the research also left me with a few questions unanswered:

  • Do we do a household survey in conjunction with PRAP, or does PRAP usually take the place of a survey?
  • If we do a PRAP, are there farmers with past experience that can facilitate the program?
  • Hypothetically, would it be beneficial to do PRAP before or after a household survey? I think PRAP could be an easier way to collect general community information than the method we’ve defined before.

Partnership with Students for Global Health, fundraising ops, and project discussion

Published
by
Shane Lofgren
on 4 September 2008
in Team
. 0 Comments

Tonight, we got to talk with two new people who hopefully will be heavily involved in ODA, each in their own way. First we talked with Kevin McNaught, an incoming freshman at the U of O who Dan and I know from high school. He’s pretty tech savvy, having worked as the Director of Technology for the Tualatin High School Associated Student Body (quite a title, eh?), and will be possibly joining ODA in the tech position. Exciting stuff!

The other person we talked to was Alex Goodell. He proposed a partnership between ODA and his organization, Students for Global Health. SGH is primarily a fundraising organization, and so far they’ve been raising money solely for Face AIDS. However, he would like for SGH to have a “Direct Action” component that they would fundraise for, and he would like us to be part of that direct action component. Not only that, but he would also like for our communities to work together where doing so would be mutually beneficial. From what I can tell, the relationship would work as follows:

  • When requesting donations, SGH would ask people if they’d like to donate either to Face AIDS or to the direct action component, with descriptions of specific projects such as ours.
  • SGH and ODA would work together to do fundraising projects around school.
  • SGH and ODA would collaborate where efficient on any other projects
  • SGH would become a co-partner on ODA projects
  • ODA will attend SGH meetings and teach members of SGH lessons we’ve learned from our work in direct action.

We’re all very excited about this relationship and the way our community is expanding.

During Adrien’s Community Development report, she talked about her discussions with Allen Hall Advertising. Megan, from AHA, would like to meet with us to talk about how exactly we see our two groups working together. We decided that we should have a quick conference call to discuss this before the meeting, so that we can have a concrete proposal to bring Megan for our meeting on the 22nd of September.

During Dan’s Lead report, we were planning to talk about our Mission Statement and Team Goals, but we decided that it was inefficient to talk about these in small chunks spread over many meetings. Instead, we will have a call specifically devoted to perfecting these two documents.

During my Research Report, I talked about my Summary of Diagnostico. I also gave the team reading assignments. The most important thing for them to read are sections from Diagnostico that I will highlight, because it will give them further idea of what we’re working on. Besides that, they should read specific EWB reports in order to learn how a project is designed and a project report is written. Finally, I told them that they should further develop their philosophical underpinnings for their development report by reading all of the readings that I selected from my INTL 240 class.

The last thing we talked about was our relationship with Green Empowerment. We decided that we’d like to have a meeting with them so that both groups could gain a clearer understanding of the others desires and expectations, as well as our visions of our places in this project. We plan to email Jason and set up a meeting to discuss this. We are also planning to have an exploratory with Health Bridges International and perhaps talk about similar things with them.

 
icon for podpress  ODA - 4 September 2008: Partnership with Students for Global Health, fundraising ops, and project discussion [83:48m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (24)

Summary of Diagnostico

Published
by
Shane Lofgren
on 2 September 2008
in Advisers, Partners and Team
. 2 Comments

A while back, Green Empowerment (GE) sent us a diagnostic assessment that Solucciones Practicas did of the province of San Pablo where we hope to be working. Unfortunately, the document was in Spanish, and so we kept drawing straws to see which of the rusty Spanish speakers was going to have to read through and translate it.  Luckily, I was assisted in this task by the tool Google has that, when emailed a PDF as an attachment, allows you to convert that PDF to HTML. After I converted the document to HTML, I put it through Google Translate in hopes of getting a comprehension aid, and what I got instead was a fully understandable (with effort) English translation. So, as I read Diagnostico, I mainly read the translation and looked through Diagnostico to see the pictures, graphs, etc. Though I have reasonably good Spanish skills, this is something that anyone could do. I’m amazed at the tools the internet, especially Google, has to offer.

On to the summary. As a quick background, this region (San Pablo) is roughly equivalent to a county, it is part of the larger state of Cajamarca, and contains the towns of San Pablo, San Luis, San Bernardino, and Tumbaden. The province has around 20,000 people, most of whom live in the town of San Pablo. The diagnostic concerned itself mainly with describing the culture, the economic activities, and the relevant organizations with the area. Also, throughout the document there was a focus on rates of, previous efforts at, organizations concerned with, and potential benefits of electrification, culminating in an assessment of various sites where electricity could be generated. This makes sense given that Solucciones Practicas is, to my understanding, mostly interested in doing an electrification project in San Pablo.

Regarding electrification, it seemed to me first that providing electricity would greatly benefit this province.  Even beyond my first thought, that electricity could pump water and save people the time of moving it, electricity would allow for economic development beyond the current low-tech, agriculture and resource-gathering activities that comprise more than 90% of the local economy. Without electricity, the local dairy farmers are forced to sell to Nestle at whatever prices it demands, as Nestle has the only refrigerated storage in the area. Diagnostico identified a number of value-added industries, such as carpentry, that would be possible with electricity to power the machines. Even beyond this, electricity could help power the internet, thus opening people up to a world of free educational opportunities, and it could make life more pleasant, powering lights and electrical appliances. The author talked about a problem where many young people leave, and only ~50% of them return. Perhaps this could be stopped by providing better jobs, more education and more amenities.

The diagnostico also provided insight into the organizations in the area and how they could assist or hinder electrification and other development projects.  It seems possible that we might be able to set up a relationship with the Peruvian government (at the federal level), because they have expressed goals of rural electrification, have made strides toward accomplishing this, and continue to have agencies and funds for this purpose. However, I don’t know what other obstacles might stand in the way of such a relationship, but this does seem to be a worthwhile lead to explore since the federal government could undoubtedly marshal a large amount of resources to help us.

At the local level of government, it is clear that there is a complex web of relationships. There are non-elected (I believe) governors, along with elected lieutenant governors and mayors, who have overlapping responsibilities and don’t always get along. For instance, the governors don’t work well with the mayors of Tumbaden or San Bernardino, the author suggests that this could be because of political jealousy. Now, I don’t imagine the situation is much different or worse than it is in any representative democracy. I’m simply going to assume that, in this area, there is a complex bureaucracy. If we try to work with them, it would likely be in our best interests to enlist a local who knows the system.

The most promising groups, in my mind, are the very local government groups and the civic organizations. There is apparently a group of elected officials called the Peasant Patrols, who help with projects around the town. There is also a great number of organizations with economic purposes, such as the Association of Agricultural Producers, who could bring together many of the local farmers. Then there are service organizations, some of which help the poor and others who help with education and health. They could be very helpful when we decide to run educational programs on clean water and sanitation.

It is clear from reading Diagnostico that there is great good that can be done here, and many groups who could help us do it.

ConferenceCast: Green Empowerment and Clinton Global Initiative

Published
by
Adrien Wilkie
on 29 July 2008
in Team
. 0 Comments

Only Daniel and I participated in the conference call tonight because Shane and Hannah weren’t available. First, we talked about our general updates. I’m is in the process of connecting with Kirsten, the Environmental Studies advisor, and Allan Hall Advertising. Daniel and Shane met with Green Empowerment on Friday. At this meeting they discussed what ODA should be researching. Jason suggested that we use the database Science Direct for our research searches. When Anna goes back to Peru, she will be gathering information concerning needs assessment so that Daniel and I can put together a needs assessment survey for San Pablo. 

Next, we briefly discussed past action items. Items still on the to do list:

  • Find project on arsenic filtration at U of O (me)
  • Start finding different organizations that might fund the project (Shane and I)
  • Discussion about advertising (Shane and I)
  • Create a research priority list (Shane). 

The major topic of this conference call was the Clinton Global Initiative grant. The great news is that the grant deadline is now August 4 (Daniel has confirmed this via email). This will give us more time to revise our work. So far, we have responded to all of  the 125 words or less questions. During the conference call, Daniel and I read through the grant and made some minor changes. One of our major concerns is the length of each of our responses, most being 40+ words over the requested limit. I will try to shorten some of the responses, while Daniel is going to work on the longer additional questions that still need to be answered. We now have seven more days to complete this grant!

Hannah is shortly leaving for New Zealand and will not be back until the beginning of September. She will have difficulty checking-in with us due to lack of available phone and internet service. Her duties of looking for grant possibilities have been passed off to Daniel, Shane, and I until she returns. 

This evening’s call also discussed Green Empowerment as a technical partner. As we interpret it, our partnership with Green Empowerment essentially boils down to us raising funds for technology and transportation, going to the location for a few weeks to install the technology, then leaving. How does ODA incorporate other elements of development into our project (i.e. looking at both quantity and quality of the water source, health, education)? 

Finally, a date has been set for our beach retreat: August 10, 11. Hannah will unfortunately not be able to attend the beach retreat, but Daniel, Shane, and I will be present. Our goals for the retreat are the same as before (”getting to know each other better, talking about our mission statement and theory of change, and how we are planning on structuring the organization”).

Agenda/Minutes - ODA - 27 July 2008 [Google Docs] 

 
icon for podpress  Standard Podcast [72:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (10)

Research summary: sustainable development and public health assessments

Published
by
Shane Lofgren
on 24 July 2008
in Community, Partners and Team
. 2 Comments

This is a summary of what I’ve accomplished so far.

What was the goal?

We are currently looking for information, ideally from scholarly or published sources, about reforestation/aquifer recharge initiatives as part of a large sustainable development project, and about public health assessments following rural water improvement projects in Latin America.

What did we find?

On the subject of sustainable development:

  • The Watershed Organization Trust is a group working in Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, India to provide sustainable development.  Though they don’t seem to do much with aquifer recharge, they do work to increase the quality of the local watershed through reforestation and education.  Here is a link to a detailed paper on their work, and here is a link to their articles page, where they have many more publications on their work.
  • The United Nations Division on Sustainable Development published a report of case studies on sustainable development in Africa.
  • I found a report for a project in Venezuela that attempted sustainable development through encouraging rural farmers to grow organic coffee in the shade and reforestation initiatives.  Unfortunately, the report is in Spanish so I can’t read it, but I would encourage anyone who can to do so, because it seems like a valuable report.

On the subject of public health assessments, the best papers I’ve found were the following:

How did we find it?

Google Scholar was my main source for finding information on public health assessments, probably because there are many papers on that subject.  Still, props to Google for creating a resource that allows quality information to be so easily accessible.

For the papers on sustainable development, I had to be a bit more creative.  The first thing I did was call the U of O Libraries and get my account working so I could use U of O’s research tools.  There’s a lot of sources of information there, and U of O does a pretty good (though not the best) job of allowing you to use them easily.  One thing that bothered me was that a lot of resources, such as ScienceDirect, are IP based, so you have to actually be in the library to use them.

Still, I would encourage anyone to look into your university research resources if you’re a student.  Your tuition dollars are paying for some high quality tools.

Those tools found me some decent articles, however, I felt like I really began to tap into a gold mine when I began searching for sustainable development blogs.  These are sites from people like us (after all, this is a sustainable development blog), many of whom have implemented projects and have valuable lessons to share.

What’s next?

The plan now is to find more sustainable development blogs, to post them, and then to comb through the best of them for detailed reports of actual projects.  I also want to find analysis of projects, in terms of lessons learned, problems encountered, and ways they plan to address these problems the next time they go into the field.  Also, as we find blogs, we are finding potential partners who we can contact and work together with.

For the community:

So, to all of you reading this, I have some questions/requests:

  • How do you feel about this research summary?  Did I go too in depth or not deep enough? How do you like my format (ie. “what was the goal,” “what did we find” etc.)?
  • Is there anything I’ve mentioned here that you’d like to know more about?
  • Do you have sources of information and research tools that you would suggest?
  • Do you know of blogs/organizations that relate to what we’re working on?

ConferenceCast: Clinton Global Initiative, summer retreat, and what we’ve researched

Published
by
Daniel Bachhuber
on 20 July 2008
in Team
. 0 Comments

Wow.  Tonight’s call with Adrien, Hannah, and Shane was absolutely stellar.  Right at the beginning, Adrien volunteered to keep track of the amount of time we spent on each section of the agenda.  By having those specific start times on our Google Doc, everyone could keep track of how long they should be talking.  Going through the agenda quickly at the very beginning to determine how much time to spend on each section also proved tremendously useful.

While she was able to connect with us, Hannah spoke a bit about the funding opportunity we’ve discovered with the Clinton Global Initiative.  Students can receive up to $10,000 USD and universities up to $250,000.  The program funds projects in four areas (energy & climate change, global health, human rights & peace, and poverty alleviation), three of which we think we can meet.  Our angle of attack will be to reconvene on Tuesday evening to discuss how we pitch our goals and split up the questions.  The entire proposal will be due on the 28th of July.

Because of work schedules all over the place, we most likely won’t be able to get together a beach retreat until the beginning of August.  Shane will check his calendar to see if this can happen over the 10th and 11th.

Also notable on tonight’s agenda is our continuing push to outreach to the community, and ideally “crowdsource” various components of project(s).  Adrien now has a number of fresh leads to contact over the next week, more specifically professors who either teach or are interested in our topic areas: sustainability, development, poverty, and innovation.  We look forward to drawing from as many minds as we can as this project progresses.  Shane, on the other hand, has started sketching out a community portal he and I will continue to work on in the next few weeks.  Our goal with this little project is to create a way for people to participate with the project to the degree that they want to, one take on Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail.”

Shane also talked briefly about the research he has begun coordinating on the ODA Wiki (I didn’t link directly to the research page because the URI might change).  It sounds like he has made an excellent start on the series of questions Jason of Green Empowerment proposed last week.  I know we all look forward to a blog post on what Shane has come across shortly (hint hint, nudge nudge. Wink).

Lastly, we’re still looking to fill two positions, Tech and Communications, as we try to round out the launch team.  For the Tech position, we’re looking for a super motivated and knowledgeable chap (or lass) to lead web/tech systems management as we progress onwards to being an Open Source Organization.  This person would ideally: know Wordpress inside and out, have familiarity with other CMSes, have skill with digital media, and be an all-around geeky person.  For Communications, we’re looking for a PR-esque student interested in social and environmental justice who wants to help put a smiley face on ODA.  If any friends or colleagues fit this description, please do send them our way!

Agenda/Minutes - ODA - 20 July 2008 [Google Docs]

 
icon for podpress  ODA - 20 July 2008: Clinton Global Initiative, summer retreat, and what we've researched [61:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (9)

Request for research resources

Published
by
Shane Lofgren
on 15 July 2008
in Community, Partners and Team
. 3 Comments

I have been officially delegated to be head of research for ODA by Daniel, the man who long ago officially delegated unto himself the officially delegate powers…

Anyway, in this position, I’ll be the go-to guy when we need to find out about something.  However, there’s a lot more to my job than that.  I also try to figure out what we should be researching, I work with others so we can help each other out when researching, I record the fruits of our research, and I blog about this whole process so that members of the ODA community can see what we’re up to, learn from us, and maybe chip in and help us with our research.

With that in mind, I’ll be blogging regular research posts that you can track if you want.  In this first post, I’ll talk about progress we’ve made in helping our partners, GE (Green Empowerment, not General Electric), find the following:

  • papers or publications exist on reforestation and aquifer recharge/restoration initiatives that have been tied to meeting local human and agricultural demands for water
  • papers on water projects (within the last 10 years) that have been paired with public health assessments in Latin America for communities with 20-100 households

I began to search first for papers that paired health assessments with water projects, utilizing Google Scholar.  An immediate problem I ran into was that most publishers want you to pay for their articles, offering only abstracts for free.  I kept track of promising abstracts, figuring that GE could look them over and see if any were worth paying for.  I was able to overcome this problem, however, because most articles gave links to similar articles, and so I was able to quickly look into a large number of good articles and find a few that were free.  I’m going to keep track of the pages that offer free articles and eventually create a page of good sources for research that all can look at and add to.

In addition to these articles, I also remembered that a friend of mine, DJ Strouse, is working on a similar water project in India and one of the things they’ll be doing is installing a software system that improves patient health by giving clinicians the ability to keep patient records electronically.  However, this system also collects data on health trends in areas where it’s installed.  Global Medical Brigades, one of DJ’s partners in this project, is the organization that provides this software, called the “GWB Data Informatics System.”

I then began to search, again using Google Scholar, for papers on reforestation/aquifer recharge initiatives, hoping to find some that also mentioned water needs, or rural areas in developing countries.  I wasn’t able to find anything promising that was free, and little at all, money or no.  I plan to continue searching tomorrow.

Before I end, I have a few requests for all of you:

  • What are good sources of information?  I’m thinking especially of sites that offer free journals/scholarly articles, but also of environmental/humanitarian blogs/news sites, good blogs/news sits in general, or even other groups that might have information that could help us with this current task, or our overall task of improving the lives people around the world through the provision of water and energy.
  • If you’d like, feel free to join me in the search for papers on the aforementioned subjects by linking to resources in the comments or tagging them with “for:oregondirectaction” with del.icio.us
Thanks!