Archive for Meet Seeples – Page 73

EPD Workshop – Ethiopia

Posted by Matt Clemons 
· Monday, February 21st, 2011 
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Several students knee deep in their workshops have submitted posts to the blog recently.  This post was submitted by Sawako Sonoyama.

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I just returned from an unforgettable two-week trip to Ethiopia as part of my SIPA curriculum. This program is called The Workshop in Development Practice with the Economic and Political Development (EPD) concentration. The workshop allows students to gain practical experience by engaging in on-going actual development projects with organizations that often involve traveling abroad for fieldwork.

My EPD Workshop is with Family Health International (FHI) in Ethiopia. FHI is a global health and development organization that focuses on providing interdisciplinary training programs related to HIV/Aids. My project was to assist in developing a measurement system and tools to monitor and evaluate the extent to which knowledge and skills transferred through training are applied in practice. After conducting an in-depth desk review, conducting several conference calls with Ethiopia, and creating preliminary evaluation tools, my teammate and I were ready to go.

Upon arriving to Addis Ababa, we were welcomed with a ride from the airport, traditional coffee ceremony, and a delicious Ethiopian feast. I have never been to a more welcoming and warm country in my life. Every day of our trip, our Ethiopian counterparts went out of the way to welcome us and ensured that we were able to get our work done.

Picture: Welcome lunch with FHI

During our two week visit, we were able to test out the evaluation tools we have created for two different trainings. The first training was the Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) Refresher training in Addis Ababa. We were able to observe many of the training modules while conducting  focus group discussions and supervisor interviews. The nurses were shy at first, but gradually opened up to us and explained the main challenges involving pregnant women in Ethiopia – mainly the inability to open up to their male partners to involve them with family planning. Furthermore, to evaluate how the nurse practitioners who attended the PMTCT training were doing on-site, we visited health centers and spoke to the clients directly. Through an interpreter, I had my first experience of interviewing pregnant women who are getting ready for a new life of starting a family.

Photo: Interviewing Clients

The second training we attended was titled Family-Based Alternative Child Care (ACC). The ACC training covers various formal or informal arrangement whereby a child is looked after outside of the birth family. This program is aimed to better support those children who have lost their parents due to HIV/Aids. The ACC training is more complex to evaluate then the PMTCT, as the behavior change of individuals is less practical. In fact, the behavior of multiple organizations must change for any region to successfully adopt an Alternative Child Care mechanism. Trying to work with this training made me realize how complex working with children from an institutional level can be.

Apart from working on the two trainings, through the wonderful cultural exchange we had, I was able to formulate a close friendship with many of the FHI staff.  I met Estsegenet Asefa, a beautiful woman from the Southern region of Ethiopia. Estegenet is a Community Health and Social Development Officer of the Southern region that was here to coordinate the training and facilitate group discussions. While she works full time at FHI-Ethiopia, she is also pursuing her MPH as a part-time graduate student. She has already completed her courses and is working on finishing her thesis is on relationships among People Living with HIV/Aids who are going through antiretroviral therapy. We shared stories about the challenges of balancing both professional and academic life, and where we hope to be after we graduate. She is also a vibrant dancer and gave me some tips on Ethiopian dance moves. We formed such a wonderful friendship and it was sad to say good bye. I am confident that she will be successful in the field of public health in Ethiopia and I hope that we meet again.

My new friend, Estsegenet

My two weeks in Ethiopia was fulfilling in so many ways – new experiences in monitoring and evaluation at health centers, interesting realizations about the complexities of working with HIV/Aids, and countless moments of absorbing the rich and wonderful Ethiopian culture. I am so thankful that I was able to travel to Ethiopia on the EPD workshop. Our work is nowhere near complete, as we must prepare for my team’s second visit to Ethiopia and finish our final report. I hope that the work we present will be useful for FHI-Ethiopia’s training programs and that can provide a meaningful impact to their clients.

Addis Ababa

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EPD Workshop Notes

Posted by Matt Clemons 
· Tuesday, February 15th, 2011 
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Workshops are a very popular part of the SIPA experience and many of our students are currently knee deep in their projects.  Last week Lacey Ramirez submitted a workshop post and now here another submitted by Beatriz Guillen.

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As you have read in previous posts, the workshop project is one of the most exciting things while you are at SIPA. The Economic and Political Development Workshop is a five month consulting project on development issues. We work with a broad variety of clients: from UN agencies, to developing countries’ governments, NGOs, etc.

In a nutshell, the workshop is structured as follows: you do much of the research and planning in New York and then travel twice to the country to do some field work.  Half of the group travels during the winter break, and half during the Spring break.

By last week, almost all the teams had returned from their destination countries after their first trip. Sierra Leone, Uganda, Sri Lanka, Kazakhstan, Chile and Jamaica were among the 15 different countries where students traveled. These days everyone is eager to tell their stories about adventures abroad. The EPD department organized a session with all the workshop participants, where we could share not only pictures and fun stories, but also challenges and lessons learned.

We were amazed at the great lengths that people who traveled went to in order to stay in contact with the part of the team that stayed in New York: from climbing to a tree to reach some cell reception, to driving around Addis Ababa to get an Internet connection to Skype with the rest of their team members.

Below, there are some pictures from the team that traveled to Jamaica and from one of the teams that traveled to Ethiopia.

The new market at Kingston

In a rural village in Ethiopia

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Workshops at SIPA

Posted by Matt Clemons 
· Monday, February 7th, 2011 
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The following post was written by current SIPA student Lacey Ramirez.  Workshops are an exciting, practical, and professional part of the SIPA experience which provide an excellent way to merge classroom learning with real world involvement.

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I know the Admissions Committee has started reading and I’ve been thinking about what advice I could give prospective students that would help them make a decision regarding schools. In other words, what makes SIPA different than the other graduate schools in international and public affairs?

One major component is the workshop requirement for all SIPA students.  Workshops require students apply the practical skills and analytical knowledge they have learned at SIPA to a real-world challenge. Students are organized into small consulting teams and assigned a substantive, policy-oriented project with an external client.  Clients include public agencies (from the local to national level), international NGOs and multi-national organizations, and major firms in the private sector.

Student teams, working under the supervision of a faculty expert, answer a carefully defined problem posed by the client.  Most of the teams will travel to the country in order to conduct the work necessary to produce an actionable report at the end of the workshop that will hopefully translate into real change on the ground.

Examples of MPA workshops can be found here.

Here you also find links to other concentration workshops, and please note to find examples of EPD workshops you’ll need to click here.

Okay, now on to my personal experience.  I am currently working on a randomized control trial measuring the effects of an education incentives program and parental involvement interventions on students’ performance and school attendance in Chiapas, Mexico. During my time at SIPA I’ve focused my studies on developing my quantitative analysis skills, and it is incredibly exciting to be able to apply what I’ve learned to a real world project.

Additionally, it is important to note that before we participate in the workshop it is mostly required that we prepare for it by taking an intensive Methods for Development Practice course that covers a wide variety of tools used by development practitioners. Tools are learned and applied in the Methods course through the use of case studies to give students an opportunity to practice before the workshop.  You can find a further description of the Methods course here.

In the last few weeks of the Methods course, the students (we) apply for the workshop we are interested in and they cover a wide variety of topics, including supply chain analysis, health, education and monitoring and evaluation.  Once we are assigned to our teams, we work very intensely to prepare a schedule that we will implement the following semester to meet our client’s objectives.

As I write this, my workshop team has members in Mexico conducting interviews, focus groups and observational studies to gather data that will prepare a team to go back in a couple of months to pilot a final survey.  It is very, very exciting and we hope that ultimately all our hard work will be used to serve the people of Chiapas to improve education programs and communities.

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Journal of International Affairs

Posted by Matt Clemons 
· Thursday, February 3rd, 2011 
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The following entry was contributed by Homa Hassan.  Homa is a first-year student at SIPA and you can read her biography here.  There are plenty of extracurricular opportunities for SIPA students to get involved in and one such opportunity is with the Journal of International Affairs.  Homa elaborates on her experience as both an Editorial and Digital Assistant.

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SIPA students are always looking for ways to get involved on campus.  There is a mix of activities to take part in – there are the organizations that have to do with your particular studies, the ones that deal with your personal interests, the ones with tradition and prestige, and the ones that introduce you to new fields and new friends.

One of the projects that links new students to old and all students to alumni and global leaders is Columbia University’s Journal of International Affairs.  Two volumes are produced each year comprised of essays, interviews, and book reviews written by prominent scholars of foreign policy and international affairs.  The Andrew Wellington Cordier Essay contest also gives students the opportunity to have their original works published.  The theme of each volume is decided on by SIPA students on the JIA Board.  Our latest theme was on Innovating Development, with essays ranging from nuclear power and sustainable development to climate change technology and gender revolutions.

There are a number of different ways to get involved with the Journal as a first year student, including serving as an Editorial Assistant, Production Assistant, and/or a Digital Assistant.  No experience is necessary and training is provided for each of the positions at the beginning of the semester.  I served as both an Editorial Assistant and a Digital Assistant.  Editorial Assistants have a demanding job.  We don’t just copy edit, which of course is important, but the bigger task is to fact-check.  Editorial Assistants are the first defense on the line protecting the publication’s reputation.

To begin with, each of us was given a brief summary of all of the articles and asked to rank them in the order of our interest.  A few days later, we were assigned 2-3 pages in one of the essays and paired with a Lead Editor who oversaw our work.  For our assigned pages, every line had to be checked and re-checked and verified by two or more sources (online or in print) to ensure the information is accurate and well-supported by substantial evidence.  Any links in the article were tracked and also verified.  The work is intense, but one of the most important processes of publishing the Journal.

The Production Assistants work with the layout of the publication, placing the content onto the pages, formatting and designing them to be aesthetically appealing, and finalizing the essays before they are sent out for production.  When the publication is finally out, the Board hosts something akin to a release party.  This year, it was a nice break from studying for final exams to listen to the speakers’ panel and join the celebrations at the subsequent reception with food, drinks, and live jazz music.  The JIA Board also hosted an end-of-semester happy hour to thank all of the SIPA students who helped out.

Digital Assistants continue to work throughout the year.  One of the large projects JIA has right now is uploading all previous issues of the Journal to the JIA website.  This means sorting through PDF versions of old issues and uploading the content to the website so that they are accessible to the general public.  The nice part about being a Digital Assistant was that I could go into the publication room between classes or after work and get my work done independently.  Having worked on the production and editorial side of journalism in the past, I welcomed learning new skills by working on the digital side of things.  I also now know the ins and outs of the publication online (great resource for classes!).

Working for the Journal of International Affairs has been challenging, but one of the most rewarding ways to get involved at SIPA.  Its fluid structure allows you to try new things and advance with commitment.  And years from now, your work is still an integral part of SIPA’s library.  Working on the Journal allows you to hit the ground running and seamlessly integrates you into life at SIPA.

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Social Entrepreneurship at SIPA

Posted by Matt Clemons 
· Monday, January 31st, 2011 
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The following post was written by Kevin Hong.  Kevin is a second-year student concentrating in Economic and Political Development with a specialization in Management.

Kevin graduated from Cornell University in 2005 and focused on Computational and Systems Biology.  Prior to joining SIPA Kevin was Study Coordinator at the Francis I. Proctor Foundation based at the University of California in San Francisco.

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Whether it is corporate social responsibility, sustainability, or social entrepreneurship, there has been increasing interest in the intersection of the private and public sectors expressed by SIPA students. As I served as the Social Entrepreneurship Chair for SIPA Net Impact, I met more and more students at SIPA who are interested in how to encourage more business to promote social causes or how to use entrepreneurial approaches in social sectors.

Net Impact is a national organization with chapters around the world to bring together students and professionals who are interested in these issues (netimpact.org).  The chapter at SIPA has been particularly active in the past year putting together a variety of events to raises awareness about social entrepreneurship (Face Book page here). Here are some of events we hosted:

  • AfroReggae- Social Entrepreneurship and Arts Education in Brazil’s Favelas
  • KOPERNIK ~ Entrepreneuring Breakthrough Technologies
  • Food in the Sky: Vertical Farming for Sustainable Food Supply with Dr. Dickson Despommier
  • Conversation with Paul Polak, Author of Out of Poverty and Founder of International Development Enterprises (IDE)
  • The Power of Social Entrepreneurship – The Mae Fah Luang Foundation
  • Social Entrepreneurship: Insights from Practitioners

In partnership with Wagner School of Public Services at NYU, SIPA Net Impact also organized the Social Enterprise Boot Camp which offered skill-building workshops, an elevator pitch competition, and speed networking for aspiring social entrepreneurs (www.socialenterprisebootcamp.org). This event was a huge success with over dozen speakers and over 100 participants and SIPA Net Impact is working to offer the Boot Camp again this year with more workshops.

Social Enterprise Boot Camp

Now with two full courses dedicated on social entrepreneurship taught by professors Sarah Holloway and Sara Minard and exciting extracurricular activities on the topic, SIPA provides unique opportunities for students who are interested in public policy and development to explore social entrepreneurship as an innovative tool to promote social causes in which they are interested.  So join us and find out how you can make the world a better place with social entrepreneurship at SIPA!

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"The most global public policy school, where an international community of students and faculty address world challenges."

—Merit E. Janow, Dean, SIPA, Professor of Practice, International and Economic Law and International Affairs

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