Monday, February 22, 2010

Wooohooo!

I got into Berkeley!! yeeeeeaaaa!

And my friend Delite is here visiting, and I finally got to eat at the Indian restaurant in Mogo last night (paneer masala: mmmmm) and Delite brought black beans so Mexican feast is happening TONIGHT.

happy.camper.

Monday, February 15, 2010

I got into UNC!

I stopped by the post office today, for like the millionth time to check on a package my wonderful aunt and grandma sent me (no luck yet, but I'm going into town to the 'big post' office tomorrow to try to track it down!) and instead of a package I found a letter from UNC?! How incredibly old school to send a PAPER copy...to TANZANIA! But do whatevs...do your thing UNC!

I started opening the letter, and for all of my telling myself "it'll be ok if you don't get in; your future is not staked on this" my hands were shaking as I pulled out the contents. ..

"Congratulations, you've been accepted to the PhD program in the Maternal and Child Health department"
...and that was pretty much all I needed to see before I took off at a run across campus to tell someone, anyone really. I came flying into the office a little bit like a puppy who hasn't quite figured out that their back legs are attached to their front and stopped from crashing into a cabinet just in time to shout out the good news. "I GOT IN!"

After I'd calmed down enough (and my hands stopped shaking) I read through the letter and saw that while I have been admitted by the UNC graduate school, my department (Maternal Child Health) has yet to decide on funding. So, I'm in but I don't know yet if I'll be supported.

Still, half way there. Big step!!

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

PhD Update!

Since I've been rambling on through this blog about my anxieties and triumphs in applying for PhD programs, I thought I'd offer a little update...

I've heard back from 3 schools so far: Hopkins, Tulane and Berkley. Some schools do a round of interviews for candidates, some just have you talk with a professor in an informal sort of interview and some do neither. This morning I talked with a woman from Tulane, and this afternoon I have 2 phone interviews with professors from Hopkins. I'm still trying to set up a time to talk with one of the professors from Berkley.

So far it's not been too bad (although who knows what they think!). It's a bit of them sizing you up and a bit of you getting a better sense of the department, which is very helpful. Everyone has been very nice to me so far, for which I am duly grateful. :)

Of the schools I've heard from so far Hopkins is the one I am incredibly excited about. They have an amazing department that focuses specifically on reproductive health (other departments are more generally focused on epidemiology or global health) and they have some amazing projects/opportunities to work abroad.

We'll see how it all turns out....fingers crossed!!!

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Aid Effectiveness

One of the things that came out of the midyear retreat, was that a group of us wanted to find ways to more actively engage the GHC community in discussing issues of global health equity and social justice. Towards that end, we decided to choose a theme every month and provide some initial information for the community to get a conversation going. This month we chose to focus on the effectiveness, or ineffectiveness, of foreign aid. I thought I'd post this months info here in case anyone else was interested in learning about this...

The Effectiveness/Ineffectiveness of Foreign Aid

Within the international development community the debate over the effectiveness of foreign aid has been going on for decades, with supporters on one side arguing for more aid to developing countries and those on the other side who think aid is what is keeping developing countries poor. Here is just a small sampling of some of the information out there on both sides of the debate:

Good aid; Bad aid

The recent book, Dead Aid, by Dambiysa Moyo, sparked a lot of discussion around the effectiveness of foreign aid. In her book, Moyo calls for the end of foreign assistance within the next 5 years argues that foreign aid has actually hampered development by creating aid dependency among nations. Check out her website (hotlinked above) for more info on the book and her point of view, or read a review of the book by Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion.

Or take a look at Ghanaian economist George Ayittey on "Dead Aid" at TED. Check out his TED Talk and read an excerpt from an interview with him on Dead Aid, as well as the 6 institutions he thinks every African nation needs to develop.

In his interview, Ayittey brings up the doctrine of “odious debts”, which states that debts undertaken by corrupt regimes which ultimately are not used to not benefit the people of the state should not then be the responsibility of the citizen’s of that state to repay. This argument has been used in favor of debt relief initiatives, such as the Jubilee Network, for countries who incurred huge foreign debt that was largely embezzled by corrupt dictators.

However, not everyone thinks aid should be decreased. In a recent blog posting, Shanta Devarajan, Chief World Bank Economist for Africa, discusses why aid to Africa needs to increase, not decrease, during the global recession.

A recent article in Global Health Magazine, also brings up the difficulties NGOs face in trying to harmonize local needs with donor demands:
"In a country like Botswana where the majority of funding comes from international donors, it is challenging for organizations to keep in line with their original mandate. NGOs often shift their priorities to meet the needs of donors as opposed to the needs of the communities”

International efforts to improve aid effectiveness

Given the widely agreed upon difficulties with foreign aid, whatever side of the debate you are on, there have been international efforts to make aid more effective. The Paris Declaration and Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) are two international efforts, led by the OECD, to coordinate foreign aid and improve aid effectiveness. Specifically, the AAA, which builds on the Paris Declaration and was signed in 2008, calls for:

• Predictability – donors will provide 3-5 year forward information on their planned aid to partner countries.
• Country systems – partner country systems will be used to deliver aid as the first option, rather than donor systems.
• Conditionality – donors will switch from reliance on prescriptive conditions about how and when aid money is spent to conditions based on the developing country’s own development objectives.
• Untying – donors will relax restrictions that prevent developing countries from buying the goods and services they need from whomever and wherever they can get the best quality at the lowest price.

Monitoring the Effectiveness of Aid
There are many organizations that track the effectiveness of aid. Just a couple examples are:
• AidWatchers.com - A blog by William Easterly, author of White Man’s Burden, which monitors aid; where it goes and how it’s used. Check out this recent post for an interesting discussion on the recent disaster in Haiti and how the aid pouring in for relief efforts is being coordinated (or not).

(Plus don’t miss this hilarious post about African leaders advising Bono on reforming U2)

• The Center for Global Development - A Washington DC based think tank that has a number of resources and initiatives looking at the effectiveness of aid. Check out this interesting blog post about the Center’s Cash on Delivery program, which links funding directly to outputs by developing nation governments.

The Center also has an HIV/AIDS Monitor: Tracking Aid Effectiveness initiative which evaluates the effectiveness of funding for HIV from the three biggest donors: PEPFAR, the Global Fund and the World Bank. Check out this paper comparing the funding practices of all three.

GHC Midyear Retreat...we came, we saw

A couple of weeks ago all of the Africa-based GHC Fellows met in Kibuye, Rwanda on Lake Kivu for our midyear retreat. In addition to reveling in Rwanda's cooler weather, reconnecting with other fellows and staging a dance party on a boat in the middle of a thunder storm, it was a great time to reflect on the last 6 months and plan for the next. A few pictures...


Sunrise in the land of a thousand hills.


If this looks a little bit like a booze-cruise, well...no comment.


The details of what this photo is re-enacting shall remain anonymous. However, the picture is worth sharing.



Ready to hike the Bisoke volcano! Note how dry & clean we all look


Looking considerably muddier and sad after we got rained out trying to get to the top. The 2 hour mudslide down the volcano was pretty hilarious though.

Monday, February 1, 2010

What is going on with this blog template?

...I know. I'm not wild about this one, but I was having trouble getting things like the "comments" function to work with the other template and since I am coding-challenged I thought I'd switch it until I could get it figured out.

Anyone know anything about coding that could help me with the other template?

Paul Farmer on Rebuilding a Stronger Haiti

Check out Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners In Health's (PIH), recent congressional testimony on the opportunity that the horrific tragedy in Haiti represents to rebuild a stronger, more stable and more prosperous Haiti.

PIH has been working in Haiti for over 20 years and I had the chance to intern with them a couple of summers ago. PIH believes strongly that basic healthcare is a human right and that cost shouldn't prevent people from getting the care they need. PIH works with their sister organization, Zamni Lasante, to provide healthcare to over a million people in Haiti and has created over 5,000 jobs in the process.

Speaking before the Senate Foreign Relation's Committee, Farmer's remarks focus on the need to work with the Haitian government in rebuilding efforts and prioritize job creation as a means of not just rescuing Haiti from this current crisis, but investing in long-term development:

"In other words, if we focus the reconstruction efforts appropriately, we can achieve long-term benefits for Haiti. The UNDP is helping to organize programs of this kind, which should be supported and extended around the country. Putting Haitians back to work and offering them the dignity that comes with having a job and its basic protections is exactly what brought our country out of the Great Depression.

This was always the right thing to do, and aid programs persistently fail to get it right. So here is our chance: if even half of the pledges made in Montreal or other such meetings are linked tightly to local job creation, it is possible to imagine a Haiti building back better with fewer of the social tensions that inevitably arise as half a million homeless people are integrated into new communities."