About the topic: PSI is a global social marketing NGO that approaches clients as consumers in 60 developing countries. What do the private sector and marketing have to teach us about saving and improving the lives of the most vulnerable? A lot, it turns out.
About the speaker: Karl Hofmann is the President and CEO of PSI (Population Services International), a non-profit global health organization based in Washington, D.C. PSI operates in 60 countries worldwide, with programs in family planning and reproductive health, malaria, child survival, HIV, maternal and child health, and non-communicable diseases. Prior to joining PSI, Mr. Hofmann was a career American diplomat. He served as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Togo, and Executive Secretary of the Department of State.
Cosponsors: Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health, Stanford Center for International Development
The Ebola epidemic, which could affect hundreds of thousands of West Africans, can only be contained by rebuilding public trust and local health systems decimated by years of neglect, according to a panel convened by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Medicine. FSI Senior Fellows David Relman, Paul Wise, Stephen Stedman, Michele Barry and Douglas Owens were among the panelists.
The World Health Organization estimates 2,811 people have died of the virus since the outbreak began earlier this year and that 5,864 people currently are infected in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Senegal and Nigeria.
In this Stanford Medicine news story,Owens, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Health Policy at FSI, cites a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that estimates that even with "very aggressive" intervention, there would be at least 25,000 cases by late December. If intervention is delayed by just one month, the CDC estimates there would be 3,000 new cases every day; if it's delayed by two months, there will be 10,000 new cases daily. "It gives you a sense of the extraordinary urgency in terms of time," Owens told the audience.
Relman and CISAC biosecurity fellow Megan Palmer have also done a Q&A about the virus.
A pregnant woman suspected of contracting Ebola is lifted by stretcher into an ambulance in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Sept. 19, 2014 in a handout photo provided by UNICEF.
Please note that this CDDRL seminar will be held on Wednesday.
Abstract:
Recent estimates place half of the world’s poorest people in fragile and conflict-affected states by 2015. As the world moves towards the next phase of global development goals, which includes a central emphasis on eradicating extreme poverty, it will be necessary to understand the challenges for countries in the most difficult contexts. Is addressing and resolving fragility a condition (or precondition) for successfully addressing poverty? Or, are there ways to significantly and sustainably reduce poverty even while countries remain fragile?
USAID is seeking to answer these questions as it recommits to working with its partners to end extreme poverty by 2030. And while we acknowledge that ending extreme poverty will not be easy, progress and gains already achieved over the past couple of decades have made us certain that it is possible. As the global community coalesces around this goal, USAID seeks to increase shared understanding of the nature of extreme poverty, where there has been success and why, and what we are already doing and will need to do differently to catalyze and invest in global solutions.
Speaker Bio:
Alex Thier
Alex Thier is USAID’s assistant to the Administrator for Policy, Planning, and Learning (PPL). The PPL Bureau is USAID’s center for policy development, strategic planning, learning and evaluation, and partner engagement. From June 2010‐ June 2013, Thier served as assistant to the administrator for Afghanistan and Pakistan affairs, overseeing USAID’s two largest missions in the world.
Before joining USAID, Thier served with the U.S. Institute of Peace as senior rule of law adviser and director for Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2005‐ 2010. While at the Institute, he co‐authored The Future of Afghanistan (2009) as well as The Next Chapter: The United States and Pakistan, the 2008 report of the Pakistan Working Group. Thier also served as director of the Institute’sConstitution Making, Peacebuilding, and National Reconciliation project, during which he advised numerous governments and civil society organizations engaged in ongoing constitutional drafting and national reconciliation exercises. Thier was also a principal staffer on the Institute’s Genocide Prevention Task Force, and a coauthor of its final report, Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for U.S. Policymakers. The recommendations from this report formed the backbone of President Barack Obama’s 2011 Directive on Mass Atrocities.
Thier previously served as director of the Project on Failed States at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. From 2002 to 2004, he was legal adviser to Afghanistan’s Constitutional and Judicial Reform Commissions in Kabul, where he assisted in the development of a new constitution and judicial system. He has also worked as a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, a legal and constitutional expert to the British Department for International Development, and as an adviser to the Constitutional Commission of Southern Sudan.
From 1993 to 1996, Thier worked as a U.N. and NGO official in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the Afghan civil war. He also served as coordination officer for the U.N. Iraq Program in New York.
An attorney, Thier was a Skadden fellow and a graduate fellow at the U.S. National Security Council’s Directorate for Near‐East and South Asia. He received the Richard S. Goldsmith award for outstanding work on dispute resolution from Stanford University in 2000.
Thier has a J.D. from Stanford Law School, a master’s degree in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and a Bachelor’s Degree from Brown University.
Discussion Paper: Ending extreme poverty in fragile contexts
Encina Hall, 3nd Floor 616 Serra St Stanford, CA 94305
Alex Thier
Assistant to the Administrator for Policy, Planning, and Learning
Assistant to the Administrator for Policy, Planning, and Learning
United States Agency for International Development
Join Global Development and Poverty Initiative (GDP) for a stimulating discussion on the opportunities, obstacles, and unforeseen events encountered while conducting field research in the developing world.
The panelists will share stories of challenges and successes from their own experiences and will offer insights on conducting effective research in the field.
473 Via Ortega, Y2E2, Room 255
Stanford, CA 94305-4020
(650) 725-9170
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jennadavis@stanford.edu
Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
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PhD
Jennifer (“Jenna”) Davis is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Higgins-Magid Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, both of Stanford University. She also heads the Stanford Program on Water, Health & Development. Professor Davis’ research and teaching is focused at the interface of engineered water supply and sanitation systems and their users, particularly in developing countries. She has conducted field research in more than 20 countries, including most recently Zambia, Bangladesh, and Uganda.
Higgins-Magid Faculty Senior Fellow, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
Faculty Lead, Center for Human and Planetary Health
Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases)
Professor of Epidemiology & Population Health (by courtesy)
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment
Faculty Affiliate at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions
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MD
Prof. Stephen Luby studied philosophy and earned a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude from Creighton University. He then earned his medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas and completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Rochester-Strong Memorial Hospital. He studied epidemiology and preventive medicine at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Prof. Luby's former positions include leading the Epidemiology Unit of the Community Health Sciences Department at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan, for five years and working as a Medical Epidemiologist in the Foodborne and Diarrheal Diseases Branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) exploring causes and prevention of diarrheal disease in settings where diarrhea is a leading cause of childhood death. Immediately prior to joining the Stanford faculty, Prof. Luby served for eight years at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Diseases Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), where he directed the Centre for Communicable Diseases. He was also the Country Director for CDC in Bangladesh.
During his over 25 years of public health work in low-income countries, Prof. Luby frequently encountered political and governance difficulties undermining efforts to improve public health. His work within the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) connects him with a community of scholars who provide ideas and approaches to understand and address these critical barriers.
Director of Research, Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health
Affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law
Forward-thinking companies, government organizations, and NGOs are beginning to link their efforts to build markets, promote environmental conservation, and reduce poverty in developing economies.
Join GDP for a discussion that explores potential synergies and challenges associated with linking these efforts. The panelists will share their own experiences and other promising models currently employed by companies, NGOs and government organizations around the world.
The Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki
Environment and Energy Building
Stanford University
473 Via Ortega, Office 363
Stanford, CA 94305
(650) 723-5697
(650) 725-1992
0
roz@stanford.edu
Senior Fellow, Stanford Woods Institute and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William Wrigley Professor of Earth System Science
Senior Fellow and Founding Director, Center on Food Security and the Environment
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PhD
Rosamond Naylor is the William Wrigley Professor in Earth System Science, a Senior Fellow at Stanford Woods Institute and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the founding Director at the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and Professor of Economics (by courtesy) at Stanford University. She received her B.A. in Economics and Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado, her M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics, and her Ph.D. in applied economics from Stanford University. Her research focuses on policies and practices to improve global food security and protect the environment on land and at sea. She works with her students in many locations around the world. She has been involved in many field-level research projects around the world and has published widely on issues related to intensive crop production, aquaculture and livestock systems, biofuels, climate change, food price volatility, and food policy analysis. In addition to her many peer-reviewed papers, Naylor has published two books on her work: The Evolving Sphere of Food Security (Naylor, ed., 2014), and The Tropical Oil Crops Revolution: Food, Farmers, Fuels, and Forests (Byerlee, Falcon, and Naylor, 2017).
She is a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, a Pew Marine Fellow, a Leopold Leadership Fellow, a Fellow of the Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics, a member of Sigma Xi, and the co-Chair of the Blue Food Assessment. Naylor serves as the President of the Board of Directors for Aspen Global Change Institute, is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for Oceana and is a member of the Forest Advisory Panel for Cargill. At Stanford, Naylor teaches courses on the World Food Economy, Human-Environment Interactions, and Food and Security.
Program on Energy and Sustainable Development
616 Jane Stanford Way
Encina Hall East, Rm E412
Stanford, CA 94305
(650) 724-9709
(650) 724-1717
0
mthurber@stanford.edu
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PhD
Mark C. Thurber is Associate Director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD) at Stanford University, where he studies and teaches about energy and environmental markets and policy. Dr. Thurber has written and edited books and articles on topics including global fossil fuel markets, climate policy, integration of renewable energy into electricity markets, and provision of energy services to low-income populations.
Dr. Thurber co-edited and contributed to Oil and Governance: State-owned Enterprises and the World Energy Supply (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and The Global Coal Market: Supplying the Major Fuel for Emerging Economies (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He is the author of Coal (Polity Press, 2019) about why coal has thus far remained the preeminent fuel for electricity generation around the world despite its negative impacts on local air quality and the global climate.
Dr. Thurber teaches a course on energy markets and policy at Stanford, in which he runs a game-based simulation of electricity, carbon, and renewable energy markets. With Dr. Frank Wolak, he also conducts game-based workshops for policymakers and regulators. These workshops explore timely policy topics including how to ensure resource adequacy in a world with very high shares of renewable energy generation.
Dr. Thurber has previous experience working in high-tech industry. From 2003-2005, he was an engineering manager at a plant in Guadalajara, México that manufactured hard disk drive heads. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and a B.S.E. from Princeton University.
Traditional drug repurposing, although successful in treating some diseases, still requires considerable time to identify candidate compounds and even more time to test them in clinical trials. Ebola requires and deserves a much more aggressive approach, while still balancing safety and efficacy concerns.
One way to considerably speed up the drug development process is to use high-end, bioinformatics-oriented computing approaches. When applied to drug repurposing, this approach can allow for a much faster identification of candidate compounds. When applied to clinical trials, this approach may quickly provide valuable animal and human information without the need for actual subjects.
With bioinformatics, drug repurposing can be used quickly without resorting to desperate measures that compromise safety. These bioinformatics approaches are already under development for diseases that are prevalent in wealthy countries, like cancer; Ebola provides an opportunity for this potentially game-changing approach to be applied to a disease primarily affecting those in resource-limited countries.
Abstract: Policies regulating the international grain trade in Southern Africa (SA) are motivated by uncertainty regarding private sector performance and, in turn, private sector performance is generally constrained by the policy environment. We study spatial price transmission between SA maize markets where trade is dominated by informal product flows. This provides an opportunity to study private sector market performance in a largely unregulated market environment. Contrary to some existing evidence on the performance of SA grain markets connected by formal trade, we find that informally trading markets work quite well. Long-run price equilibrium is consistent with competitive trade, price transmission is rapid, and potential trade constraints have no disruptive impact on long-run relationships. Nevertheless, we do find evidence of occasionally high transfer costs that may impede informal trade flows. The conclusion is that a policy focus on encouraging informal trade and lowering informal trade costs would lead to improved market performance.
In a recent interview with NPR, Larry Diamond provides insights and analysis on some of the most pressing political developments confronting the world today.
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Larry Diamond at the opening dinner of the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.
About the Topic: Foreign aid for health in low- and middle-income countries has increased five-fold over the past 25 years. Between 2005 and 2010, health aid made up more than 30% of all health spending in low-income countries. Global health is also an increasingly important component of U.S. foreign aid, rising steadily from under 4% of all U.S. non-military aid in 1990 to 22.7% in 2011. There is growing evidence for the role of health aid in improving health among recipient countries, but is that it? In this talk I will address the arguments for and against health as a focus of aid efforts and present initial evidence on the role of health aid on human capital and economic development.
About the Speaker: Eran Bendavid is an infectious diseases physician and an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Medical Disciplines and a Stanford Health Policy affiliate. His research interests involve understanding the relationship between policies and health outcomes in developing countries. He explores how decisions about foreign assistance for health are made, and how those decisions affect the health of those whom assistance aims to serve.
He received a B.A. in chemistry and philosophy from Dartmouth College, and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He completed his residency in internal medicine and fellowship in infectious diseases at Stanford.
Encina Hall (2nd floor)
Eran Bendavid
Assistant Professor of Medicine
Speaker
Stanford University
Nearly 250,000 refugees stopped to rest at the foot of an active volcano in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, recalled Thomas Fingar, referring to a situation in 1994 when he served as the deputy assistant secretary for analysis at the State Department. Officials asked him how to respond. Would the volcano erupt? If so, which way would the lava, ash and gas plumes travel? Must the refugees, exhausted from leaving Rwanda, be relocated to a safer venue? Aid workers had to decide whether to move the refugees and risk death by fatigue, or leave them there and risk death from the volcano. Specialized knowledge was required to make a decision. Fingar directed Bureau staff to find a volcanologist with expertise on that particular volcano–the Nyiragongo–and its surrounding area. It was likely to erupt, the expert informed them, and the path of volcanic debris would be away from where the refugees were assembled. Consequently, the refugees did not have to move.
That example was one of many illustrations that Fingar, the Oksenberg-Rohlen distinguished fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, offered in a keynote speech delivered at the College of William & Mary, drawing upon his 15 years of experience in senior U.S. national security roles.
His presentation entitled, “National Security in the Global Era,” was part of a three-day conference at the Reves Center for International Studies that gathered a cadre of experts to examine the future of global education.
Specialized area studies and foreign language education have reached a critical point in the age of globalization. The current trend is one of steady cuts in funding. If it is not reversed, the nation will quickly lose critical capabilities. Fingar argued that the teaching and study of foreign languages and areas are more important than ever before.
Fingar (at Left) speaks with colleagues at the conference, which convened a wide range of leaders with global expertise.
“Meeting challenges, managing threats and taking advantage of opportunities on a global scale require different and deeper kinds of knowledge than was required during the Cold War,” he said.
Any effective strategy or policy – whether addressing economic, health or terrorism-related concerns – requires in-depth understanding of the countries involved, especially as new transnational threats and global developments emerge.
“If we do not understand, and cannot communicate with, the still highly diverse world, the downsides and dangers of globalization will erode our prosperity, endanger our safety and degrade our security.”
The full text of his speech is available below.
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FSI fellow Thomas Fingar speaks at a conference held at the Reves Center for International Studies on the "Internationalization of U.S. Education in the 21st Century."
Alex Thier
