The Campaign for Columbia SIPA Economic Development and Poverty Reduction
John Mutter
Breaking the disaster-poverty cycle. When disaster strikes, it is often poor people and underdeveloped countries that suffer the most. Professor John Mutter, a SIPA geophysicist who leads SIPA’s PhD program in sustainable development, is one of the world’s leading voices on the relationship between poverty and natural disasters in the developing world. His research shows that the poor suffer disproportionately because they often live in circumstances especially vulnerable to disasters, like low-lying coastal areas or poorly designed housing.
Seizing opportunities, improving lives. Long a hallmark of the business world, entrepreneurship is increasingly seen as a promising avenue to develop effective policies for the public good. To this end, SIPA has launched a number of initiatives that encourage students to pursue creative approaches to pressing issues. Among these is the Dean’s “Public Policy Challenge,” an annual competition in which student teams propose innovative technology-based solutions to help solve global problems. Drawing on mentors, technical training, and financial support provided by SIPA, students compete to demonstrate that their projects can be implemented quickly and make a meaningful impact. Winning teams receive shares of a $50,000 prize pool to support further development of their proposals.
Mutter predicts that climate change will drive an even greater wedge between the haves and the have-nots.
Expanding technology’s reach.
Professor Mutter was a leading voice about the shortfalls in official death tolls in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria.
In rural regions in Latin America, Internet access is often scarce. Doctors and nurses can’t easily go online to consult the latest medical resources, and as a result their patients suffer. A team of SIPA students traveled to the Dominican Republic to study the feasibility of providing rural clinics with an offline technology known as “Internet in a Box” — a digital library, the size of a cellphone, housing data originally downloaded from
Recent winners include Alice Bosley and Patricia Letayf, whose Kurdistan-based company, Five One Labs, is the first startup incubator in a region that is home to more than a million displaced Iraqis and Syrian refugees. Other successful startups include NaTakallam, which employs displaced persons as Arabic-language tutors, connecting them via Skype to individuals and institutions around the world, and the most recent Challenge winner, A4Ed, which aims to improve refugees’ access to formal education and employment opportunities by using mobile phones and blockchain technology to maintain easily accessible records of their educational and experiential backgrounds.
the Internet. Students shared a prototype of the device and consulted with local clinicians to refine recommendations for improving ts contents. Each year, more than 500 SIPA students work in small teams to tackle real-world problems like this — often outside the United States — for an external client.
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From STEM education to clean cooking, these signature Capstone workshops provide a valuable opportunity to make an impact where it’s needed most.