“Oil Bills: Will they erase our doubts?“ was published in the Ugandan newspaper The Daily Monitor while SIPA Professor Jenik Radon and his students were in Uganda in March doing field research for a Capstone Workshop. Professor Radon and Marie-Paule Jeansonne (MIA ‘12) are both quoted in this article, commenting on the latest draft of two petroleum bills currently being considered by the Ugandan Parliament.

Eight SIPA students have been working on a Capstone Workshop that focuses on Uganda’s “Oil Bills,” conducting research to make recommendations on ways to effectively legislate and manage newly found oil reserves. 

The team’s initial comment on the legislation, which was put together by Jeansonne and Sri Swaminathan (MPA ‘12) under the guidance of Professor Radon, has been quoted in various media outlets in Uganda, including The Daily Monitor (above) and The Independent (“Parliament to pass weak laws on oil”). 

The students and Professor Radon also presented their comments and recommendations in-person to 15 members of the Ugandan Parliament’s Natural Resource Committee. 

The team presents its recommendations to Members of Parliament in Uganda. At right, Professor Radon and Jeansonne.

According to Professor Radon, the team’s two biggest recommendations are:

1. to have a stronger system of checks and balances, with an emphasis on transparency;
2. not to concentrate decision-making in one individual

During their time in Uganda in mid-March, the team also organized meetings with individuals from government ministries, members of Parliament (governing and opposition), civil society, Ugandan citizens, international donors, foreign embassies, and international and local media.

“We tried to identify what they see as the biggest issues and problems,” said Jeansonne. “By then, we already had ideas about what our recommendations would be, so our field trip was a good chance to test them. We had to make sure our report was something that could be actionable and something Ugandans could relate to.” 

While Nithin Coca (MIA ‘12), Kazumi Kawamoto (MIA ‘12), Ida Dokk Smith (MIA ‘12) and Frithiof August Wilhelmsen (MIA ‘13) conducted interviews in the capital city Kampala, Chitra Choudhury (MIA/Journalism ‘12) and Frazer Lanier (MIA ‘12) travelled to the resource-rich “oil belt” region of Hoima, which shares a border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Choudhury and Lanier in Hoima.

“We conducted interviews with both local authorities and residents,” said Choudhury, “people who might be displaced, fishing communities that might be affected… We were trying to understand how far-removed people on the ground are from what’s going on in Parliament. It added an extra layer of understanding on the issues.”

Professor Radon added that one of the major images that has stuck in his mind from the students’ field research is that “the elephants are leaving” due to the drilling and vibrations.

“That’s something we found,” said Choudhury, “the environmental impact wasn’t being studied. The government is doing that now, with the help of NORAD [the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation].” 

“You have to consider the full impacts,” Professor Radon added. “The importance of such a trip is you discover information from the locals. For example, there is a greater influx of fishing because of roads being built and increased access to [Lake Albert]. There’s overfishing, too much to be sustainable…. So these are the unintended consequences that you can only see on the ground.”

Jeansonne emphasized that because most of the oil drilling is on land, there are “grave implications for human rights, because people will be displaced.” This raises questions about compensation, how people should be displaced, and whether they should be displaced in the first place. 

“Developing extractive industries is difficult to do in the best of circumstances,” Radon said. “So these questions need to be answered in the right way.”

- Michelle Chahine

Several SIPA students share their experiences from field work across the world for their Workshops in Development Practice. For more information on the projects featured in this video, click on the links below:

Promoting a Political Voice in Georgia

Access for All: Students Design Pilot Credit Program in Tanzania

“Untouchables:” Students Examine Health Care Access for Nepalese Dalits

-Michelle Chahine

At left, Vivik Yadav (MPA ‘12) and Mai Shintani (MIA ‘12), with a group of Dalits in Nepal. 

A team of five students is working with the Samata Foundation in Nepal this semester to help assess the health care access for the marginalized Dalit population. 

Two team members, Vivek Yadav (MPA ’12) and Mai Shintani (MIA ’12), conducted field research in early January. They visited a Dalit compound, as well as met with NGOs, UNICEF, WHO, and government officials in Nepal.

“One of the goals of the January trip was to narrow our focus of what the project is, because earlier it was just too broad,” said Yadav. “So now we’re looking at exactly what health policies are in Nepal and how they relate to marginalized communities.

Secondly, what access issues do Dalits face when it comes to health care? How do their economic conditions, their educational background… affect their ability to access health care? And thirdly, what discrimination they face at the point of health care delivery.”

Shintani and Yadav interview members of the Dalit population in Nepal.

The rest of the team, Nadia Hasham (MIA ‘12), Kiryn Lanning (MIA/MPH ‘12), and Tsufit Daniel (MPA/MPH /12), will be traveling to Nepal in mid-March.

“We’re going to be there a little over two weeks,” said Lanning. “We also hope to capture more of the voice of the Dalit community, because as of now, we’ve already done a lot of interviews with policymakers and organizations working around these issues, but we really want to hear it from the communities that are most affected by this.”

The team explained that their deliverables include policy recommendations as well as next steps for the Samata Foundation. But an important component of the project is documenting and understanding the complex issue.

“There are so many different social constraints and circumstances and historical discrimination that are compounded within this one particular population,” explained Lanning.

“So understanding this nexus of discrimination is huge, and as a human rights organization, which is the agency we’re working for, being able to capture that in many different sectors and be able to apply it to policy would be amazing. 

Basically, when we first started this, we were told that there’s no literature or understanding around health care access for this population, particular to Nepal. There’s a lot of literature on it in India, and there’s been a lot of work around it, but in Nepal there hasn’t been much.”

Lanning added that Nepal is currently designing its constitution, so this is an important time to bring these issues to light.

- Michelle Chahine

Photo credit: Mai Shintani (MIA ‘12)

View more of this team’s and other student photographs from the field.

Fighting the Use of Child Soldiers with a List

by Dulcie Liembach, PassBlue
February 11, 2012

The “naming and shaming” tool has been the most successful mechanism so far in the United Nations’ arsenal on ending the practice of child soldiers in the last 10 years, said Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN secretary-general’s special envoy for children and armed conflict since 2006. Yet pockets of child soldier use still elude efforts by the UN and human rights groups since the General Assembly passed a resolution in 1998 banning the practice.

A UN Studies Program panel discussion held at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs on Jan. 31 focused on child soldiers in a two-hour program titled “The Security Council and Its Human Rights Agenda: Children and Armed Conflict: New Tools to Fight Impunity.”

Led by Elisabeth Lindenmayer, director of the UN program and a former adviser to Kofi Annan at the UN, the panel featured Coomaraswamy, a former Sri Lankan human-rights lawyer; Grace Akallo, a former child soldier and founder of United Africans for Women and Children Rights; Jo Becker, advocacy director, Children’s Rights Division, Human Rights Watch; and Ralf Schröer, a political officer at the German mission to the UN. The program began with “Ana’s Playground,” a film showing children playing in a desolate park, witnessing shootings and the target of a sniper themselves.

Akallo spoke first on the panel, detailing her life as a child soldier. She was in high school when she was recruited in northern Uganda by the Lord’s Resistance Army, known as the LRA and headed by Joseph Kony, who is under indictment by the International Criminal Court and is being hunted by Ugandan troops with the help of US advisers. The LRA trained children as young as 6 years old, Akallo said, beating them as an initiation rite, threatening them with witchcraft and forcing them to kill civilians and other rebels, using AK47’s.

Life as a child soldier, Akallo said, was “worse than death itself.”

Read more from PassBlue.

An unauthorized immigrant mother showing Paola Medina the empty mobile homes of former neighbors who have fled Alabama since the enactment of HB 56.

The spring semester at SIPA nearly always means Capstone Workshops for second-year students. But for Paola Medina (MPA, MSSW ‘12), her workshop came a little earlier because of her dual degree work with the School of Social Work. What came next for Medina was a front-row seat for one of the most contentious debates in the United States today: immigration and states’ rights.

“A recent team of students worked with Human Rights Watch (HRW), a Washington, DC-based organization, that supports efforts to preserve and to protect basic human rights of people around the world,” said Professor Paul Thurman, faculty adviser to the team. “The group studied whether certain federal provisions reduced crime reporting by illegal aliens in specific Virginia and Arizona counties.”

Their assignment was to conduct quantitative analysis examining the effects of Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The goal was to see if there was an effect on calls for emergency services (namely the police and fire departments) in counties that had anti-immigrant policies. The team examined undocumented populations.

“It’s a population that is in the shadows,” explained Medina. “So it’s difficult to document. What you can do are statistical inferences.

In the end, our recommendation to Human Rights Watch was to have a survey team assess what is happening.”

Medina and her teammates were doing their research from New York based on existing data sets.

“Human Rights Watch usually does qualitative research,” added Medina. “They wanted to have us do some quantitative work. I think when talking to policymakers you need the quantitative data to support the stories behind an issue.”

Through the relationships she built while working on the Capstone Workshop, Medina landed an internship in the U.S. Division at Human Rights Watch. She began last September and remains there until the end of this academic year.

In October, she traveled to Alabama as a consultant, along with U.S. Program researcher Grace Meng, to assist with research for a report on the state’s controversial new immigration law: the Hammon-Beason Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act, commonly known as HB 56.

Medina and Meng were there to get a better understanding of what was happening after the law was enacted and to see how people were being affected.

“When we landed in Birmingham, we went right to work,” said Medina. “We met with local community organizers. We spoke to people doing work on the issue.

We went to a rural area outside of Birmingham and spoke to a pastor. He mentioned people leaving the church because they were leaving the state… We also spoke to two members of his church that day, one of them undocumented. So we got a good feel of what was going on in the community.”

Prior to the HB 56, these two U.S. citizen girls partook in several activities, such as soccer practice and games. Now, their undocumented parents are too afraid to drive them to these activities in fear of getting detained.

A Mexican restaurant owned by an unauthorized immigrant single mother who has resided in Alabama for seven years and in the U.S. for 12 years. 

An unauthorized immigrant who has lived in the U.S. for 12 years sits with her US citizen grandson in her Mexican restaurant. Alabama’s new immigrant law could prevent her from renewing her business permit when it expires this year.

An Alabama immigrant family that has been affected by the recent law and that has been living in fear since its passage.

Read the full report here: No Way to Live: Alabama’s Immigrant Law

Currently, Medina is working on her own project at HRW, focusing on undocumented longtime resident immigrant youth in the U.S., conducting policy research and analysis for what will hopefully become an upcoming report that she will co-author.

- Michelle Chahine

photo credit: © 2011 Grace Meng/Human Rights Watch