(Happily) Back to the Grind…

Today was my the end of first week back at Columbia’s Masters in Development Practice program.  Every Friday we have a cross-disciplinary seminar with our class of 24, which serves as a chance to regroup and communicate any administrative issues. More importantly, these informal seminars are designed to give us exposure to a wide-array of experts within the development community. Last semester we met with a range of professionals including employees of Dalberg, Millennium Village project, and Rockefeller Foundation. We’re exposed to an absurd amount of accomplished practitioners and scientists in other Columbia courses, but the strength of this particular session is that it allows us to personally interact with top-notch professionals while surrounded by the familiar MDP crew. One of the most important rules of the seminar is that we’re able to (and encouraged) to access the speakers after they’ve left the classroom.

Today, however, was different in a number of ways. Our summer Millennium Village field sites are getting closer to being finalized, but more urgently, Professor Sachs joined our Program Dean, Glenn Denning, to challenge us to devise a way we can support Haiti’s reconstruction and perhaps institutionalize it into our program for future generations of MDPers to continue. The challenges are extreme. As many are aware, Haiti had a weak institutional and economic structure previous to the disaster, and international assistance tends to fade once the cameras are shut off. Many questions demand adequate answers before long-term recovery can be attempted: What industries still exist in Haiti? What structures exist for reconstruction? What is the soil composition in agricultural areas? It’s a complex scenario and we’ll see if our team is able to draw upon SIPA and Earth Institute resources to contribute something meaningful to medium and long-term redevelopment efforts.

For some interesting information on short term recovery in Haiti, see a recent NYTimes article and Saundra Schimmelpfennig’s blog, “Good Intentions Are Not Enough“. Thanks to Barbara Wiczek of Rotary International’s World Community Service Program for forwarding them along.