Developing potential participants in East and West Africa

PhD Candidate Elizabeth Resor has identified and is interviewing potential participants for the CERES network in East and West Africa. Based on her interviews, she is also in the planning stages of a fieldwork trip to take place in the fall (pending post-election political stability in Ethiopia and global health concerns) for fieldwork with key participants in the edu-tech startup world in Nairobi and beyond. The CERES grant has been instrumental in enabling Elizabeth to undertake this research project. She has also enjoyed getting to know the CERES scholars network and looks forward to future professionalization opportunities with them.

PI Morgan Ames has been mentoring Elizabeth in this work and cultivating other possible CERES projects with other UC Berkeley I School graduate students. She is excited about several opportunities that would fit the CERES mission very well and would also be a huge benefit to the students in the coming years. Even if they are not directly funded by CERES, she plans to nominate them to be CERES scholars and participate in networking and professionalization activities.

We plan to continue to develop Elizabeth’s project, in particular her plans to undertake 1-2 months of ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa, and to potentially support a qualitative project that I School PhD student Zoe Khan is undertaking in Togo focused on mobile phone-supported youth health initiatives. We welcome opportunities to partner with others in the CERES network in our work on these projects and related endeavors.