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Mitch Smith Wins Trip to Africa with Nick Kristof!
March 11, 2010
This is a joint post with Katherine Douglas and Sandy Stonesifer.
After three months, 893 applications, and a lot of effort by bright university students across the United States, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof selected Nebraska native Mitch Smith to join him on a reporting trip to Africa.
Those of you who entered or follow the yearly Win-a-Trip contest know that Nick asked CGD to vet the first round of applications. We jumped at the opportunity to lend some elbow grease to Nick’s contest and quickly realized how persuasively and passionately these students communicated about poverty and development.
We spent long afternoons reading each essay and watching each video – often many times over – to distinguish the really good candidates, from the really, really good candidates. We don’t envy Nick’s task of choosing just one student out of the short list of qualified finalists we turned over to him.
After Nick announced the winner in his column today, he visited CGD for a private discussion with our staff and special guests. The discussion touched on many areas of development, humanitarianism, journalism, and communication. Nick concluded on a slightly somber note, stating that as the mainstream media shrinks, development coverage will continue to decline:
“If you want information about eastern Congo, then increasingly you’re going to go to some combination of advocacy organizations and think tanks to get that information.”
Nick urged advocacy organizations and think tanks to improve how they communicate their valuable research and policy recommendations as it becomes the public’s main source of information about poverty and development. When the university students who entered the Win-a-Trip contest graduate, we hope they bring fresh ideas that help us in our continued efforts to promote development policy.
4 Responses to “Mitch Smith Wins Trip to Africa with Nick Kristof!”
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March 15th, 2010 at 9:30 am
Nick Kristof also proposed a Teach for the World program in his Sunday column and blog post.
This reminds me of the one ‘ask’ Secretary Clinton made in her speech on development: Help us tap into the talents of the first global generation of Americans – the young men and women graduating from our colleges and universities. Encourage them to volunteer, to intern, to work not only for NGOs, but to lend their energy and skill to the State Department and particularly to USAID.
What could be better than Teach for the World as a way to create a new generation of global citizens (if they go on to other pursuits) and development professionals (if they stay on and work with developing countries)?
March 15th, 2010 at 11:50 am
Nick further explained his Teach for the World proposal on Friday in a column titled “Teach for the World Vs. Peace Corps. http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.c.....ace-corps/ He noted that the main purpose of Teach for the World is to build a constiuency for development in the United States.
I fully endorse this idea because of a transformational experience I had as an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Barbara. I was fortunate to be chosen to participate in something called Project Pakistan, a student exchange program that sent a team of eight California university students to visit Pakistani universities and meet with our counterparts. (This was 1973, and we visited areas that today would be highly dangerous for any Americans.)
I am quite sure that we achieved little in Pakistan, beyond perhaps putting a human face on the idea of “American” for those who met us. But the impact on my understanding of global poverty and of Americans’ role in the world could not have been greater. When I graduated in 1976 I was keen on joining the PeaceCorps but was told I need not apply because I lacked the technical skills they were seeking.
As Nick notes: PeaceCorps “is often aimed at somewhat older folks rather than young college graduates whose lives are at a turning point. That’s why 12 percent of Ivy League College seniors this year are applying for Teach for America, but only a tiny percent for Peace Corps. I’m all in favor of greater financial support for PeaceCorps, but that won’t meet the needs of a lot of young people who are looking for just a year of overseas service. And I do think it’s very important that we find mechanisms to send more young people abroad, embedded in foreign societies.”
March 15th, 2010 at 4:40 pm
It seems like PeaceCorps is great for some, but too long or at the wrong career time for others. Having an option like Teach for the World could be extremely attractive to college graduates and help build the “constituency for development in the U.S.” that Kristof is advocating for.
If it is true that there is underserved demand for a program of this nature and length, I support the idea. The upside appears very real.
An important argument against such a program is that 1 year isn’t enough time. The 11th comment on Kristof’s newer post on the subject notes:
“while I definitely gained more than I was able to contribute, almost everything I did contribute was in my second year of service, after I had mastered the language, acquired some cultural competency, gained the trust of my colleagues, and built working relationships within the community.”
It’s an argument that has to be considered seriously when planning Teach for the World. Even if the point is to create a constituency in the U.S., Teach for the World has to be at least useful for countries teachers are going to.
March 17th, 2010 at 10:58 am
Strongly second Steve Perlow’s last thought that even if the program is planned to build a constituency for global development in the U.S., Teach for the World HAS to be useful/productive for the receiving/host countries. We don’t really need another “technical assistance” model for global development that benefits the donor country, with such distal effects for the receiving country—graduates of this program will be lifelong donors, will go and work for USAID, will figure out how to design aid to use more effectively. We don’t know that this happening with any significance, do we? And by the time (a long way, I think) these effects work in favor of the developing world, aid may not even be relevant. See Alanna Shaikh’s strong views on this idea at: http://undispatch.com/node/9665 The last line of her blog post says it all- “the developing world has specific needs that have to be addressed through programs that are designed to meet those needs, not just any random aid we want to send.”
That said, I’m not opposed to the big idea, but the devil is in the details. A more effective model could link young Americans with young people in the developing world—both sides benefit and it is a much more balanced and respectful two way learning process, where youth in America understand the developing world better, but also where youth in Africa, for example, understand the U.S. and the rich world better. Wouldn’t that motivate African youth to figure out what they could do in their countries to accelerate development? In short, it’s “how” the program is designed that will be critical to its success, which can’t be defined only as creating a constituency for global development in the U.S.