Travel WSPs can be very valuable, but they are limited to a 2-3 week stay. Faculty in the Williams in Africa Initiative have been developing 6 week summer field research projects, some of which are described below. The projects are wide ranging and include areas such as public health, agriculture, social and economic entrepreneurship and the arts. These areas complement nicely the Cape Town Policy in Action Program, whose main focus is socio-economic and political post-apartheid reconstruction.
Kiaran Honderich: Measuring Care Labor in Uganda
Run as a pilot in Summer 2009, this project paired up Williams students with Ugandan students to train them in measuring care labor within households affected by HIV. The students spent time in households, gathering data on the specific impact of AIDS orphans and those who were sick and dying on the workload of members of their households. This data was used by AIDS activists and policy-makers. Like the Cape Town program, Honderich’s Uganda project taught research methods, formal training in political economy, and used summer fellowships to familiarize students with Africa in a socially constructive way.
Kenda Mutongi: Boda Boda: Socio-economic and Political Change in Uganda
Kampala has a population of 2 million, and yet there is no government operated bus system. The city has been trying to introduce buses but, at the moment, only possesses 7 of them. As such, more and more people are turning to bicycle transportation, known as boda boda. (They are so-named because people rode them in order to sneak across the border to get away from Uganda during Idi Amin’s reign). The boda boda offer employment to many youth, who use the bicycles to transport people around. Beyond their obvious utilitarian function, however, boda bodas are important to students of Africa because they provide a window on many socio-economic and political facets of early twenty-first century Africa—for example, organized crime, indigenous entrepreneurship, transition to democracy and to free market economies, labor disputes, class and respectability, popular culture, and rural urban migration. The parking lots where boda boda youth hang out also serve as public sites where gossip is exchanged, fashions are displayed, politics are disputed, and crimes are perpetrated. In other words, the boda boda industry represents a cultural phenomenon at the crossroads of Uganda’s clashing ideas and values. Mutongi will work closely with Williams students, teaching them various ethnographic methodologies and oral history techniques. Students should emerge from this experience with a greater awareness of Kampala’s urban life and with a deepened understanding of urban societies in Uganda and elsewhere in eastern and central Africa.
Doug Gollin: Examining agricultural productivity in rural Uganda
As many as three in four of Uganda’s people live in rural areas; most of these people earn their living from agriculture and related rural enterprises (such as bicycle repair, transport, brick making, and retail trading). Relatively little is known, however, about the structure of the rural economy and its economic links with the urban economies of Kampala/Entebbe, Jinja, Mbarara, etc. Working with researchers from the Makerere Institute for Social Research (MISR), Williams students will travel to rural areas in western and central Uganda to conduct simple quantitative surveys of farm households. The purpose of the study is to examine transport costs and marketing margins and their relationship to the farm economy. Do farmers use little fertilizer simply because of transport costs? Are the prices that they receive suppressed by poor infrastructure? These are the kinds of questions that the survey will include, and it would be a valuable opportunity for Williams students to see how surveys are conducted and how they can impact donor projects and other policies.
Kiaran Honderich: Collaborative Video in HIV Prevention and Public Health in Senegal
This project will build upon and deepen Honderich’s 2007 WSP in Senegal. We have the opportunity to create a team-taught class on public health with Gary Engelberg, the director of an NGO in Dakar, who has extraordinary experience of fighting HIV in West Africa and interacting with the different levels of government, NGOs and community activists. Our first 3 weeks will be spent in Dakar learning about Senegal’s experience fighting HIV and poverty and visiting local groups, particularly women’s groups. Then we will spend 3 weeks based in the regional capital of Thies, working closely with local community-based groups to understand their work and the challenges they face, and to empower them to make videos they can use in their work. These will include a rural group that is making health care available locally and using powerful participatory techniques, and a group inside Thies that teaches and supports mothers to feed their babies the healthiest possible diet.
