Harvard Magazine features student projects in Africa

This month's issue of Harvard Magazine features students from the College working on a wide variety of projects in Africa, including a documentary on mental-health care and policy reform in Ghana and the development of vertical agriculture (VertiGrow) in Kibera, Nairobi. Today's evening news here in Ghana actually debated the progress of the mental-health bill in Parliament.

As a political-scientist-in-training, I found the VertiGrow article quite intriguing, namely in that it falls under the question of, "do interventions actually work?", a question that remains to be answered. Surely my fellow Easterly fans will enjoy this key quote:

Nowak was never sure what she would find each day when she arrived at the designated construction sites for the planters in Kibera. But she says her approach of letting the residents take the lead resulted in a product that merges the undergraduates’ ideas with local preferences and customs in a way that something designed wholly in a Harvard classroom never could.

Local ownership is certainly a key part of improving development outcomes. More broadly, this technology may have numerous implications for slums across the developing world, and it will be interesting to see how economic incentives and results are shaped by this product. One thing that just came to mind: if declining returns to agriculture result in increased urbanization, then wouldn't it be ironic if vertical agriculture helped people get out of the slums and into more productive settings?

Always something new out of Africa.