« Previous Story | Next Story »
April 20, 2006
Students Break Down Walls
April 14 marked the 3rd annual Fletcher Conference on Innovative Approaches (FCIA), an entirely student-run and student-organized conference. Co-chairs Karen Miles, Priya Pradhan, Amber Haque and Osnat Lupesko-Persky expressed their anxious excitement as the day started off at 9am with two panel discussions.
Session I panels covered the 2005-2006 Presidential Elections in Latin America and focused on the facts, myths and future of the region following the election results. The second panel was on the role of monitoring, evaluations and learning in overcoming barriers to development. Dr Lisa Hirschorn recapped her experience in the improvement of the HIV clinical care setting and how evaluations and monitoring have been applied to the process. Dr Patrick Grasso expressed his skeptical, but overall promising, experience in evaluation as Director of the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank, while Dr Laura Roper of Oxfam America told the audience of her very positive perception of evaluation, but stressed the need for organizations to use it more effectively.
“The fact of the matter,” she states, “is that a lot of organizations do not do evaluation. If they do, they do not do it consistently or well, and they do not learn from their evaluation processes.” She then offered solutions to these unfortunately common barriers to effective evaluation and monitoring procedures.
The second session time block was filled with a panel on Women as Citizens and a panel on the State in Africa, which was designed to take lessons from recent scholarship on the state and state failure and how to apply it to policy-making. In the panel on women as citizens, Ms Micheline Ravololonarisoa of UNIFEM gave an exhilarating talk on women finding and taking control of their space within a given society.
“To resolve [the lack of space for women], there is a need today to have strong women’s agencies. Not only a strong women’s movement, but a strong women’s agencies at the national level, where the strengths of women can resonate, with the possibility of having women’s concerns at the center of the community,” she advises.
Ravololonarisoa was followed by Ms Betty Murungi, a feminist lawyer and Director of Urgent Action Fund – Africa, and Lara Storm-Swire, Relationship Manager of Pro Mujer, a microfinancing firm that caters almost completely to women in Latin America.
Fletcher alumni Tim Judah spoke at the pre-lunch plenary talk about his experiences as a journalist covering primarily war situations. He started off by telling the audience that “war is, in some respects, quite easy to write about. If there are missiles slamming into doors next to you….the story sort of writes itself. But, introspection isn’t something that necessarily comes easily to journalists.”
He continued with several accounts of his experiences in the field, which offered the audience a compelling look into some of the more intense journalistic careers.
The last session had two panels as well, with one covering the global investing field, specifically comparing social value screening to global investment profits, and the other involving a robust discussion on the current nuclear ambitions of Iran.
Dr Jim Walsh, a Research Associate at the Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University, started off with a rundown of the situation with Iran and highlighted most of the available options for the international community in dealing with the situation. These included airstrikes, giving full discretion to the International Atomic Energy Agency and conducting direct face-to-face negotiations with the Iranian government.
Dr Ali Banuazizi, co-director of the Program in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and a professor in cultural psychology, gave a brief history of Iran’s nuclear program, and concluded with his own recommendations. He feels that it would be impossible to get Iran to abandon its drive towards its development of nuclear policy, and that, therefore, “direct negotiations with Iran may be the only reasonable and productive strategy to pursue, with an insistence on full and complete transparency,” he stated. He also stressed the need for international consensus.
Ambassador Michael Schmunk and Dr Chen Kane followed up with assessments that added to the incredibly worthwhile discussion of this very pertinent issue.
By Kate Brodock, MALD '07
Posted by fletcher at April 20, 2006 04:59 PM
