Working for Change

This week was a week of celebration and joy and of regret and loss. On one hand, the non-profit I started last year, Us. International finally put in our very first project well at the Lwawuna Primary School in Uganda. A well that will serve more than a thousand people in the area. But in the same day I learned that the woman who encouraged me to start my non-profit through her kindness and spirit that overcame hardship lost her stable job in Tanzania and her father in the same month.

So first things first, the joy. I came off the trail in Cimarron, New Mexico where I’m working as a ranger for the summer to find an email in my box from John at Drop in the Bucket, our sister charity with boots on the ground. The email had photos of the new well and some information on the completion of the project. I had tears well in my eyes seeing the photos. My friends and I were all starting seniors in high school last summer when we plotted our hair-brain scheme to raise 25,000 USD in one year to fund four project wells and sanitation education programs in Africa through a non-profit that we planned to organize and run. By the fall we had a Texas Non-profit Status, website, and board of directors. In October, we put out a national campaign called “Change for Water” that reached schools all over the country and by the mid point in the year we had raised more than 16,000 USD. We were doing what we set out to do. You’d expect to hear “we proved them wrong.” Or “No one believed in Us but we overcame.” In reality though, that wasn’t the case. Sure, some thought we were crazy to have such a huge goal or thought us too idealistic, they were probably right. In spite of that, for the most part our families, friends, and schoolmates came together to support us and help us on our way. Without them, we wouldn’t have been able reach any of our goals. When I saw those photos of kids getting fresh water from a well that all my friends and I financed, I was overwhelmed. More than a thousand people, a thousand people! Water isn’t an end all solution, but it is a vital step towards progress and growth. More time will be added into the lives of these rural Africans and the women in the villages will be empowered with this new free time and ability to enter the market place. There are a hundred reasons for why water empowers women, opens economic and academic opportunities, and improves health and living conditions.

Next things next, sorrow. Margreth is one of the strongest and inspirational people that I know. I met her in Tanzania when she gave me her cell phone to use to call back to the states and when I tried to return it to her, she told me to keep it for the night in case “She called me back.” Embarrassingly enough, I had been discovered. My important call was to a girl. However, she entrusted me with one of her most valued items and that was something. I learned over time that she had overcome hardship her whole life from sickness as a child to the many obstacles on the way to adulthood to be the educated and kind woman she is today. Last month, she lost her father and job in one blow. Hotel management changed and they brought in someone new and out she went to spite her great performance and loyalty. She was forced back to her village and left without the funds for her sons’ education. Luckily, my summer job can cover the fees for the year, another example of the total difference in lifestyles we live. But, her life is now changed, and much for the worse, over the small change. A change in the states would be minor but in a smaller, non-diversified economy, means real hardship.

Margreths situation isn’t the problem her country faces, but the symptom of the illness, the symptoms of a developing nation. It reminds me that in victories there is little time to rest and celebrate. That even in the face of accomplishment, there is much more to be done. It reminds me that though on a macro level things are better, there are still many more individuals suffering uncelebrated or acknowledged. We need to push on, work harder, and recommit ourselves in both times of hardship and in joy. I believe wells and water foster the environment needed to build a better economy for the country and better lives for the people and that’s what makes the victory so sweet and the drive and to push on so much stronger.

By Will Lynch

Rebuilding a Future

This week I started a project in my Human Geography class that focuses on redesigning an international city. I chose to look at Urban Development, and more specifically at slum prevention and then viable alternatives for future growth. The language of the universe is written in mathematics, from the interaction of particles at speeds near light to stars slowly (or at least relatively) orbiting one another. A statistical model can describe most of Human interaction and behavior that we call economics, and there is where I first turned. History tells us that there has rarely been an event where frugality didn’t play the key player and economics confirms that people look for the solution that is most viable with the highest profit for the party in power.


The question on the surface is what is the best solution, but ‘best solution’ is a subjective question. Everyone has an agenda, whether they are a high school student looking for a solution that improves foreign investment, gender equality, and human capital or a city planner looking to level the highest profit for the city or a slum dweller just hoping for a better life and better access to water. Obviously, leveling all the slums, building high rises, and shooing the untouchable further from the city center would be the most profitable for the city, but there isn’t a way that they could do that. Alternatively, they can’t invest their entire budget into the slums to bring them sanitation, bathrooms, water, and transportation systems. So what is the happy medium?


Well, first what are the main problems in the average slums today? And since this is a Gender publication what are the largest gender inequality issues? Slums are large expanses of land that are developed by migrants from the rural countryside to find jobs in the city. Generally, they aren’t looking for riches but a chance to survive. They build homes out of wood and cardboard. The average home size is about the size of half an American car parking space with an average house size of six to twelve members. In some house the members sleep on their sides and they almost fit. Sanitation is a huge issue, and women especially feel this, with few bathrooms that have constant lines and a surcharge per use and non-existent hygiene stations like sinks for hand washing. Most children just use the restrooms in the makeshift slum streets that run with water from the crowded and dirty water pumps that serve about 100 to a 1000 people each. Women are hard hit in these situations and are the first to feel the effects of poor sanitation through high birth-mortality rates, higher fertility rates, and little access to proper health care to boot.


In my project I followed the model that India is champing and combining it with western tax & property policies. The city I chose was Cairo, but I found that most developing cities are facing the same problems and that the solutions are more or less universal. First, land needs to be privatized to get anywhere. After that, there are a few roads that one could go down that could lead somewhere positive, the road I took was one where the city government and foreign investors came together to create change through free market competition. India champed this model, in a way; they would sell existing slum land to investors and give current inhabitants a lease in the building. In my model the land was sold anywhere from 16th to 1/3rd free market value, which would be rather high for land with that proximity to the city center and to charge an impact fee that would bring the sale price to about 2/3rds to 4/5ths the free market value. The impact fee would be used to purchase leases for 1.5 times the amount of space that current inhabitants previously occupied. Money would still be left over after those leases were paid and could be used to cover the cost of new infrastructure like water and roads. 


One major obstacle to this kind of plan is that slum businesses and services don’t want to, or can’t, pay the higher cost of business that urbanization brings. I proposed that the tax system be bracketed so that low-income businesses that operated in former slum land be given rent subsidization and that companies that hire low income workers on the books be given a tax credit. This would also encourage more companies to hire low-income workers and disperse more income. The next policy would be to create a perpetual sharing scheme in the city where infinite maturity bonds are sold and the profits be used to create infrastructure and finance the increased social sector, which I’ll touch on soon. All the citizens in the city, which would include the previous slum dwellers, will pay the interest that would be built on those bonds as they are cashed. This would mean that those who benefited from the projects would also be helping shoulder the cost. I wanted to create low-income housing for new residents to prevent future slums. However, they would only be able to retain residence if they practiced fiscally sound policy. That’s where the expanded social sector comes in; the city would need to train a fleet of social workers, which could be previous slum dwellers, which would help keep citizens on a fiscally responsible path.


This plan probably is too idealistic and too simple to spite the time I put into it, but I think that some of the ideas from the project could really be put into place to prevent, fight, and reverse slums in developing countries and help reduce gender in-equality and raise the standard of living across the board. 


By William Lynch

Is war likely?

Last summer I worked with a few other students from across the nation to form a non-profit that works in conjunction with the California based NGO to build wells in northern Uganda and southern South Sudan. We were on track to put in two new wells in and were funding for the third. Yesterday I received troubling news; that Drop in the Bucket was being evacuated from the region. It appears that Sudan will in fact declare war on South Sudan.

This is devastating news for our project, but more importantly it’s devastating for Sudan and especially the women of Sudan. This means, more than likely, we will have a renewed genocide in the region in the course of a few months and that a politically and economically unstable region of the world will be plunged into even more dire circumstances. That the work of non-profits and first world nations will be swiftly reversed and the region will be further set back.

Armed conflicts have a huge cost to economies, gender equality, and human capital. A Harvard study from 2003 shows that there is a steep negative relationship between GDP per capita and the likely hood of armed conflict and another study out of Sweden shows that the cost of armed conflict is anywhere between 30% to more than 100% of GDP. It would seem that armed conflict is a vicious cycle that keeps impoverished countries in poverty.

Armed conflicts also have the obvious and unfortunate effect of compounding gender inequality. Women and low-income groups are the first to feel the effects of economic downturns. Losing out on important economic share in the market place further lowers their social status while limiting the groups  job possibilities to mainly lower income jobs that are often more dangerous and degrading. Women are also more likely to be the victims of civilian violence and sexual violence during times of conflict. The protection of women during conflict is, in fact, the focus of more than thirty provisions in the Geneva Conventions and Protocols. However, women are often dealt with according to their relationship to others instead of as individuals and that marginalization of women’s welfare infringes on their rights. Only recently have gender-specific crimes that are committed during conflict been prosecuted at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

I worked on a paper this year that compared the GDP gradient of nations and their cost variable proximity to predict the possibility of interregional conflict. The hypothesis was that the possibility for two nations to go to war would be greater if the difference between their GDPs was high and the cost to migrate from one area to another was low. This model works off the assumption that conflict is economic based, instead of ethnically or culturally fueled. Though, most uprisings or conflicts throughout history do have substantial economic components. In Sudan we have a classic economic conflict over oil resources, after the south took approximately 75% of the oil producing regions when separating from the northern state last year. The difference in revenue that the oil producing region creates is the gradient and the low cost from one country to another makes the possibility for military conquest economically efficient on the surface. However, the true cost of conflict for both regions will most likely far outstrip any amount of potential gain from the annexed lands.

The war in the newly established South Sudan will indubitably set back the country politically, economically, and socially. How great the set back is still in the hands of the global community as we decide our level involvement.

By William Lynch