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    J-PAL North America announces new evaluation incubator collaborators from state and local governments

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    J-PAL North America recently selected government partners for the 2024-25 Leveraging Evaluation and Evidence for Equitable Recovery (LEVER) Evaluation Incubator cohort. Selected collaborators will receive funding and technical assistance to develop or launch a randomized evaluation for one of their programs. These collaborations represent jurisdictions across the United States and demonstrate the growing enthusiasm for evidence-based policymaking.Launched in 2023, LEVER is a joint venture between J-PAL North America and Results for America. Through the Evaluation Incubator, trainings, and other program offerings, LEVER seeks to address the barriers many state and local governments face around finding and generating evidence to inform program design. LEVER offers government leaders the opportunity to learn best practices for policy evaluations and how to integrate evidence into decision-making. Since the program’s inception, more than 80 government jurisdictions have participated in LEVER offerings.J-PAL North America’s Evaluation Incubator helps collaborators turn policy-relevant research questions into well-designed randomized evaluations, generating rigorous evidence to inform pressing programmatic and policy decisions. The program also aims to build a culture of evidence use and give government partners the tools to continue generating and utilizing evidence in their day-to-day operations.In addition to funding and technical assistance, the selected state and local government collaborators will be connected with researchers from J-PAL’s network to help advance their evaluation ideas. Evaluation support will also be centered on community-engaged research practices, which emphasize collaborating with and learning from the groups most affected by the program being evaluated.Evaluation Incubator selected projectsPierce County Human Services (PCHS) in the state of Washington will evaluate two programs as part of the Evaluation Incubator. The first will examine how extending stays in a fentanyl detox program affects the successful completion of inpatient treatment and hospital utilization for individuals. “PCHS is interested in evaluating longer fentanyl detox stays to inform our funding decisions, streamline our resource utilization, and encourage additional financial commitments to address the unmet needs of individuals dealing with opioid use disorder,” says Trish Crocker, grant coordinator.The second PCHS program will evaluate the impact of providing medication and outreach services via a mobile distribution unit to individuals with opioid use disorders on program take-up and substance usage. Margo Burnison, a behavioral health manager with PCHS, says that the team is “thrilled to be partnering with J-PAL North America to dive deep into the data to inform our elected leaders on the best way to utilize available resources.”The City of Los Angeles Youth Development Department (YDD) seeks to evaluate a research-informed program: Student Engagement, Exploration, and Development in STEM (SEEDS). This intergenerational STEM mentorship program supports underrepresented middle school and college students in STEM by providing culturally responsive mentorship. The program seeks to foster these students’ STEM identity and degree attainment in higher education. YDD has been working with researchers at the University of Southern California to measure the SEEDS program’s impact, but is interested in developing a randomized evaluation to generate further evidence. Darnell Cole, professor and co-director of the Research Center for Education, Identity and Social Justice, shares his excitement about the collaboration with J-PAL: “We welcome the opportunity to measure the impact of the SEEDS program on our students’ educational experience. Rigorously testing the SEEDS program will help us improve support for STEM students, ultimately enhancing their persistence and success.”The Fort Wayne Police Department’s Hope and Recovery Team in Indiana will evaluate the impact of two programs that connect social workers with people who have experienced an overdose, or who have a mental health illness, to treatment and resources. “We believe we are on the right track in the work we are doing with the crisis intervention social worker and the recovery coach, but having an outside evaluation of both programs would be extremely helpful in understanding whether and what aspects of these programs are most effective,” says Police Captain Kevin Hunter.The County of San Diego’s Office of Evaluation, Performance and Analytics, and Planning & Development Services will engage with J-PAL staff to explore evaluation opportunities for two programs that are a part of the county’s Climate Action Plan. The Equity-Driven Tree Planting Program seeks to increase tree canopy coverage, and the Climate Smart Land Stewardship Program will encourage climate-smart agricultural practices. Ricardo Basurto-Davila, chief evaluation officer, says that “the county is dedicated to evidence-based policymaking and taking decisive action against climate change. The work with J-PAL will support us in combining these commitments to maximize the effectiveness in decreasing emissions through these programs.”J-PAL North America looks forward to working with the selected collaborators in the coming months to learn more about these promising programs, clarify our partner’s evidence goals, and design randomized evaluations to measure their impact. More

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      “Mens et manus” in Guatemala

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      In a new, well-equipped lab at the University del Valle de Guatemala (UVG) in June 2024, members of two Mayan farmers’ cooperatives watched closely as Rodrigo Aragón, professor of mechanical engineering at UVG, demonstrated the operation of an industrial ultrasound machine. Then he invited each of them to test the device.“For us, it is a dream to be able to interact with technology,” said Francisca Elizabeth Saloj Saloj, a member of the Ija´tz women’s collective, a group from Guatemala’s highlands.After a seven-hour bumpy bus ride, the farmers had arrived in Guatemala City with sacks full of rosemary, chamomile, and thyme. Their objective: to explore processes for extracting essential oils from their plants and to identify new products to manufacture with these oils. Currently, farmers sell their herbs in local markets for medicinal or culinary purposes. With new technology, says Aragón, they can add value to their harvest, using herb oils as the basis for perfumes, syrups, and tinctures that would reach broader markets. These goods could provide much-needed income to the farmers’ households.A strategy for transformationThis collaboration is just one part of a five-year, $15-million project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and managed by MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering in collaboration with UVG and the Guatemalan Export Association (AGEXPORT). Launched in 2021 and called ASPIRE — Achieving Sustainable Partnerships for Innovation, Research, and Entrepreneurship — the project aims to collaboratively strengthen UVG, and eventually other universities in Central America, as problem-solving powerhouses that research, design, and build solutions with and for the people most in need.“The vision of ASPIRE is that within a decade, UVG researchers are collaborating with community members on research that generates results that are relevant to addressing local development challenges — results that are picked up and used by policymakers and actors in the private sector,” says MIT Research Scientist Elizabeth Hoffecker, a co-principal investigator of ASPIRE at MIT, and leader of the Institute’s Local Innovation Group.UVG, one of Guatemala’s top universities, has embraced ASPIRE as part of its long-term strategic plan, and is now pursuing wide-ranging changes based on a playbook developed at MIT — including at MIT D-Lab, which deploys participatory design, co-creation, low-cost technologies, and capacity building to meet the complex challenges of poverty — and piloted at UVG. The ASPIRE team is working to extend the reach of its research innovation and entrepreneurship activities to its two regional campuses and to other regional universities. The overall program is informed by MIT’s approach to development of research-driven innovation ecosystems.Although lacking the resources (and PhD programs) of a typical U.S. university, UVG has big ambitions for itself, and for Guatemala.“We want to thrive and lead the country in research and teaching, and to accomplish this, we are creating an innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem, based on best practices drawn from D-Lab and other MIT groups,” says Mónica Stein, vice-rector for research and outreach at UVG, who holds a doctorate from Stanford University in plant biology. “ASPIRE can really change the way that development work and local research is done so that it has more impact,” says Stein. “And in theory, if you have more impact, then you improve environmental outcomes, health outcomes, educational outcomes, and economic outcomes.”Local innovation and entrepreneurshipShifting gears at a university and launching novel development initiatives are complex challenges, but with training and workshops conducted by D-Lab-trained collaborators and MIT-based ASPIRE staff, UVG faculty, staff, and students are embracing the change. Programs underway should sound familiar to anyone who has set foot recently on the campus of a U.S. research university: hackathons, makerspaces, pitchapaloozas, entrepreneurship competitions, and spinouts. But at UVG, all of these serve a larger purpose: addressing sustainable development goals.ASPIRE principal investigator Daniel Frey, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, believes some of these programs are already paying off, particularly a UVG venture mentoring service (VMS), modeled after and facilitated by MIT’s own VMS program. “We’d like to see students building companies and improving their livelihoods and those of people from indigenous and marginalized communities,” says Frey.The ASPIRE project intends to enable the lowest-income communities to share more of Guatemala’s wealth, derived mainly from agricultural goods. In collaborating with AGEXPORT, which enables networking with companies across the country, the team zeroed in on creating or enhancing the value chain for several key crops.“Snow peas offer a great target for both research and innovation,” says Adilia Blandón, ASPIRE research project manager and professor of food engineering at UVG. Many farming communities grow snow peas, which they send along to companies for export to the U.S. Unless these peas are perfect in shape and color, Blandón explains, they don’t make it to market. Nearly a third of Guatemala’s crop is left at processing plants, turned into animal feed, or wasted.An ASPIRE snow pea team located farmers from two cooperatives who wanted to solve this problem. At a series of co-creation sessions, these growers and mechanical engineers at UVG developed a prototype for a low-tech cart for collecting snow peas, made from easily acquired local materials, which can navigate the steep and narrow paths on the hills where the plants grow. This method avoids crushing snow peas in a conventional harvest bag. In addition, the snow pea project has engaged women at a technical school to design a harvest apron for women snow pea farmers. “This could be a business opportunity for them,” Blandón says.Blandón vividly recalls her first ASPIRE workshop, focused on participatory design. “It opened my eyes as a researcher in so many ways,” she says. “I learned that instead of taking information from people, I can learn from them and create things with them that they are really excited about.” It completely changed how she approaches research, she says.Working with Mayan communities that produce snow peas, where malnourishment and illness are rampant, Blandón and ASPIRE researchers found that families don’t eat the protein-packed vegetable because they don’t find it palatable — even though so much of it is left over from harvest. Participatory design sessions with a group of mothers yielded an intriguing possibility: grinding snow peas into flour, which would then be incorporated into traditional bean- and corn-based dishes. The recipes born of this collaboration could land on WhatsApp or TikTok, mobile apps familiar to these families.Building value chainsAdditional research projects are teasing out novel ways of adding value to the products grown or made by Guatemalan hands.These include an educational toolkit developed with government farm extension workers to teach avocado producers how to improve their practices. The long-term goal is to grow and export larger and unblemished fruit for the lucrative U.S. market, currently dominated by Mexico. The kit, featuring simple graphics for growers who can’t read or don’t have the time, offers lessons on soil care, fertilizing, and protecting the fruit post-harvest.ASPIRE UVG Research Director Ana Lucia Solano is especially proud of “an immersive, animated, Monopoly-like game that shows farmers the impact of activities like buying fertilizer on their finances,” she says. “If small producers improve their practices, they will have better opportunities to sell their products at a better price, which may allow them to hire more people, teach others more easily, and offer better jobs and working conditions — and maybe this will help prevent farmworkers from having to leave the country.”Solano has just begun a similar program to educate cocoa producers. “The cocoa of Guatemala is wonderful, but the growers, who have great native knowledge, also need to learn new methods so they can transform their chocolate into the kind of high-quality product expected in European markets, with the help of AGEXPORT,” she says.At the UVG Altiplano campus, Mayan instructor Jeremías Morales, who runs the maker space, trained with Amy Smith, an MIT senior lecturer and founding director of the D-Lab, to facilitate creative capacity-building programs. He is working with nearby villages on a solution for the backbreaking labor of planting broccoli seedlings.“Here in Guatemala, small farm holders don’t have technology to do this task,” says Solano. Through design and prototyping workshops, the village and UVG professors have developed an inexpensive device that accomplishes this painful work. “After their next iteration of this technology, we can support the participants in starting a business,” says Solano.Opportunities to invent solutions to commonplace but vexing problems keep popping up. A small village of 100 families has to share two mills to grind corn for their tortillas. It’s a major household expense. With ASPIRE facilitators, a group of women designed a prototype corn mill for home use. “They were skeptical at first, especially when their initial prototypes didn’t work,” reports Solano, “but when they finally succeeded, there was so much excitement about the results, an energy and happiness that you could feel in the room.”Adopting an MIT mindsetThis feeling of empowerment, a pillar of sustainable development, has great meaning for UVG Professor Victor Hugo Ayerdi, an ASPIRE project manager and director of UVG’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.“In college and after I graduated, I thought since everything came from developed countries, and I was in a developing country, I couldn’t invent products.” With that mindset, he says, he went to work in manufacturing and sales for an international tire manufacturing company.But when he arrived at UVG in 2009, Ayerdi heard from mechanical engineering students who craved practical experience designing and building things. Determined to create maker spaces for the three UVG campuses, he took a field trip to MIT, whose motto is “mens et manus” or “mind and hand.”“The trip changed my life,” he says. “The MIT mindset is to believe in yourself, try things, and fail, but assume there has to be a way to do it.” As a result, he says, he realized UVG faculty and students could also use scientific and engineering knowledge to invent products, become entrepreneurs, spark economic growth; they had the capacity. He and other UVG colleagues were primed for change when the ASPIRE opportunity emerged.As some ASPIRE research projects wind down their initial phases, others are just gearing up, including an effort to fashion a water purification system from the shells of farmed shrimp. “We are only just starting to get results from our research,” says Stein. “But we are totally betting on the ASPIRE model because it works at MIT and other places.”The ASPIRE researchers acknowledge they are looking at long timelines to make significant inroads against environmental, health, educational, and economic challenges.“My greatest hope is that ASPIRE will have planted the seed of this innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem model, and that in a decade, UVG will have optimized the different programs, whether in training, entrepreneurship, or research, enough to actively transfer them to other Central American universities,” says Stein.“We would like to be the hub of this network and we want to stay connected, because, in theory, we can work together on problems that we have in common in our region. That would be really cool.” More

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      Aspiring to sustainable development

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      In a first for both universities, MIT undergraduates are engaged in research projects at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala (UVG), while MIT scholars are collaborating with UVG undergraduates on in-depth field studies in Guatemala.These pilot projects are part of a larger enterprise, called ASPIRE (Achieving Sustainable Partnerships for Innovation, Research, and Entrepreneurship). Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, this five-year, $15-million initiative brings together MIT, UVG, and the Guatemalan Exporters Association to promote sustainable solutions to local development challenges.“This research is yielding insights into our understanding of how to design with and for marginalized people, specifically Indigenous people,” says Elizabeth Hoffecker, co-principal investigator of ASPIRE at MIT and director of the MIT Local Innovation Group.The students’ work is bearing fruit in the form of publications and new products — directly advancing ASPIRE’s goals to create an innovation ecosystem in Guatemala that can be replicated elsewhere in Central and Latin America.For the students, the project offers rewards both tangible and inspirational.“My experience allowed me to find my interest in local innovation and entrepreneurship,” says Ximena Sarmiento García, a fifth-year undergraduate at UVG majoring in anthropology. Supervised by Hoffecker, Sarmiento García says, “I learned how to inform myself, investigate, and find solutions — to become a researcher.”Sandra Youssef, a rising junior in mechanical engineering at MIT, collaborated with UVG researchers and Indigenous farmers to design a mobile cart to improve the harvest yield of snow peas. “It was perfect for me,” she says. “My goal was to use creative, new technologies and science to make a dent in difficult problems.”Remote and effectiveKendra Leith, co-principal investigator of ASPIRE, and associate director for research at MIT D-Lab, shaped the MIT-based undergraduate research opportunities (UROPs) in concert with UVG colleagues. “Although MIT students aren’t currently permitted to travel to Guatemala, I wanted them to have an opportunity to apply their experience and knowledge to address real-world challenges,” says Leith. “The Covid pandemic prepared them and their counterparts at UVG for effective remote collaboration — the UROPs completed remarkably productive research projects over Zoom and met our goals for them.”MIT students participated in some of UVG’s most ambitious ASPIRE research. For instance, Sydney Baller, a rising sophomore in mechanical engineering, joined a team of Indigenous farmers and UVG mechanical engineers investigating the manufacturing process and potential markets for essential oils extracted from thyme, rosemary, and chamomile plants.“Indigenous people have thousands of years working with plant extracts and ancient remedies,” says Baller. “There is promising history there that would be important to follow up with more modern research.”Sandra Youssef used computer-aided design and manufacturing to realize a design created in a hackathon by snow pea farmers. “Our cart had to hold 495 pounds of snow peas without collapsing or overturning, navigate narrow paths on hills, and be simple and inexpensive to assemble,” she says. The snow pea producers have tested two of Youssef’s designs, built by a team at UVG led by Rony Herrarte, a faculty member in the department of mechanical engineering.From waste to filterTwo MIT undergraduates joined one of UVG’s long-standing projects: addressing pollution in Guatemala’s water. The research seeks to use chitosan molecules, extracted from shrimp shells, for bioremediation of heavy metals and other water contaminants. These shells are available in abundance, left as waste by the country’s shrimp industry.Sophomores Ariana Hodlewsky, majoring in chemical engineering, and Paolo Mangiafico, majoring in brain and cognitive sciences, signed on to work with principal investigator and chemistry department instructor Allan Vásquez (UVG) on filtration systems utilizing chitosan.“The team wants to find a cost-effective product rural communities, most at risk from polluted water, can use in homes or in town water systems,” says Mangiafico. “So we have been investigating different technologies for water filtration, and analyzing the Guatemalan and U.S. markets to understand the regulations and opportunities that might affect introduction of a chitosan-based product.”“Our research into how different communities use water and into potential consumers and pitfalls sets the scene for prototypes UVG wants to produce,” says Hodlewsky.Lourdes Figueroa, UVG ASPIRE project manager for technology transfer, found their assistance invaluable.“Paolo and Ariana brought the MIT culture and mindset to the project,” she says. “They wanted to understand not only how the technology works, but the best ways of getting the technology out of the lab to make it useful.”This was an “Aha!” moment, says Figueroa. “The MIT students made a major contribution to both the engineering and marketing sides by emphasizing that you have to think about how to guarantee the market acceptance of the technology while it is still under development.”Innovation ecosystemsUVG’s three campuses have served as incubators for problem-solving innovation and entrepreneurship, in many cases driven by students from Indigenous communities and families. In 2022, Elizabeth Hoffecker, with eight UVG anthropology majors, set out to identify the most vibrant examples of these collaborative initiatives, which ASPIRE seeks to promote and replicate.Hoffecker’s “innovation ecosystem diagnostic” revealed a cluster of activity centered on UVG’s Altiplano campus in the central highlands, which serves Mayan communities. Hoffecker and two of the anthropology students focused on four examples for a series of case studies, which they are currently preparing for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.“The caliber of their work was so good that it became clear to me that we could collaborate on a paper,” says Hoffecker. “It was my first time publishing with undergraduates.”The researchers’ cases included novel production of traditional thread, and creation of a 3D phytoplankton kit that is being used to educate community members about water pollution in Lake Atitlán, a tourist destination that drives the local economy but is increasingly being affected by toxic algae blooms. Hoffecker singles out a project by Indigenous undergraduates who developed play-based teaching tools for introducing basic mathematical concepts.“These connect to local Mayan ways of understanding and offer a novel, hands-on way to strengthen the math teaching skills of local primary school teachers in Indigenous communities,” says Hoffecker. “They created something that addresses a very immediate need in the community — lack of training.Both of Hoffecker’s undergraduate collaborators are writing theses inspired by these case studies.“My time with Elizabeth allowed me to learn how to conduct research from scratch, ask for help, find solutions, and trust myself,” says Sarmiento García. She finds the ASPIRE approach profoundly appealing. “It is not only ethical, but also deeply committed to applying results to the real lives of the people involved.”“This experience has been incredibly positive, validating my own ability to generate knowledge through research, rather than relying only on established authors to back up my arguments,” says Camila del Cid, a fifth-year anthropology student. “This was empowering, especially as a Latin American researcher, because it emphasized that my perspective and contributions are important.”Hoffecker says this pilot run with UVG undergrads produced “high-quality research that can inform evidence-based decision-making on development issues of top regional priority” — a key goal for ASPIRE. Hoffecker plans to “develop a pathway that other UVG students can follow to conduct similar research.”MIT undergraduate research will continue. “Our students’ activities have been very valuable in Guatemala, so much so that the snow pea, chitosan, and essential oils teams would like to continue working with our students this year,” says Leith.  She anticipates a new round of MIT UROPs for next summer.Youssef, for one, is eager to get to work on refining the snow pea cart. “I like the idea of working outside my comfort zone, thinking about things that seem unsolvable and coming up with a solution to fix some aspect of the problem,” she says. More

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      The changing geography of “energy poverty”

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      A growing portion of Americans who are struggling to pay for their household energy live in the South and Southwest, reflecting a climate-driven shift away from heating needs and toward air conditioning use, an MIT study finds.The newly published research also reveals that a major U.S. federal program that provides energy subsidies to households, by assigning block grants to states, does not yet fully match these recent trends.The work evaluates the “energy burden” on households, which reflects the percentage of income needed to pay for energy necessities, from 2015 to 2020. Households with an energy burden greater than 6 percent of income are considered to be in “energy poverty.” With climate change, rising temperatures are expected to add financial stress in the South, where air conditioning is increasingly needed. Meanwhile, milder winters are expected to reduce heating costs in some colder regions.“From 2015 to 2020, there is an increase in burden generally, and you do also see this southern shift,” says Christopher Knittel, an MIT energy economist and co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results. About federal aid, he adds, “When you compare the distribution of the energy burden to where the money is going, it’s not aligned too well.”The paper, “U.S. federal resource allocations are inconsistent with concentrations of energy poverty,” is published today in Science Advances.The authors are Carlos Batlle, a professor at Comillas University in Spain and a senior lecturer with the MIT Energy Initiative; Peter Heller SM ’24, a recent graduate of the MIT Technology and Policy Program; Knittel, the George P. Shultz Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and associate dean for climate and sustainability at MIT; and Tim Schittekatte, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan.A scorching decadeThe study, which grew out of graduate research that Heller conducted at MIT, deploys a machine-learning estimation technique that the scholars applied to U.S. energy use data.Specifically, the researchers took a sample of about 20,000 households from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey, which includes a wide variety of demographic characteristics about residents, along with building-type and geographic information. Then, using the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data for 2015 and 2020, the research team estimated the average household energy burden for every census tract in the lower 48 states — 73,057 in 2015, and 84,414 in 2020.That allowed the researchers to chart the changes in energy burden in recent years, including the shift toward a greater energy burden in southern states. In 2015, Maine, Mississippi, Arkansas, Vermont, and Alabama were the five states (ranked in descending order) with the highest energy burden across census bureau tracts. In 2020, that had shifted somewhat, with Maine and Vermont dropping on the list and southern states increasingly having a larger energy burden. That year, the top five states in descending order were Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, West Virginia, and Maine.The data also reflect a urban-rural shift. In 2015, 23 percent of the census tracts where the average household is living in energy poverty were urban. That figure shrank to 14 percent by 2020.All told, the data are consistent with the picture of a warming world, in which milder winters in the North, Northwest, and Mountain West require less heating fuel, while more extreme summer temperatures in the South require more air conditioning.“Who’s going to be harmed most from climate change?” asks Knittel. “In the U.S., not surprisingly, it’s going to be the southern part of the U.S. And our study is confirming that, but also suggesting it’s the southern part of the U.S that’s least able to respond. If you’re already burdened, the burden’s growing.”An evolution for LIHEAP?In addition to identifying the shift in energy needs during the last decade, the study also illuminates a longer-term change in U.S. household energy needs, dating back to the 1980s. The researchers compared the present-day geography of U.S. energy burden to the help currently provided by the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which dates to 1981.Federal aid for energy needs actually predates LIHEAP, but the current program was introduced in 1981, then updated in 1984 to include cooling needs such as air conditioning. When the formula was updated in 1984, two “hold harmless” clauses were also adopted, guaranteeing states a minimum amount of funding.Still, LIHEAP’s parameters also predate the rise of temperatures over the last 40 years, and the current study shows that, compared to the current landscape of energy poverty, LIHEAP distributes relatively less of its funding to southern and southwestern states.“The way Congress uses formulas set in the 1980s keeps funding distributions nearly the same as it was in the 1980s,” Heller observes. “Our paper illustrates the shift in need that has occurred over the decades since then.”Currently, it would take a fourfold increase in LIHEAP to ensure that no U.S. household experiences energy poverty. But the researchers tested out a new funding design, which would help the worst-off households first, nationally, ensuring that no household would have an energy burden of greater than 20.3 percent.“We think that’s probably the most equitable way to allocate the money, and by doing that, you now have a different amount of money that should go to each state, so that no one state is worse off than the others,” Knittel says.And while the new distribution concept would require a certain amount of subsidy reallocation among states, it would be with the goal of helping all households avoid a certain level of energy poverty, across the country, at a time of changing climate, warming weather, and shifting energy needs in the U.S.“We can optimize where we spend the money, and that optimization approach is an important thing to think about,” Knittel says.  More

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      Q&A: Claire Walsh on how J-PAL’s King Climate Action Initiative tackles the twin climate and poverty crises

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      The King Climate Action Initiative (K-CAI) is the flagship climate change program of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), which innovates, tests, and scales solutions at the nexus of climate change and poverty alleviation, together with policy partners worldwide.

      Claire Walsh is the associate director of policy at J-PAL Global at MIT. She is also the project director of K-CAI. Here, Walsh talks about the work of K-CAI since its launch in 2020, and describes the ways its projects are making a difference. This is part of an ongoing series exploring how the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences is addressing the climate crisis.

      Q: According to the King Climate Action Initiative (K-CAI), any attempt to address poverty effectively must also simultaneously address climate change. Why is that?

      A: Climate change will disproportionately harm people in poverty, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, because they tend to live in places that are more exposed to climate risk. These are nations in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia where low-income communities rely heavily on agriculture for their livelihoods, so extreme weather — heat, droughts, and flooding — can be devastating for people’s jobs and food security. In fact, the World Bank estimates that up to 130 million more people may be pushed into poverty by climate change by 2030.

      This is unjust because these countries have historically emitted the least; their people didn’t cause the climate crisis. At the same time, they are trying to improve their economies and improve people’s welfare, so their energy demands are increasing, and they are emitting more. But they don’t have the same resources as wealthy nations for mitigation or adaptation, and many developing countries understandably don’t feel eager to put solving a problem they didn’t create at the top of their priority list. This makes finding paths forward to cutting emissions on a global scale politically challenging.

      For these reasons, the problems of enhancing the well-being of people experiencing poverty, addressing inequality, and reducing pollution and greenhouse gases are inextricably linked.

      Q: So how does K-CAI tackle this hybrid challenge?

      A: Our initiative is pretty unique. We are a competitive, policy-based research and development fund that focuses on innovating, testing, and scaling solutions. We support researchers from MIT and other universities, and their collaborators, who are actually implementing programs, whether NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], government, or the private sector. We fund pilots of small-scale ideas in a real-world setting to determine if they hold promise, followed by larger randomized, controlled trials of promising solutions in climate change mitigation, adaptation, pollution reduction, and energy access. Our goal is to determine, through rigorous research, if these solutions are actually working — for example, in cutting emissions or protecting forests or helping vulnerable communities adapt to climate change. And finally, we offer path-to-scale grants which enable governments and NGOs to expand access to programs that have been tested and have strong evidence of impact.

      We think this model is really powerful. Since we launched in 2020, we have built a portfolio of over 30 randomized evaluations and 13 scaling projects in more than 35 countries. And to date, these projects have informed the scale ups of evidence-based climate policies that have reached over 15 million people.

      Q: It seems like K-CAI is advancing a kind of policy science, demanding proof of a program’s capacity to deliver results at each stage. 

      A: This is one of the factors that drew me to J-PAL back in 2012. I majored in anthropology and studied abroad in Uganda. From those experiences I became very passionate about pursuing a career focused on poverty reduction. To me, it is unfair that in a world full of so much wealth and so much opportunity there exists so much extreme poverty. I wanted to dedicate my career to that, but I’m also a very detail-oriented nerd who really cares about whether a program that claims to be doing something for people is accomplishing what it claims.

      It’s been really rewarding to see demand from governments and NGOs for evidence-informed policymaking grow over my 12 years at J-PAL. This policy science approach holds exciting promise to help transform public policy and climate policy in the coming decades.  

      Q: Can you point to K-CAI-funded projects that meet this high bar and are now making a significant impact?

      A: Several examples jump to mind. In the state of Gujarat, India, pollution regulators are trying to cut particulate matter air pollution, which is devastating to human health. The region is home to many major industries whose emissions negatively affect most of the state’s 70 million residents.

      We partnered with state pollution regulators — kind of a regional EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] — to test an emissions trading scheme that is used widely in the U.S. and Europe but not in low- and middle-income countries. The government monitors pollution levels using technology installed at factories that sends data in real time, so the regulator knows exactly what their emissions look like. The regulator sets a cap on the overall level of pollution, allocates permits to pollute, and industries can trade emissions permits.

      In 2019, researchers in the J-PAL network conducted the world’s first randomized, controlled trial of this emissions trading scheme and found that it cut pollution by 20 to 30 percent — a surprising reduction. It also reduced firms’ costs, on average, because the costs of compliance went down. The state government was eager to scale up the pilot, and in the past two years, two other cities, including Ahmedabad, the biggest city in the state, have adopted the concept.

      We are also supporting a project in Niger, whose economy is hugely dependent on rain-fed agriculture but with climate change is experiencing rapid desertification. Researchers in the J-PAL network have been testing training farmers in a simple, inexpensive rainwater harvesting technique, where farmers dig a half-moon-shaped hole called a demi-lune right before the rainy season. This demi-lune feeds crops that are grown directly on top of it, and helps return land that resembled flat desert to arable production.

      Researchers found that training farmers in this simple technology increased adoption from 4 percent to 94 percent and that demi-lunes increased agricultural output and revenue for farmers from the first year. K-CAI is funding a path-to-scale grant so local implementers can teach this technique to over 8,000 farmers and build a more cost-effective program model. If this takes hold, the team will work with local partners to scale the training to other relevant regions of the country and potentially other countries in the Sahel.

      One final example that we are really proud of, because we first funded it as a pilot and now it’s in the path to scale phase: We supported a team of researchers working with partners in Bangladesh trying to reduce carbon emissions and other pollution from brick manufacturing, an industry that generates 17 percent of the country’s carbon emissions. The scale of manufacturing is so great that at some times of year, Dhaka (the capital of Bangladesh) looks like Mordor.

      Workers form these bricks and stack hundreds of thousands of them, which they then fire by burning coal. A team of local researchers and collaborators from our J-PAL network found that you can reduce the amount of coal needed for the kilns by making some low-cost changes to the manufacturing process, including stacking the bricks in a way that increases airflow in the kiln and feeding the coal fires more frequently in smaller rather than larger batches.

      In the randomized, controlled trial K-CAI supported, researchers found that this cut carbon and pollution emissions significantly, and now the government has invited the team to train 1,000 brick manufacturers in Dhaka in these techniques.

      Q: These are all fascinating and powerful instances of implementing ideas that address a range of problems in different parts of the world. But can K-CAI go big enough and fast enough to take a real bite out of the twin poverty and climate crisis?

      A: We’re not trying to find silver bullets. We are trying to build a large playbook of real solutions that work to solve specific problems in specific contexts. As you build those up in the hundreds, you have a deep bench of effective approaches to solve problems that can add up in a meaningful way. And because J-PAL works with governments and NGOs that have the capacity to take the research into action, since 2003, over 600 million people around the world have been reached by policies and programs that are informed by evidence that J-PAL-affiliated researchers produced. While global challenges seem daunting, J-PAL has shown that in 20 years we can achieve a great deal, and there is huge potential for future impact.

      But unfortunately, globally, there is an underinvestment in policy innovation to combat climate change that may generate quicker, lower-cost returns at a large scale — especially in policies that determine which technologies get adopted or commercialized. For example, a lot of the huge fall in prices of renewable energy was enabled by early European government investments in solar and wind, and then continuing support for innovation in renewable energy.

      That’s why I think social sciences have so much to offer in the fight against climate change and poverty; we are working where technology meets policy and where technology meets real people, which often determines their success or failure. The world should be investing in policy, economic, and social innovation just as much as it is investing in technological innovation.

      Q: Do you need to be an optimist in your job?

      A: I am half-optimist, half-pragmatist. I have no control over the climate change outcome for the world. And regardless of whether we can successfully avoid most of the potential damages of climate change, when I look back, I’m going to ask myself, “Did I fight or not?” The only choice I have is whether or not I fought, and I want to be a fighter. More

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      in Environment

      Illustrating India’s complex environmental crises

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      Abhijit Banerjee, the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT, and Sarnath Banerjee (no relation), an MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST) visiting artist share a similar background, but have very different ways of thinking. Both were raised for a time in Kolkata before leaving India to pursue divergent careers, Abhijit as an economist who went on to win the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (an award he shares with MIT Professor Esther Duflo and Harvard University Professor Michael Kremer), and Sarnath as a visual artist and graphic novelist. 

      The two collaborated on a pair of short films, “The Land of Good Intentions” and “The Eternal Swamp,” that blend their expertise in a unique and captivating form. Each film addresses a particular environmental crisis facing present-day India by tracing its origins back through the centuries. The films are presented in a kind of lecture style, with Abhijit appearing as the narrator, unraveling historical details, as graphics by Sarnath visualize the story with an often wry and easy wit. The results apply logic and narrative coherence to problems with complex roots in the forces of nature, economics, and local culture. 

      “The Land of Good Intentions” explores the conditions and policies that led to mass protests by farmers, in Punjab and elsewhere, following the passage of farming legislation in September 2020. The film begins by providing historical context from multiple angles, including the significance of rice to regional culture, its growing conditions (which require a lot of water), the region’s climate (which produces very little), and previous government subsidies that led to its overproduction. The 2020 Farm Bills were intended to address rice overproduction and its consequences, including the depletion of Punjab’s groundwater supply, pollution from the burning of rice stalks, and a surplus going to waste. But farmers considered that they were being asked to shoulder the costs of a problem the government created. 

      “The arguments in the film don’t necessarily align with popular liberal arguments, but it gives subtler shape and layers to them,” Sarnath says. “That dialectical way of thinking is important to the liberal movement, which is driven by passion and a sense of justice. Abhijit is driven by factual analysis, which sometimes makes the argument more complex.”

      Their second film, “The Eternal Swamp,” addresses the crisis of flooding in Kolkata and its causes in the geographical and economic development of the city from the start. Because Kolkata was built on very wet land, and real estate has long been one of the only viable industries in the city, it has been developed without regard to proper drainage in a climate that produces more rainfall than it can handle. There is a pervading sense that Kolkata will eventually be entirely below water.

      “It was a good collaboration from the beginning,” Sarnath says of working with Abhijit on the CAST Visiting Artist project, a process which began just before Abhijit was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2019 and continued through the pandemic. “Both of us work on instinct, but the way he shapes an argument is very different from me,” Sarnath says. “My work does not follow a linear approach to telling a story; it’s fragmentary, driven by mood and emotion more than narrative, like composing a piece of music.”

      Since they first met at a literary conference years ago, Abhijit and Sarnath have been close friends and intellectual sparring partners. Though Sarnath is based in Berlin and Abhijit in Boston, the two often cross paths in different locales and have long, ambling discussions that traverse a wide array of topics. “We spend a lot of time walking together wherever we find ourselves, whether it’s down the Longfellow Bridge in Boston or through Delhi or Kolkata,” Sarnath says. The idea for this project was born out of such conversations, in response to pressing events in their home country. 

      Abhijit wrote a proposal to MIT CAST, and the questions they received through the process helped them further shape the project. “It’s important, when you have the luxury, just to spend time together. Thanks to MIT, we managed to do that across continents,” Sarnath says of their creative process. “It’s more than just telling a story; Abhijit unpacked what was in his head, and I drew and wrote a bit as well,” Sarnath says. And they worked with the editor and animator Niusha Ramzani, whom Sarnath says lent an Iranian aesthetic to the film’s animations. 

      As for the format of the films, they wanted to capture the sense of a serene Bengali afternoon, with Abhijit seated in his home in Kolkata speaking in a relaxed tone. “We wanted it to be a bit like a Royal Society lecture,” Sarnath says, somewhat like a TED Talk but more personable and intimate. The aim was to make their complicated subjects more easily comprehensible, through the language of Abhijit’s narration and with the help of visual metaphors. Still, they did not want to sacrifice complexity.

      “Economists are fabulists,” says Abhijit Banerjee. “We tell stories, simple stories, but that tends to get obscured in the telling, often because we like to be very careful about not overstating our case. Irony and the kind of playful humor that Sarnath brings to narration seemed to offer a different way to avoid being too emphatic, while allowing the story to be told in a way that it reaches a much larger audience. What is brilliant about Sarnath’s work is the play between reliable and the unreliable — the readers are happy to be misdirected because they know that it will ultimately lead them where they want to be. I was hoping we could bring a little of that into economics.” 

      “You have to emancipate yourself from any one definitive answer,” Sarnath Banerjee says, describing Abhijit’s expansive way of thinking, through which he follows multiple thought processes to their logical conclusions. The result allows for ambiguity and contradiction, though the pathways of thinking are clear. The films illustrate the situations facing farmers in Punjab and the waterlogged streets of Kolkata by tracing their roots and examining the history of cause and effect. The results provide clarity, but no simple answers.

      The process was an enriching one for both of them, the kind of advancement in understanding that can only come in dialogue. “With each collaboration, you learn, and learning to me is an artistic form,” Sarnath says. “We are always learning.” More

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      in Environment

      K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research Center will prioritize innovations for resource-constrained communities

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      Billions of people worldwide face threats to their livelihood, health, and well-being due to poverty. These problems persist because solutions offered in developed countries often do not meet the requirements — related to factors like price, performance, usability, robustness, and culture — of poor or developing countries. Academic labs frequently try to tackle these challenges, but often to no avail because they lack real-world, on-the-ground knowledge from key stakeholders, and because they do not have an efficient, reliable means of converting breakthroughs to real-world impact.

      The new K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Center at MIT, founded with a $28 million gift from philanthropist and investor Lisa Yang, aims to rethink how products and technologies for resource-constrained communities are conceived, designed, and commercialized. A collaboration between MIT’s School of Engineering and School of Science, the Yang GEAR Center will bring together a multidisciplinary team of MIT researchers to assess today’s most pressing global challenges in three critical areas: global health, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and the water-energy-food nexus.

      “As she has shown over and over through her philanthropy, Lisa Yang shares MIT’s passion for connecting fundamental research and real-world data to create positive impact,” says MIT president Sally Kornbluth. “I’m grateful for her powerful vision and incredible generosity in founding the K. Lisa Yang GEAR Center. I can’t imagine a better use of MIT’s talents than working to improve the lives and health of people around the world.”

      Yang’s gift expands her exceptional philanthropic support of human health and basic science research at MIT over the past six years. Yang GEAR Center will join MIT’s Yang Tan Collective, an assemblage of six major research centers focused on accelerating collaboration in basic science, research, and engineering to realize translational strategies that improve human health and well-being at a global scale.

      “Billions of people face daily life-or-death challenges that could be improved with elegant technologies,” says Yang. “And yet I’ve learned how many products and tools created by top engineers don’t make it out of the lab. They may look like clever ideas during the prototype phase, but they are entirely ill-suited to the communities they were designed for. I am very excited about the potential of a deliberate and thoughtful engineering effort that will prioritize the design of technologies for use in impoverished communities.”

      Cost, material availability, cultural suitability, and other market mismatches hinder many major innovations in global health, food, and water from being translated to use in resource-constrained communities. Yang GEAR Center will support a major research and design program with its mission to strategically identify compelling challenges and associated scientific knowledge gaps in resource-constrained communities then address them through academic innovation to create and translate transformative technologies.

      The center will be led by Amos Winter, associate professor of mechanical engineering, whose lab focuses on creating technologies that marry innovative, low-cost design with an in-depth understanding of the unique socioeconomic constraints of emerging markets.

      “Academia has a key role to play in solving the historically unsolvable challenges in resource-constrained communities,” says Winter. “However, academic research is often disconnected from the real-world requirements that must be satisfied to make meaningful change. Yang GEAR Center will be a catalyst for innovation to impact by helping colleagues identify compelling problems and focus their talents on realizing real-world solutions, and by providing mechanisms for commercial dissemination. I am extremely grateful to find in Lisa a partner who shares a vision for how academic research can play a more efficient and targeted role in addressing the needs of the world’s most disadvantaged populations.”

      The backbone of the Yang GEAR Center will be a team of seasoned research scientists and engineers. These individuals will scout real-world problems and distill the relevant research questions then help assemble collaborative teams. As projects develop, center staff will mentor students, build and conduct field pilots, and foster relationships with stakeholders around the world. They will be strategically positioned to translate technology at the end of projects through licensing and startups. Center staff and collaborators will focus on creating products and services for climate-driven migrants, such as solar-powered energy and water networks; technologies for reducing atmospheric carbon and promoting the hydrogen economy; brackish water desalination and irrigation solutions; and high-performance, global health diagnostics and devices.

      For instance, a Yang GEAR Center team focused on creating water-saving and solar-powered irrigation solutions for farmers in the Middle East and North Africa will continue its work in the region. They will conduct exploratory research; build a team of stakeholders, including farmers, agricultural outreach organizations, irrigation hardware manufacturers, retailers, water and agriculture scientists, and local government officials; design, rigorously test, and iterate prototypes both in the lab and in the field; and conduct large-scale field trials to garner user feedback and pave the way to product commercialization.

      “Grounded in foundational scientific research and blended with excellence in the humanities, MIT provides a framework that integrates people, economics, research, and innovation. By incorporating multiple perspectives — and being attentive to the needs and cultures of the people who will ultimately rely on research outcomes — MIT can have the greatest impact in areas of health, climate science, and resource security,” says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics.

      An overarching aim for the center will be to educate graduates who are global engineers, designers, and researchers positioned for a career of addressing compelling, high-impact challenges. The center includes four endowed Hock E. Tan GEAR Center Fellowships that will support graduate students and/or postdoctoral fellows eager to enter the field of global engineering. The fellowships are named for MIT alumnus and Broadcom CEO Hock E. Tan ’75 SM ’75.

      “I am thrilled that the Yang GEAR Center is taking a leading role in training problem-solvers who will rethink how products and inventions can help communities facing the most pressing challenges of our time,” adds Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “These talented young students,  postdocs, and staff have the potential to reach across disciplines — and across the globe — to truly transform the impact engineering can have in the future.” More

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      in Environment

      New clean air and water labs to bring together researchers, policymakers to find climate solutions

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      MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is launching the Clean Air and Water Labs, with support from Community Jameel, to generate evidence-based solutions aimed at increasing access to clean air and water.

      Led by J-PAL’s Africa, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and South Asia regional offices, the labs will partner with government agencies to bring together researchers and policymakers in areas where impactful clean air and water solutions are most urgently needed.

      Together, the labs aim to improve clean air and water access by informing the scaling of evidence-based policies and decisions of city, state, and national governments that serve nearly 260 million people combined.

      The Clean Air and Water Labs expand the work of J-PAL’s King Climate Action Initiative, building on the foundational support of King Philanthropies, which significantly expanded J-PAL’s work at the nexus of climate change and poverty alleviation worldwide. 

      Air pollution, water scarcity and the need for evidence 

      Africa, MENA, and South Asia are on the front lines of global air and water crises. 

      “There is no time to waste investing in solutions that do not achieve their desired effects,” says Iqbal Dhaliwal, global executive director of J-PAL. “By co-generating rigorous real-world evidence with researchers, policymakers can have the information they need to dedicate resources to scaling up solutions that have been shown to be effective.”

      In India, about 75 percent of households did not have drinking water on premises in 2018. In MENA, nearly 90 percent of children live in areas facing high or extreme water stress. Across Africa, almost 400 million people lack access to safe drinking water. 

      Simultaneously, air pollution is one of the greatest threats to human health globally. In India, extraordinary levels of air pollution are shortening the average life expectancy by five years. In Africa, rising indoor and ambient air pollution contributed to 1.1 million premature deaths in 2019. 

      There is increasing urgency to find high-impact and cost-effective solutions to the worsening threats to human health and resources caused by climate change. However, data and evidence on potential solutions are limited.

      Fostering collaboration to generate policy-relevant evidence 

      The Clean Air and Water Labs will foster deep collaboration between government stakeholders, J-PAL regional offices, and researchers in the J-PAL network. 

      Through the labs, J-PAL will work with policymakers to:

      co-diagnose the most pressing air and water challenges and opportunities for policy innovation;
      expand policymakers’ access to and use of high-quality air and water data;
      co-design potential solutions informed by existing evidence;
      co-generate evidence on promising solutions through rigorous evaluation, leveraging existing and new data sources; and
      support scaling of air and water policies and programs that are found to be effective through evaluation. 
      A research and scaling fund for each lab will prioritize resources for co-generated pilot studies, randomized evaluations, and scaling projects. 

      The labs will also collaborate with C40 Cities, a global network of mayors of the world’s leading cities that are united in action to confront the climate crisis, to share policy-relevant evidence and identify opportunities for potential new connections and research opportunities within India and across Africa.

      This model aims to strengthen the use of evidence in decision-making to ensure solutions are highly effective and to guide research to answer policymakers’ most urgent questions. J-PAL Africa, MENA, and South Asia’s strong on-the-ground presence will further bridge research and policy work by anchoring activities within local contexts. 

      “Communities across the world continue to face challenges in accessing clean air and water, a threat to human safety that has only been exacerbated by the climate crisis, along with rising temperatures and other hazards,” says George Richards, director of Community Jameel. “Through our collaboration with J-PAL and C40 in creating climate policy labs embedded in city, state, and national governments in Africa and South Asia, we are committed to innovative and science-based approaches that can help hundreds of millions of people enjoy healthier lives.”

      J-PAL Africa, MENA, and South Asia will formally launch Clean Air and Water Labs with government partners over the coming months. J-PAL is housed in the MIT Department of Economics, within the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. More

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      in Security

      System tracks movement of food through global humanitarian supply chain

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      Although more than enough food is produced to feed everyone in the world, as many as 828 million people face hunger today. Poverty, social inequity, climate change, natural disasters, and political conflicts all contribute to inhibiting access to food. For decades, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA) has been a leader in global food assistance, supplying millions of metric tons of food to recipients worldwide. Alleviating hunger — and the conflict and instability hunger causes — is critical to U.S. national security.

      But BHA is only one player within a large, complex supply chain in which food gets handed off between more than 100 partner organizations before reaching its final destination. Traditionally, the movement of food through the supply chain has been a black-box operation, with stakeholders largely out of the loop about what happens to the food once it leaves their custody. This lack of direct visibility into operations is due to siloed data repositories, insufficient data sharing among stakeholders, and different data formats that operators must manually sort through and standardize. As a result, accurate, real-time information — such as where food shipments are at any given time, which shipments are affected by delays or food recalls, and when shipments have arrived at their final destination — is lacking. A centralized system capable of tracing food along its entire journey, from manufacture through delivery, would enable a more effective humanitarian response to food-aid needs.

      In 2020, a team from MIT Lincoln Laboratory began engaging with BHA to create an intelligent dashboard for their supply-chain operations. This dashboard brings together the expansive food-aid datasets from BHA’s existing systems into a single platform, with tools for visualizing and analyzing the data. When the team started developing the dashboard, they quickly realized the need for considerably more data than BHA had access to.

      “That’s where traceability comes in, with each handoff partner contributing key pieces of information as food moves through the supply chain,” explains Megan Richardson, a researcher in the laboratory’s Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Systems Group.

      Richardson and the rest of the team have been working with BHA and their partners to scope, build, and implement such an end-to-end traceability system. This system consists of serialized, unique identifiers (IDs) — akin to fingerprints — that are assigned to individual food items at the time they are produced. These individual IDs remain linked to items as they are aggregated along the supply chain, first domestically and then internationally. For example, individually tagged cans of vegetable oil get packaged into cartons; cartons are placed onto pallets and transported via railway and truck to warehouses; pallets are loaded onto shipping containers at U.S. ports; and pallets are unloaded and cartons are unpackaged overseas.

      With a trace

      Today, visibility at the single-item level doesn’t exist. Most suppliers mark pallets with a lot number (a lot is a batch of items produced in the same run), but this is for internal purposes (i.e., to track issues stemming back to their production supply, like over-enriched ingredients or machinery malfunction), not data sharing. So, organizations know which supplier lot a pallet and carton are associated with, but they can’t track the unique history of an individual carton or item within that pallet. As the lots move further downstream toward their final destination, they are often mixed with lots from other productions, and possibly other commodity types altogether, because of space constraints. On the international side, such mixing and the lack of granularity make it difficult to quickly pull commodities out of the supply chain if food safety concerns arise. Current response times can span several months.

      “Commodities are grouped differently at different stages of the supply chain, so it is logical to track them in those groupings where needed,” Richardson says. “Our item-level granularity serves as a form of Rosetta Stone to enable stakeholders to efficiently communicate throughout these stages. We’re trying to enable a way to track not only the movement of commodities, including through their lot information, but also any problems arising independent of lot, like exposure to high humidity levels in a warehouse. Right now, we have no way to associate commodities with histories that may have resulted in an issue.”

      “You can now track your checked luggage across the world and the fish on your dinner plate,” adds Brice MacLaren, also a researcher in the laboratory’s Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Systems Group. “So, this technology isn’t new, but it’s new to BHA as they evolve their methodology for commodity tracing. The traceability system needs to be versatile, working across a wide variety of operators who take custody of the commodity along the supply chain and fitting into their existing best practices.”

      As food products make their way through the supply chain, operators at each receiving point would be able to scan these IDs via a Lincoln Laboratory-developed mobile application (app) to indicate a product’s current location and transaction status — for example, that it is en route on a particular shipping container or stored in a certain warehouse. This information would get uploaded to a secure traceability server. By scanning a product, operators would also see its history up until that point.   

      Hitting the mark

      At the laboratory, the team tested the feasibility of their traceability technology, exploring different ways to mark and scan items. In their testing, they considered barcodes and radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and handheld and fixed scanners. Their analysis revealed 2D barcodes (specifically data matrices) and smartphone-based scanners were the most feasible options in terms of how the technology works and how it fits into existing operations and infrastructure.

      “We needed to come up with a solution that would be practical and sustainable in the field,” MacLaren says. “While scanners can automatically read any RFID tags in close proximity as someone is walking by, they can’t discriminate exactly where the tags are coming from. RFID is expensive, and it’s hard to read commodities in bulk. On the other hand, a phone can scan a barcode on a particular box and tell you that code goes with that box. The challenge then becomes figuring out how to present the codes for people to easily scan without significantly interrupting their usual processes for handling and moving commodities.” 

      As the team learned from partner representatives in Kenya and Djibouti, offloading at the ports is a chaotic, fast operation. At manual warehouses, porters fling bags over their shoulders or stack cartons atop their heads any which way they can and run them to a drop point; at bagging terminals, commodities come down a conveyor belt and land this way or that way. With this variability comes several questions: How many barcodes do you need on an item? Where should they be placed? What size should they be? What will they cost? The laboratory team is considering these questions, keeping in mind that the answers will vary depending on the type of commodity; vegetable oil cartons will have different specifications than, say, 50-kilogram bags of wheat or peas.

      Leaving a mark

      Leveraging results from their testing and insights from international partners, the team has been running a traceability pilot evaluating how their proposed system meshes with real-world domestic and international operations. The current pilot features a domestic component in Houston, Texas, and an international component in Ethiopia, and focuses on tracking individual cartons of vegetable oil and identifying damaged cans. The Ethiopian team with Catholic Relief Services recently received a container filled with pallets of uniquely barcoded cartons of vegetable oil cans (in the next pilot, the cans will be barcoded, too). They are now scanning items and collecting data on product damage by using smartphones with the laboratory-developed mobile traceability app on which they were trained. 

      “The partners in Ethiopia are comparing a couple lid types to determine whether some are more resilient than others,” Richardson says. “With the app — which is designed to scan commodities, collect transaction data, and keep history — the partners can take pictures of damaged cans and see if a trend with the lid type emerges.”

      Next, the team will run a series of pilots with the World Food Program (WFP), the world’s largest humanitarian organization. The first pilot will focus on data connectivity and interoperability, and the team will engage with suppliers to directly print barcodes on individual commodities instead of applying barcode labels to packaging, as they did in the initial feasibility testing. The WFP will provide input on which of their operations are best suited for testing the traceability system, considering factors like the network bandwidth of WFP staff and local partners, the commodity types being distributed, and the country context for scanning. The BHA will likely also prioritize locations for system testing.

      “Our goal is to provide an infrastructure to enable as close to real-time data exchange as possible between all parties, given intermittent power and connectivity in these environments,” MacLaren says.

      In subsequent pilots, the team will try to integrate their approach with existing systems that partners rely on for tracking procurements, inventory, and movement of commodities under their custody so that this information is automatically pushed to the traceability server. The team also hopes to add a capability for real-time alerting of statuses, like the departure and arrival of commodities at a port or the exposure of unclaimed commodities to the elements. Real-time alerts would enable stakeholders to more efficiently respond to food-safety events. Currently, partners are forced to take a conservative approach, pulling out more commodities from the supply chain than are actually suspect, to reduce risk of harm. Both BHA and WHP are interested in testing out a food-safety event during one of the pilots to see how the traceability system works in enabling rapid communication response.

      To implement this technology at scale will require some standardization for marking different commodity types as well as give and take among the partners on best practices for handling commodities. It will also require an understanding of country regulations and partner interactions with subcontractors, government entities, and other stakeholders.

      “Within several years, I think it’s possible for BHA to use our system to mark and trace all their food procured in the United States and sent internationally,” MacLaren says.

      Once collected, the trove of traceability data could be harnessed for other purposes, among them analyzing historical trends, predicting future demand, and assessing the carbon footprint of commodity transport. In the future, a similar traceability system could scale for nonfood items, including medical supplies distributed to disaster victims, resources like generators and water trucks localized in emergency-response scenarios, and vaccines administered during pandemics. Several groups at the laboratory are also interested in such a system to track items such as tools deployed in space or equipment people carry through different operational environments.

      “When we first started this program, colleagues were asking why the laboratory was involved in simple tasks like making a dashboard, marking items with barcodes, and using hand scanners,” MacLaren says. “Our impact here isn’t about the technology; it’s about providing a strategy for coordinated food-aid response and successfully implementing that strategy. Most importantly, it’s about people getting fed.” More