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Tuesday, March 20, 2001

A Global Course Focuses on Improving the Lot of the Urban Poor By BURTON BOLLAG The United Nations Development Program and Yale University are collaborating on a course that uses the Internet to help students around the globe share experiences and knowledge about ways to improve the conditions experienced by the urban poor. Yale and U.N.D.P. are jointly running a one-semester, 13-session course incorporated into a variety of undergraduate and graduate degree programs at 19 institutions. Its aim is to lead students to examine the use of public-private partnerships to provide urban services like clean drinking water, sewage treatment, solid-waste management, and clean energy. "There's been a tremendous amount of politics, with people either for or against private investment in water and other services," says Brad Gentry, a part-time lecturer at Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Mr. Gentry, who is also a working lawyer specializing in environmental issues, teaches the course at Yale and is the facilitator of the 19-university program. "There is a wide range of tools available, from government providing all services, to businesses providing all services, and everything in between," he says. "We're distilling lessons as to which partnerships have worked best and in what contexts." A syllabus and core reading material have been distributed to each of the institutions -- on paper, because the poor Internet connections of some of the institutions in developing countries would have made downloading from a Web site impractical. But each week, Mr. Gentry posts his latest lecture notes as well as charts and other graphics on the program's Web site. And five electronic mailing lists permit participants to share information: one for lecturers, one for all of the approximately 250 students participating in the program, and three regional mailing lists for students in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America. "We share experiences and lessons from projects of each country," says Surajit Chakravarty, an undergraduate student in physical planning at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi. "This is an advantage. It wasn't happening before." Students generally are assigned to prepare case studies of public-private partnerships in their own countries, and each of the 19 institutions is encouraged to post its findings, as well as students' questions and summaries of class discussions. But Mr. Gentry says institutions sometimes need some gentle pushing. Two years ago, Yale developed and tested the course materials by offering the course with the University of the Western Cape, in South Africa, and the Center for Environmentally Sustainable Technology Transfer, in China. Mr. Gentry says that the pilot, and a one-year seminar on the same subject with international participants a year earlier, showed that students initially tended to be quite active in communicating their experiences, but then participated less, because of a lack of time or worries about the quality of their contributions. So, as facilitator, Mr. Gentry tries to be more directive, asking individual classes to contribute information on specific issues in which they have useful experiences. The organizers hope soon to add chat rooms -- where, for example, students would be able to have live Internet discussions with government officials or company representatives -- as well as electronic bulletin boards to allow participants to share graphics. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

U.S. agricultural colleges react to outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Europe U. of Cambridge plans major expansion American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy to honor 7 scholars Cal State hires Unisys to run its PeopleSoft administrative software A global course focuses on improving the lot of the urban poor