Highlighting our 2019 Photo Drive Finalists!
This post was written by Catherine Helmke, CEGA Communications Intern, with contributions from Dustin Marshall, CEGA Events and Communications Associate.
With all of the disruption and uncertainty around COVID-19, we hope that by highlighting this year’s annual photo drive finalists, we can help our community pause and reflect on the people and places that motivate our work. This year, we received 75+ photo submissions covering a range of topics relevant to CEGA — from interventions focused on micro-entrepreneurs to agricultural technology adoption to cash transfers and resource governance. CEGA staff voted to narrow the submissions to 10 finalists, then we crowed-sourced votes for the winners on Twitter.
We asked our finalists to tell us a bit about their submissions; their responses and photos are below.
Enjoy!
1st Place: Julius Ruschenpohler, “Ibu Rahmi in front of her shop “Toko Akbar” in Kramat Jati, Jakarta”
“When I handed in my Ph.D. thesis in the winter of 2019, the cover photo showed a woman from Jakarta, Indonesia, who goes by the name of Ibu Rahmi. Half with pride and half letting her shyness show, her left hand nestles up to the frame of her shop’s counter while she musters a faint smile for the camera. Ibu Rahmi is one of the most amazing people I got to know when doing interviews with micro-entrepreneurs about their local ways of doing business. Surprised someone would take interest, she had just shown us the thick binder she uses to keep track of transactions and customer requests. The name of her shop, Toko Akbar, refers to her aspirations to see it grow (Toko means “shop” and akbar means “big, great” in Arabic). Needless to say, we knew we had found the first of five role models who would star in a film that we’d show in small gatherings all across Jakarta.”
Julius Ruschenpohler is a postdoc at CEGA, UC Berkeley, who works at the intersection of psychology and development economics.
2nd Place: Gogi Grewal, “A woman’s work in a man’s world”
“An elderly woman winnows grains harvested by her household in Tamakoshi, Nepal. Much of a rural woman’s daily routine is consumed by time-intensive physical work like this. Women’s drudgery reduction through the introduction of appropriate household and community level technologies is an important way to improve well-being and enable women to spend their time and energy on other more productive activities.”
Gogi Grewal is a public health nutritionist. She has been working with the World Bank in Nepal for the last few years on evaluating projects that integrate agriculture and nutrition interventions, with the goal of improving the livelihoods and nutrition outcomes of small-holder farmers in rural areas.
3rd Place: Cristina Chiarella, “Traditional bean farming systems”
“Traditionally, when beans are harvested, the mature plants are cut, and its beans are first left drying in a plastic blanket under shade. Once dry, farmers stick them with rods, so that the beans fall out of the pods. As farmers say, beans are “clubbed.” The remaining beans are cleaned by the wind, separated by hand and dried again to avoid post-harvest losses. In the photo, father and son carry dry bean pods to club them. Photo taken in 2019, during a project evaluation with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). The project aims to lift families out of poverty and hunger in the Dry Corridor of Honduras.”
Cristina Chiarella is a PhD student at UC Davis, studying how farmers’ social networks respond to a contagious plant pest in Honduras.
Honorable Mention: Jasmine Miller, “Artisanal Gold Miners in Sierra Leone”
“Many people are familiar with the diamond industry in Sierra Leone from the movie Blood Diamond, but there’s also a significant gold mining industry. Much of the gold mining is artisanal and small scale, and it is often difficult for the government to regulate. I traveled to Sierra Leone with Project on Resources and Governance, a group working to generate more research around the resource governance sector. We were working with the Government of Sierra Leone to test methods to improve the regulation of pits like this one. We found this one just off the main road in the Makeni district and this picture only shows about 1/3 of the entire pit mine.”
Jasmine Miller is an economist dedicated to data collection and utilization in developing contexts. She has been working in the development sector for 4 years now with Innovations for Poverty Action in Tanzania and with Project on Resources and Governance at UCLA.
Honorable Mention: Gogi Grewal, “Learning by Doing: Farmer Field School”
“Women farmers stand on their demonstration plot and watch as a farmer field school facilitator makes notes on improved versus traditional methods of planting during a farmer field school demonstration session. They will keep track of which plots were planted in the traditional way versus improved to see which crop performs better. In the steep upper hills of Darchula, Nepal, land for agriculture is limited and improving productivity on terraced hillsides is especially important for the food security of these mostly subsistence farmers.”
Gogi Grewal is a public health nutritionist. She has been working with the World Bank in Nepal for the last few years on evaluating projects that integrate agriculture and nutrition interventions, with the goal of improving the livelihoods and nutrition outcomes of small-holder farmers in rural areas.
Honorable Mention: Will Slotznick, “A farmer discusses her preferences for cash transfers versus anti-malaria bed nets in Jirapa, Ghana.”
“I took this photo in a village in Jirapa District, a predominantly rural, agrarian area in the far northwestern corner of Ghana, near the border with Burkina Faso. I spent a lot of time in Jirapa as a part of a project called Measuring People’s Preferences, an initiative between IDinsight and GiveWell to better incorporate the opinions of aid recipients in global philanthropy decisions.
In this interview, we asked a farmer to value a life-saving mosquito bed net relative to a one-time cash transfer that can improve her economic welfare. Our respondents in Ghana — most of whom live below the poverty line — overwhelmingly chose health interventions over cash infusions. I like this shot because the composition conveys exactly the ethos of our project: let’s include recipients as decision-makers in funding development.”
Will Slotznick is a Senior Associate at the global research and advisory group IDinsight, where he focuses on sustainable agriculture and livelihoods in sub-saharan Africa and India. Learn more about IDinsight at www.idinsight.org
Honorable Mention: Gogi Grewal, “All in a day’s work”
“An elderly man climbs a steep slope from the fields down below, carrying a heavy load. In many rural areas of Nepal, migration of middle-aged men from villages to other countries (especially the Middle East and Malaysia) in search of better economic opportunities means that a disproportionate burden of agricultural work falls on the shoulders of the elderly, the young, and women.”
Gogi Grewal is a public health nutritionist. She has been working with the World Bank in Nepal for the last few years on evaluating projects that integrate agriculture and nutrition interventions, with the goal of improving the livelihoods and nutrition outcomes of small-holder farmers in rural areas.
Honorable Mention: Gogi Grewal, “Fruits of labor…sometimes lead to more labor”
“A woman slices ripe, sweet persimmon in preparation for sun-drying in Dolakha, Nepal. In areas that do not have convenient access to roads and therefore markets, a surplus of crops must be preserved since they cannot be sold. Connecting producer groups to buyers is an important way to ensure a more secure income for small-holder farmers.”
Gogi Grewal is a public health nutritionist. She has been working with the World Bank in Nepal for the last few years on evaluating projects that integrate agriculture and nutrition interventions, with the goal of improving the livelihoods and nutrition outcomes of small-holder farmers in rural areas.
Honorable Mention: Merabi George Chkhenkeli, “Novice monk watches a film in the isolated and conflict-ridden Shan hills.”
“A novice monk watches a film at the village chief’s house in an isolated and mostly ungoverned part of eastern Shan State, Myanmar. This hillside village is located at the centre of the Golden Triangle, the world’s second largest producer of opium. Foreigners require special permission to enter the region, which has had very little contact with outsiders. In recent months, the village has seen a proliferation of information technology, with nearby cellular connectivity appearing in mid-2019, and rapid smartphone adoption, especially amongst the youth. Questions remain as to the societal and economic-wide consequences of ICT adoption and new forms of media consumption.”
Merabi George Chkhenkeli is a PhD studying politics and development at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and a photographer whose portfolio of work is available at instagram.com/_merabi.
Honorable Mention: Harshirt Bawa, “बेरंग धागे” (Colorless Threads)
“A lady making and selling garlands in New Delhi, India.”
Harshirt Bawa is the Media Associate for LEAD at Krea University and an aspiring documentary filmmaker.
