Through Their Eyes

Lauren Herman received a Bachelors of Arts in Peace and Conflict Studies with a minor in Global Poverty and Practice in May 2011. At UC Berkeley, it was her decision to join the Global Poverty and Practice minor that shaped the majority of her studies and research regarding poverty alleviation, specifically market based approaches to poverty alleviation. In 2010, Lauren received a Summer Travel Fellowship from the Blum Center for Developing Economies to work on the creation of a new rural based microcredit program within a grassroots non-governmental organization through collaboration with ten women.  She decided to return to Kenya as a UC Berkeley Institute for International Studies Undergraduate Merit Scholarship Recipient to research the impact that microcredit has on women participants, their families and businesses, rather than rely on research conducted by financial and development institutions.  Most recently, Lauren completed her honors thesis that analyzes the gender inequalities that women microcredit participants experience in the informal economy and in their households to demonstrate how vulnerabilities in the lives of women shape their participation in microfinance.

While working and conducting research in the summer of 2010 and January 2011 within a microcredit program in Kenya, Lauren became aware of the lack of consumer protection measures to prevent predatory lending within microfinance institutions (MFIs).  To bring awareness to this issue, Lauren received the Judith Lee Stronach Baccalaureate Prize at UC Berkeley to create a consumer and legal education manual that will contribute to the legal education initiatives and resources for Kenyan microcredit borrowers.  She will collaborate with consumer advocacy groups and microcredit borrowers in Nairobi, Kenya to research and document the operational and loan requirements of the five largest Kenyan MFIs.  This educational resource will assist clients in making informed and educated decisions about their participation in these financial institutions.  Most importantly, the experiences of microcredit borrowers will be included in the manual to allow potential borrowers the opportunity to learn about the microcredit programs through peer review, allowing current microcredit borrowers to contribute to the content and structure of the manual.  In the future, Lauren hopes that the dissemination of the manual to organizations serving Kenyan low income communities will contribute to a national campaign to implement legal protection for all Kenyan microfinance clients.

Nathen Menard received his Bachelor's Degree in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010.  While at Berkeley. Nathen was selected to participate in the Haas Scholars Program, an undergraduate research program which funds a year of research for undergraduate students.  As a Haas Scholar, Nathen travelled to India, Nicaragua, and New Orleans, Louisiana, where he originally intended to research the effectiveness of NGOs in raising the life-chances of environmentally displaced women.  However, his time in the field led him to discover a much broader, but more important topic that needed to be addressed in the national and international communities around the world - the need to conecptualize and legitimize the category of environmental dispalcement as a internationally recognized form of refugee

The number of environmental "refugees" in 1995 was conservatively estimated to be at least 25 million and was expected to double by 2010, with future predictions of 200 million permanently displaced persons due to environmentally forced migration by 2050.  These facts led Koko Warner and her colleagues to argue that, “Environmentally-induced migration and displacement has the potential to become an unprecedented phenomenon—both in terms of scale and scope”.  Despite these facts, the category of environmentally displaced person, and specifically environmental refugee, remains highly contentious.  The culmination of Nathen's work as a Haas scholar was his honors thesis paper for the Sociology Department at Berkeley on the need to accept environmental refugees as a very real issue in the world today. His thesis paper earned him highest honors at Berkeley, and will set the foundation for his future graduate work amongst one of several graduate programs that he is currently considering.