Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law is proud to announce the 2016 class of Draper Hills Summer Fellows who were selected for their outstanding contributions to advancing democratic development in some of the most challenging regions of the world. 

From Afghanistan to Venezuela, this group of 25 courageous leaders are working to root out corruption, advance freedom of expression, pioneer new technology for social change, and reform government institutions. Many have been imprisoned and victimized for their work, and struggle with great odds to defend democracy and human rights in closed societies. Fellows will arrive at Stanford in July to begin the three-week academic training program taught by Stanford faculty, policymakers, and thought-leaders in the technology sector.

The 2016 class will mark the 12th cohort of the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program and the fellows will join the Omidyar Network Leadership Forum, an alumni community of over 270 alumni in 70 countries worldwide.

Sub-Saharan Africa

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Rafael Marques de Morais is an award-winning journalist and human rights activist in Angola, working to investigate corruption and abuse of power by the country’s ruling family. He founded Makaangola, a watchdog website dedicated to exposing corruption and human rights abuses in Angola. 

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Astère Muyango is a human rights lawyer working to strengthen the rule of law in Burundi, and serves as the country program director of International Bridges to Justice. His organization represents indigents accused of crimes, and has represented many of the young protestors who were arrested during Burundi’s recent political violence. 

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Kasha Nabagesera is the executive director of Kuchu Times Media Group, the first LGBTI media platform in Africa. She is known as the “founding mother” of the LGBTI movement in Uganda - where homosexuality is illegal - advocating for equal rights and the eradication of all forms of discrimination based on sexual orientation. 

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Oluseun Onigbinde is a social entrepreneur in Nigeria and co-founder of BudgIT, which develops civic technology tools to advance greater public sector transparency and accountability. Their technology campaigns have reached over 625,000 Nigerians on issues of public sector accountability.  

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Glowen Wombo Kyei-Mensah is the managing director of Participatory Development Associates, a development consultancy working to support governance and community development in Ghana. She brings over a decade of experience in the development sector, leading nationwide research projects with considerable impact on social and policy reform. 

Asia

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Atishi Marlena is a young Indian politician, who is part of the Aam Aadmi Party, which emerged from a nationwide anti-corruption movement. She serves as the advisor to the Deputy Chief Minister working on educational reform and participatory governance efforts in the National Capital Territory of Delhi, where the political party is in power. 

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Wai Wai Nu is the director and founder of Women Peace Network-Arakan, an organization building a platform for peace and understanding among Burma’s diverse ethnic groups. Nu was a political prisoner for seven years under the Burmese military government, and emerged to serve as a national – and international – voice for Burma’s human rights and democracy movement.

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Rajamanohar Somasundaram is a technology entrepreneur from India who co-founded Hexolabs, a company building technology solutions for basic mobile handset users in emerging markets. Somasundaram pioneers the use of mobile technology for the development of healthcare, education, and governance services to support inclusive development at the base of the pyramid.

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Nguyen Duc Thanh is a Vietnamese economist, and president of the Vietnam Institute for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank that advocates for market economy reform, civil society empowerment, and the implementation of the rule of law. Thanh was a member of the Economic Advisory Group to the Vietnamese Prime Minister from 2011-2016. 

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Chandralal Majuwana is a human rights lawyer in Sri Lanka. He serves as the head of the Human Rights Program for the Forum for Human Dignity, a Colombo-based NGO. The program provides legal assistance to victims of human rights abuses and focuses on education and advocacy.

Eastern Europe and Eurasia

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Olga Aivazovska is head of the Board of the Civil Network OPORA, a civil-society organization catalyzing change in Ukraine by engaging citizens in decision-making, and fighting for the protection of voting rights and transparent electoral processes. An active participant in Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, Aivazovska has been working to transform Ukraine into a democratic and prosperous country. 

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Giorgi Kadagidze is a professor at Ilia State University, one of the leading research and educational institutions in Georgia. From 2009-2016, Kadagidze served as Chairman of the Board and Governor of the Central Bank of Georgia, leading the country’s economic transition from a planned to a market-based economy. 

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Edmon Marukyan is a member of the National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia and serves as the chairman of the Council of Bright Armenia, an opposition party. Before assuming public office, he worked as a human rights lawyer helping to strengthen democracy and civil society in Armenia. 

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Natalia Yudina is a researcher and vice-director at the SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, a Russian-based nonprofit organization that conducts research on nationalism and racism, relations between the churches and secular society, and political radicalism. Yudina’s work has contributed to a growing awareness of the government’s anti-extremist measures on the Internet and how these actions harm freedom of expression. 

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Elizaveta Osetinskaya is a media manager, editor and business journalist. She was responsible for the editorial operations at RBC Media Holding until May 2016. RBC Media Holding is the leading independent Russian media outlet, which includes a TV channel, the largest news portal in the country, a newspaper and magazine. 

Arab World

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Houssem Aoudi is a Tunisian entrepreneur with over a decade of experience in media, civic engagement, and social innovation. He is the founder of Wasabi, a company that builds platforms to promote open expression. Aoudi served as the director of the Media Center for the 2014 Tunisian parliamentary and presidential elections, and is the co-founder of a hub and community space for entrepreneurs. 

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Asos Askari is a lawyer who serves as a legal advisor to the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, drafting new laws and regulations to govern natural resource, human rights, and public sector reform. He also co-founded the Iraq Legal Education Initiative, a partnership between the American University of Iraq Sulaimani and Stanford Law School, which seeks to advance legal education in the Kurdistan region.

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Belabbes Benkredda is an award-winning social innovator and the founder of the Munathara Initiative, the Arab world’s largest online and television debate forum highlighting voices of youth, women, and marginalized communities. Operating in 11 Arab countries, Munathara’s monthly prime- time TV debates are the only civil society-run, independent political talk program on Arabic television. 

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Abdelrahman Mansour is an Egyptian political activist and entrepreneur in the field of media and journalism. He has played a key role in several Egyptian and Arab initiatives committed to advancing citizen’s rights to knowledge and access to information. 

Latin America

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Mauricio Alarcón Salvador is an Ecuadorian lawyer, and human rights and transparency activist. He is currently the executive director of Fundación Ciudadanía y Desarrollo, a non-profit organization that works on citizen participation and transparency, and serves as the program director of Fundamedios, Ecuador’s leading organization in the promotion and defense of freedom of expression. 

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Lisseth Boon is a Venezuelan investigative journalist with over 20 years of experience in print, broadcast, and digital media. She is currently an investigative reporter at RunRun.es, an independent news website.

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Lucila Crexell is a national senator of Argentina and represents the province of Neuquén, located in the Patagonia region. She has two decades of experience working in different areas of the public administration - both at the national and local level. As a senator, she defends the decentralization of power and the protection of provincial autonomy.

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Maria Llorente is the executive director of the Fundacion Ideas para la Paz, an independent think tank working on peace and security issues, and actively involved in the peace process in Colombia. Her work has contributed to evidence-based policy recommendations to increase citizen security and the reform of the Colombian police.  

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Jana Macedo is a public policy manager at the Brazilian Federal Government where she works at the Ministry of Planning coordinating initiatives on participatory planning and civic engagement. Previously, Macedo worked on human rights issues, which gave her a multidisciplinary perspective to develop public policy serving vulnerable populations.

CDDRL is pleased to announce that several affiliates have been awarded the prestigious Andew Carnegie Fellowship for 2016. The fellowship will provide 33 preeminent scholars and thinkers the opportunity to advance their research in the social sciences and humanities with total awards reaching $6.6 million. Each award recipient will receive up to $200,000 toward the funding of one to two years of scholarly research and writing aimed at addressing some of the world’s most urgent challenges to U.S. democracy and international order.

CDDRL-affiliated recipients include:

Mark Massoud, Assistant Professor of Politics and Legal Studies, UCSC; former CDDRL postdoctoral fellow (2008-2009). Research project title: "Human Rights and Islamic States: Can Religion Rebuild the Rule of Law After War?"

Nathaniel Persily, James B. McClatchy Professor of Law, Stanford Law School; researcher for CDDRL's Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective. Research project title: "The Campaign of the Future."

Landry Signe, Professor of Political Science, University of Alaska, Anchorage (UAA); former CDDRL postdoctoral fellow (2011-2013). Research project title: "Why African Nations Fail and How to Fix It: The Political Economy of Economic Growth and Democratic Development."

Launched in 2000, the fellowship program supports both established and emerging scholars, journalists, and authors whose work distills knowledge, enriches culture, and equips leaders in the realms of education, law, technology, business, and public policy. For more information about the fellowship program and the other recipients, please click here. 

"What do I do about the chickens?"

When assistant professor of medicine Eran Bendavid began a study on livestock in African households to determine impact on childhood health, he'd already anticipated common field problems like poorly captured or intentionally misreported data, difficulty getting to work sites, or problems with training local volunteers.

But he'd never gotten that particular question from a fieldworker before. It didn't occur to him that participating families, in reporting their livestock holdings, would completely omit the chickens running around at their feet, thereby skewing the data.

"They didn't consider chickens to be livestock," recalled Bendavid. Along with Scott Rozelle, the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow at FSI, and associate professor of political science and FSI senior fellow Beatriz Magaloni, Bendavid spoke to a full house last week on lessons learned from fieldwork gone awry. The return engagement of FSI's popular seminar, "Everything that can go wrong in a field experiment” was introduced by Jesper Sørensen, executive director of Stanford Seed, and moderated by Katherine Casey, assistant professor of political economy at the GSB. The seminar is a product of FSI and Seed’s joint Global Development and Poverty (GDP) Initiative, which to date has awarded nearly $7 million in faculty research funding to promote research on poverty alleviation and economic development worldwide.

Rozelle, co-director of the Rural Education Action Program, spoke of the obstacles to accurate data gathering, especially in rural areas where record-keeping is inaccurate and participants' trust is low. Arriving in a Chinese village to carry out child nutrition studies, said Rozelle, "we found Grandma running out the back door with the baby." The researchers had worked with the local family planning council to find the names of children to study, but the families thought the authorities were coming to penalize them for violation of the one-child policy.

Cultural differences make for entertaining and illuminating (if frustrating) lessons, but Beatriz Magaloni, director of FSI's Program on Poverty and Governance at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law had a different story to tell. Over the course of three years, her GDP-funded work to investigate and reduce police violence in Brazil - a phenomenon resulting in more than 22,000 deaths since 2005 - has encountered obstacle after obstacle. Her work to pilot body-worn cameras on police in Rio has faced a change in police leadership, setting back cooperation; a yearlong struggle to decouple a study of TASER International’s body worn cameras from its electrical weapons in the same population; a work site initially lacking electricity to charge the cameras or Internet to view the feeds; and noncompliance among the officers. "It's discouraging at times," admitted Magaloni, who has finally gotten the cameras onto the officers' uniforms and must now experiment with ways to incentivize their use. "We are learning a lot about how institutional behavior becomes so entrenched and why it's so hard to change."

Experimentation is a powerful tool to understand cause and effect, said Casey, but a tool only works if it's implemented properly. Learning from failure makes for an interesting panel discussion. The speakers' hope is that it also makes for better research in the future.

The Global Development and Poverty Initiative is a University-wide initiative of the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (Seed) in partnership with the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI). GDP was established in 2013 to stimulate transformative research ideas and new approaches to economic development and poverty alleviation worldwide. GDP supports groundbreaking research at the intersection of traditional academic disciplines and practical application. GDP uses a venture-funding model to pursue compelling interdisciplinary research on the causes and consequences of global poverty. Initial funding allows GDP awardees to conduct high-quality research in developing countries where there is a lack of data and infrastructure.