Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Major: International Relations
Minor: Math
Hometown: Pound Ridge, NY
Thesis Advisor: Rosamond Naylor
Tentative Thesis Title: Food Security: School Meal Programs in Latin America and China
Future aspirations post-Stanford: Learn to cook.
A fun fact about yourself: I have a twin sister.
Supply chains can be surprisingly complex. In many low- and middle-income settings, large companies often rely on networks of small, independent distributors who travel by foot to sell consumer goods to otherwise hard-to-reach customers (Kruijff et al. 2024). These ‘micro-distributors’ operate at the far edge of the supply chain, with no formal employment contracts, thin profit margins, and high levels of economic risk.
In a field experiment in Kenya, we partnered with one of the world’s largest food manufacturers (pseudonymously “FoodCo”) to evaluate whether investment-appropriate financing contracts could help their independent distributors improve their business performance. We found that tailoring repayment terms to better share risk and rewards—compared to a standard, rigid debt contract—significantly boosted distributors’ profits. Crucially, these more flexible contracts took advantage of detailed administrative data on monthly performance. These findings underscore the promise of improved observability enabled by digitisation: with richer data, financial contracts can be designed to incorporate greater risk-sharing (Fischer 2013, Meki 2024), potentially opening new opportunities for mutually beneficial investments.
Flexible financing for ‘last-mile’ distributors boosted profits across a food supply chain in Kenya.
Major: Political Science
Minor: Native American Studies
Hometown: Kailua, Hawaiʻi
Thesis Advisor: Hakeem Jefferson
Tentative Thesis Title: Analyzing Food Insecurity in Hawaiʻi and Opportunities for Sustainable Development
Future aspirations post-Stanford: After completing my undergraduate studies, I plan to pursue a joint Juris Doctorate and Master in Public Policy degree. I strive to work as a federal policymaker and specialize in legislation strengthening Hawaiʻi’s economic resilience and sustainability, leveraging legislation to foster economic diversification and investment in food security. I’m passionate about serving my home state by crafting policy championing economic development and diversification, sustainability and climate resilience, and Native Hawaiian empowerment.
A fun fact about yourself: I’ve competed in outrigger canoe paddling and kayaking throughout my life, including paddling in a forty-one-mile canoe race between two islands in the Hawaiian chain (Molokaʻi to Oʻahu). I also ran a cupcake and cake business in high school!
The opportunity to go to D.C. on the Honors College trip was one of the things that drew me to the CDDRL Honors Program in the first place, and the visit to the Brookings Institution was exactly the kind of experience I was hoping to get. Obviously, I’m interested in research — I wouldn’t recommend writing a thesis if you aren’t — but in terms of my future career, I’ve always wanted to have a hand in guiding policy, and to me, a think tank like Brookings is exactly the kind of place where research and policy intersect.
It was wonderful to have the opportunity to learn about the specific research interests of the three panelists — for example, Molly Reynolds, a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies, focuses on congressional rules and procedure and had an encyclopedic knowledge of trivia about various House members (though we never did find out which representative from Arkansas was left-handed). I was most interested in hearing about how the panelists view their role in the policy-making process: having the right idea, in the right place, at the right time.
This visit was also particularly exciting for me because all three panelists were women, which was encouraging to see. In fact, over the course of the week, the number of women we met in important and influential positions was fairly inspiring. The week in D.C. certainly influenced my thinking about what kind of work I want to do in the future — even the visits that weren’t directly related to my research interests were fascinating, and an extremely useful exposure to the kind of careers that a CDDRL alumnus might pursue.
~ Sorcha Whitley
Honors College gave me the opportunity to travel to Washington, D.C. (and the East Coast, for that matter) for the first time. I was excited to learn about how people and organizations in government and other practitioners put into practice all that we have learned about democracy, development, and the rule of law. Some visits have left me with new insight and questions that would be helpful in my thesis research.
At first glance, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) would have appeared to be less relevant to the study of democracy, development, and the rule of law, but we were quite instantly impressed with the conversation that ensued. We were hosted by Riya Mehta, a CDDRL honors alumna who has been working as the chief of staff at the USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA) for just less than a year. Just like at Brookings, the session was mainly conducted by two women — Riya and a career civil servant that had been with the USDA for decades. Not only was that inspiring, but seeing the rapport and understanding between them was heartwarming and showed great promise for the mission of the FSA.
We learned about how the USDA delicately balances its role in development with its agenda in maintaining equity and focusing on sustainability, especially reckoning with its history of discrimination. The FSA operates in nearly every county in the United States, and such reach has enabled it to support local farmers and rural communities efficiently. The FSA also works with other agencies in the USDA such as the Foreign Agricultural Service to work toward more comprehensive development goals, a goal that requires increased international cooperation amidst a global food and supply chain crisis. Just like our research, this trip had us seek inspiration in unlikely places, and come out with more questions to ponder!
~ Gan Chern Xun
This is the third in a series of blog posts written by the Fisher Family Honors Program class of 2023 detailing their experiences in Washington, D.C. for CDDRL's annual Honors College.
Ambassador David Lane was nominated by President Barack Obama to serve as the U.S. Representative to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture and confirmed by the U.S. Senate on May 24, 2012.
Ambassador Lane has more than twenty years of experience working in leadership positions across sectors. Before coming to Rome, he served at the White House as Assistant to the President and Counselor to the Chief of Staff.
Prior to joining the Obama Administration, he served as President and CEO of the ONE Campaign, a global advocacy organization focused on extreme poverty, development, and reform. Before that, as Director of Foundation Advocacy and the East Coast Office of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he helped lead that organization’s advocacy and public policy efforts.
During the Clinton Administration, he served as Executive Director of the National Economic Council at the White House and Chief of Staff to the U. S. Secretary of Commerce. He served as Vice-Chair of Transparency International USA, and he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations
Ambassador Lane earned his B.A. from the University of Virginia and his M.P.A. from the Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
Sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE). Supported in part by Zachary Nelson ('84) and Elizabeth Horn.
As part of the Arab Reform and Democracy Program's speaker series, UC Santa Barbara Historian Sherene Seikaly discusses her research on Egypt's 1977 bread intifada. A return to the historical moment of the “Bread Intifada,” of 1977 interrupts the narrative resilience of the alternating sleep and wakefulness of the Egyptian, and more broadly the Arab people. By engaging 18-19 January 1977 as a moment of politics and popular sovereignty, Seikaly's project challenges who and what count as political, rational, and legitimate. The role food played in protestors’ and government strategies and demands reveals how basic needs function as a trigger of social upheaval as well as a vehicle of political containment. This project attends to the roles that poverty and hunger play in politics in order to detail critiques of the open door policy. It explores how government officials, journalists, and protestors defined and ultimately contained the “poor” and the “hungry.” More importantly, by studying how protestors narrated and represented themselves and the tools they used to make their claims, this project troubles the construction of the “people.” In so doing, it explores continuity and rupture between 1977 and 2011.
Carolyn Miles, CEO and president of Save the Children, spoke on her organization’s efforts to protect children’s rights in many countries of the world at the Stanford Program on Human Rights’ Winter Speaker Series U.S Human Rights NGOs and International Human Rights on February 11, 2015.
Throughout her talk, Miles addressed the Stanford audience about the importance of protecting the basic needs of children, proclaiming the Save the Children mission: Every child deserves a childhood. She spoke about the urgent needs of child refugees in Syria, the organization’s biggest and most challenging hurdle at present. The audience grew still when Miles played a Save the Children commercial capturing a Syrian child’s experience in one year of her life during the wake of the crisis. Miles raised other important issues, such as the critical importance of developing longer-term strategies that support children in the aftershock of crises, which often can be more damaging than the initial crisis itself. For example, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when thousands of children were displaced, organizations such as the Red Cross had no plan in place for caring for children in shelters beyond a short period of time. Save the Children trained Red Cross workers in preparedness techniques and strategies for emergency aftermath.
Helen Stacy, director of the Program on Human Rights and moderator of the event, questioned Miles on the organization’s strategy for accessing marginalized communities; prioritizing children that are forgotten or ignored; and the concern of overeducating and preparing children in countries with a depleted workforce. Miles believes that focusing on the hard-to-reach populations will close the gap between the majority and the minority, and that studies show that this is achievable when governments are made to feel accountable to their marginalized peoples when witnessed on an international level. In relation to unrealistically preparing children for the workforce, Miles stated that in the Middle East this may potentially be a problem, but that Save the Children endeavors to prepare students through matching their skillsets to jobs that are already available. When Stacy challenged Miles on the Western mindset that frames the Save the Children mission that “every child deserves a childhood," Miles agreed that it is a Western attitude but stood by her stance that she believes that all children under the age of eighteen are entitled to certain basic rights, regardless of non-Western cultural norms indicating otherwise. Questions from the audience included fundraising issues, learning from undesirable program evaluation results, dealing with diversity when designing projects and innovation in children’s rights.
Dana Phelps, Program Associate, Program on Human Rights
Over the last four years of upheaval in the Arab world, the notion of “the people,” Egyptian and otherwise, has proven profoundly resilient. It is these “people”—as individuals and a collective—that are problematically celebrated as subjects finally fulfilling their long-awaited destiny; dismissed as passive objects duped by external forces and incapable of politics; or incited against as dangerous masses capable of destroying the nation. A return to the historical moment of the “Bread Intifada,” of 1977 interrupts the narrative resilience of the alternating sleep and wakefulness of the Egyptian, and more broadly the Arab people. By engaging 18-19 January 1977 as a moment of politics and popular sovereignty, this project challenges who and what count as political, rational, and legitimate. The role food played in protestors’ and government strategies and demands reveals how basic needs function as a trigger of social upheaval as well as a vehicle of political containment. This project attends to the roles that poverty and hunger play in politics in order to detail critiques of the open door policy. It explores how government officials, journalists, and protestors defined and ultimately contained the “poor” and the “hungry.” More importantly, by studying how protestors narrated and represented themselves and the tools they used to make their claims, this project troubles the construction of the “people.” In so doing, it explores continuity and rupture between 1977 and 2011.
Sherene Seikaly
Sherene Seikaly is Assistant Professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the co-editor of the Arab Studies Journal, and co-founder and editor of Jadaliyya e-zine. Seikaly's Men of Capital in Times of Scarcity: Economy in Palestine (Stanford University Press, forthcoming) explores how Palestinian capitalists and British colonial officials used economy to shape territory, nationalism, the home, and the body.
This event is co-sponsored by the Arab Studies Institute and the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.
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Okimoto Conference Room
3rd Floor East Wing
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, California 94305
Abstract:
CDDRL post-doctoral fellow Bilal Siddiqi will address the question of whether progressive, statutory legal reform can meaningfully affect the lives of the poor, using observational and experimental evidence from Liberia in a new study co-authored with Justin Sandefur at the Center for Global Development. The authors develop a simple model of forum choice and test it using new survey data on over 4,500 legal disputes taken to a range of customary and formal legal institutions in rural Liberia. Their results suggest that the poor would benefit most from access to low-cost, remedial justice that incorporates the progressive features of the formal law. They then present the results of a randomized controlled trial of a legal empowerment intervention in Liberia providing pro bono mediation and advocacy services, using community paralegals trained in the formal law. The authors find strong and robust impacts on justice outcomes, as well as significant downstream welfare benefits—including increases in household and child food security of 0.24 and 0.38 standard deviations, respectively. They interpret these results as preliminary evidence that there are large socioeconomic gains to be had from improving access to justice, not by bringing the rural poor into the formal domain of magistrates’ courts, government offices, and police stations, but by bringing the formal law into the organizational forms of the custom through third-party mediation and advocacy.
About the Speaker:
Bilal Siddiqi is a postdoctoral scholar affiliated with the Empirical Studies of Conflict project (esoc.princeton.edu). His research focuses on micro-institutions, formal and informal legal systems, peace-building and state accountability in post-conflict settings. He is currently involved in several field experiments in Sierra Leone and Liberia, including a randomized controlled trial of two non-financial incentive mechanisms in Sierra Leone’s public health sector; experimental evaluations of community-based paralegal programs in Liberia and Sierra Leone; and a randomized controlled trial of a community reconciliation program in Sierra Leone.
Bilal received his Ph.D. and M.Phil. in economics from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to Stanford, he was based at the Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) at Stockholm as a Marie Curie / AMID Scholar; and has also spent time at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, where he worked on aid effectiveness in global health. He holds a B.Sc. (Hons) from the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan.
Encina Ground Floor Conference Room
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Bilal Siddiqi is a postdoctoral scholar affiliated with the Empirical Studies of Conflict project (esoc.princeton.edu). His research focuses on micro-institutions, formal and informal legal systems, peace-building and state accountability in post-conflict settings. He is currently involved in several field experiments in Sierra Leone and Liberia, including a randomized controlled trial of two non-financial incentive mechanisms in Sierra Leone’s public health sector; experimental evaluations of community-based paralegal programs in Liberia and Sierra Leone; and a randomized controlled trial of a community reconciliation program in Sierra Leone.
Bilal received his Ph.D. and M.Phil. in economics from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to Stanford, he was based at the Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) at Stockholm as a Marie Curie / AMID Scholar; and has also spent time at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC, where he worked on aid effectiveness in global health. He holds a B.Sc. (Hons) from the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan.
