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| NADEL Newsletter July 2023 |
Dear NADEL friends and alumni,
NADEL hosted an inspiring event with Dr. Eugenia Cheng. As a mathematician, she thinks about what pure maths can contribute to advancing gender equality. Some food for thought: Labelling certain behaviours as masculine and others as feminine and encouraging women to adapt more masculine traits leads to a dead end in gender equality. Dr. Cheng suggests separating character traits from gender. She offers new language as a starting point, speaking of ingressive vis à vis congressive behaviour. At the institutional level, the same applies: we take for granted that those who negotiate more aggressively get higher salaries and conclude that everyone must negotiate harder. This also leads to a dead end because it rewards ingressive behaviour even though this is not correlated with the quality of the work we seek. We are more likely to progress in equality if we do not try to change people but change the rules of the institution instead so that salary is decoupled from negotiating behaviour. Missed the event? Watch the recording here.
For the NADEL team,
Fritz Brugger and Isabel Günther |
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| Course registration open for Autumn Semester 2023 |
| Registration is now open for NADEL courses during the Autumn Semester 2023. Participants can choose from 11 different courses on sustainable development and project management, such as “Decolonizing Aid”, “Social Entrepreneurship – Driving Sustainability in Business” and “Qualitative and Participatory Research Methods for Development”. Courses can be taken individually or as part of a full CAS certificate. The NADEL course programme offers a broad range of methodological skills, introduces participants to new topics, and links research with practice. The mix of academics and practitioners teaching in the courses is one of the signature features of the NADEL continuing education programme. What students learn is inspired by research and grounded in experience. |
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| Podcast: Global education crisis, salaries, and small NGOs |
| In the latest episode of our podcast 1.90 pro Tag, the focus is on education. Our guest Nicole Stejskal gives us an insight into her work as Co-Executive Director of CO-OPERAID, an NGO which promotes education for children in Asia and Africa. Although enrolment rates were rising in most low-income countries before the pandemic, the quality of education is still lagging behind. Nicole says this is not only due to low salaries, but also to the low regards for the teaching profession. |
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| Study: Urban mining in Switzerland |
| Mobile phones are one of the most commonly owned personal electronic devices. They contain about 15 different metals, mostly extracted with severe negative environmental consequences. Sourcing metals from retired mobile phones, i.e. urban mining, could alleviate these effects. In a study, NADEL’s Antoinette van der Merwe and Isabel Günther, together with Livia Cabernard from the ETH Institute of Environmental Engineering, analyzed the viability of urban mining in Switzerland. The study explored several strategies to increase cell phone recycling rates. They found that while informational treatments did not change recycling rates, reducing transaction costs doubled recycling rates. |
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| Visiting researcher: Welcome to Sutirtha Bandyopadhyay |
| Welcome to visiting researcher Dr. Sutirtha Bandyopadhyay. Sutirtha will work on the project “Human Development and Fertility in India” with Kenneth Harttgen and Isabel Gunther. Sutirtha holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi and an M.A. in Economics from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Indian Institute of Management, Indore. His primary research interests include applied welfare economics, development economics, applied econometrics, food and agricultural trade, gender discrimination, and measurements of poverty and inequality. His research combines theoretical and empirical techniques to examine several policy-relevant questions in the context of India and other developing economies. |
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| Interview: Future trends and competencies for international cooperation |
| The "Future Trends and Competencies for the Swiss International Cooperation Sector" report was recently published by cinfo and NADEL. The study looked into which trends will shape the future of the international cooperation sector, and what competencies practitioners will need to address these trends. In this interview, NADEL’s Jasmine Neve and Kimon Schneider put the findings in context and offer personal advice for people working in international cooperation. |
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| Book chapter: Food insecurity and poverty |
| ETH NADEL’s Kenneth Harttgen and Johannes Seiler from the University of Innsbruck contributed a chapter on Food Insecurity and Poverty for the recently published Research Handbook on Measuring Poverty and Deprivation. The handbook provides comprehensive coverage of poverty measurement, examining various dimensions such as health, energy, and housing. In their chapter, Kenneth and Johannes introduce the issue of food insecurity and its relationship to poverty. Despite efforts to reduce poverty, millions of people still lack regular access to safe and nutritious food. |
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| Study: Salafist violence in Burkina Faso |
| Armed groups have expanded their presence in the Sahel over the last decade, including in areas with intensive artisanal gold mining. In a study on the Sanmatenga Province in Burkina Faso, NADEL’s Fritz Brugger and Tongnoma Zongo from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique et Technologique, Burkina Faso, examine how Salafist expansion interacts with local socio-political dynamics and impacts agriculture and artisanal mining. They found that agriculture contracts due to widespread violence against civilians, undermining food security; artisanal mining expands as miners perceive Salafist governance as more liberal and economically advantageous; and revenue streams redirect towards the Salafist agenda. |
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