Between 2014 and 2017 hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed, and millions of individuals were displaced, due to the Islamic State’s (IS) occupation and the subsequent military campaign to defeat its forces. IS particularly targeted minority communities living in Ninewa province in northern Iraq. Regional livelihoods based on farming and animal husbandry were devastated....
Led by Purdue University and the Kenyan Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO) the Building Sustainable Resilient Supply Chains: A Model of Youth Input Resellers in Kenya project aims to identify and train motivated rural youth in Eastern Kenyan counties to become resellers of agricultural inputs working in collaboration with local agro-dealers. The goal is...
We are delighted to inform you that Pallavi Gupta has joined us as Program Director for LASER PULSE as of April 1, 2021. Born and brought up in Uttar Pradesh India, Pallavi comes to LASER PULSE with more than 14 years of experience having worked across engineering, management consulting, social entrepreneurship and international development fields with...
Do you have an experience, project, or best practice on research translation your fellow LASER PULSE Network members should be aware of? Contact us at laserpulse@purdue.edu to see if we can feature your work in a subsequent newsletter.
POKET is an out of the box tool for researchers to deploy their own crowdsourcing engagements. The focus is on projects that can benefit from self-reported data, high-frequency data capture, citizen-generated data, participatory mapping or community-driven insights. POKET retrofits their suite of mobile and desktop tools so researchers can generate location-specific insights...
A key component of LASER PULSE’s Embedded Research Translation model is the collaboration of researchers and practitioners in development research projects. LASER PULSE defines Embedded Research Translation as an iterative codesign process among academics, practitioners and other stakeholders in which research is intentionally applied to a development challenge. Core to this approach to translation are...
In the Exploring Blockchain Technology to Improve Food Security Through African Indigenous Vegetables project in Western Kenya, we have prioritized a co-design process between the research and research translation partners from the proposal development stage. Egerton University (research), Virginia Tech (research), and AgUnity (research translation) each bring their own, yet complementary, expertise to the project....
A new LASER PULSE project to develop and test an early childhood evidence-based intervention for social emotional learning in Uganda has begun to implement a train-the-trainer scale-up model. Due to travel constrictions, the team conducted trainings via teleconference with Nakaseke Primary Teachers College (PTC) trainers. While this approach allowed the project to complete critical training...
A recently-concluded LASER PULSE project, funded by USAID, can offer you insights into measuring local level capacity and commitment. In this research project, Texas A&M (led by Sylvie Hamie and Khalil Dirani) and University of Notre Dame (led by Tushi Baul and Lila Khatiwada) researchers collaborated with the Office of Learning, Evaluation, and Research (PPL/LER) in...
Enduring Results Study 3.0, led by USAID, CRS, and Accenture Development Partnership, is one of the LASER PULSE research studies under Private Sector Engagement buy-in. This study is the third in the series of Enduring Results Studies (ERS), which collect and disseminate evidence on the drivers of sustainability and scale in USAID’s...
