The East Asia Program (EAP) offers several categories of fellowships and grants to support student and faculty research and study related to East Asia:

EAP Graduate Area Studies Fellowships East Asian Language Study Grants EAP Research Travel GrantsCan’t attend? Contact eap@cornell.edu.

The speaker, Jordan Blekking (Postdctoral Associate, Department of Global Development, Cornell) is investigating how smallholder farmers’ perceptions of environmental conditions vary across locations and how these perceptions inform their cropping decisions in areas experiencing high rainfall variability. Second, he uses publicly available, high resolution (<250m) remotely sensed products to investigate how urban food retail environments change as African urban areas grow. He has conducted research in Kenya, Zambia, and South Africa.

Declining soil health is a major challenge for smallholder farmers in Africa. Smallholders often struggle to align their intentions to improve soil health with on-farm behaviors. Using a longitudinal dataset collected by an NGO from 170 smallholders in Western Kenya, we examine the extent to which short message service (SMS) messages that are targeted toward specific behaviors can enhance the adoption of sustainable gardening practices following a six-month farmer field school training. We find that, on average, farmers that received timely SMS messages targeted to specific practices adopted 0.44 more practices during a one-year period (p <0.05), even when controlling for socioeconomic factors. We also tested whether framing related to community social norms were effective, but we did not find evidence that social norm framing improved adoption rates. These findings suggest that behaviorally targeted and temporally relevant SMS messaging can significantly increase the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices. In-person messaging remains the most important avenue for information dissemination, but our findings illustrate how NGOs and other agricultural extension service providers can use SMS messages to maintain farmer engagement and adoption of sustainable practices following a training period.

Public Registration

"Seeds of Survival is an exhibition at Cornell Botanical Gardens that honors the Black experience in the Americas dating back to the transatlantic slave trade1. The exhibition includes an outdoor plant display, audio tour and an indoor exhibit1. It focuses on food plants native to West Africa, such as black-eyed peas, okra and millet, that were used as provisions on the slave ships and became embedded in American cuisine21. The exhibition also highlights the cash crops, like sugarcane, cotton and tobacco, that fueled the transatlantic slave trade2."- Cornell Botanic Gardens

Public Registration

At independence, African states inherited liberal constitutions enshrining multiparty democracy. However, within a decade, many collapsed into military dictatorships and one party-regimes and elections lost their significance. The democratization process of the late 1980s and early 1990s led to the drafting of ‘new’ constitutions that reinstated competitive elections. The reintroduction of multiparty democracy entailed that elections were going to be genuinely contested between several candidates, with the possibility that opposition leaders could wrestle power from the incumbent leaders. Many constitutions or electoral laws adopted following this wind of change provide for the possibility of aggrieved individuals and/or entities to seek legal redress in courts of law or other quasi-judicial bodies, usually on specified grounds. This phenomenon is now compounded by the increased use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in the electoral process. Almost all presidential election disputes in the last ten years in Africa have revolved around failure or alleged tampering with the ICT facilities in the electoral process. It would, therefore, seem that ICTs, although helpful in increasing efficiency in the electoral process, provide possible new and cleaner ways of stealing elections. This new development presents new challenges to courts as often ICTs are adopted by Electoral Management Bodies (EMBs) without appropriate changes to the electoral laws to enhance transparency and accountability. This paper analyses how the courts are facing the challenge of increased use of technology in elections and explores the way forward in terms of progressive interpretation and proactive adjudication of election matters.

Dr. O’Brien Kaaba, Lecturer, Department of Public Law, and Assistant Dean of Research, University of Zambia

Public Registration

Good governance is contingent on the development of political systems that gives citizens ownership of the political process.