Chronicle Online e-News
Pinstrup-Andersen pioneers a program to take
issues of hunger and poverty to their global
grassroots
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Feb08/worldfood.co
urse.sl.html
Feb. 6, 2008
By Susan Lang
ssl4@cornell.edu
A course on world food policy at Cornell might
help a poor country if it inspired a few students
in their careers. But put the course's materials
online and teach workshops around the world on
how to use them using a social entrepreneurial
approach -- then the result could be leaders with
the skills to help alleviate some of world's
hunger and poverty.
That's the program that the 2001 World Food Prize
laureate and Cornell professor Per
Pinstrup-Andersen has been pilot testing in
concert with three other U.S. universities.
He has posted 63 case studies
<http://cip.cornell.edu/gfs> from around the
world about real-world policy issues experienced
and written by 56 experts. Next he plans to teach
75 educators from Africa and Asia in workshops to
be held in Uganda, Bangladesh and China how to
use the materials, together with a new textbook
he is writing with Fuzhi Cheng, a former
postdoctoral fellow. The educators will learn how
to engage students in tackling an issue from
various points of view, hashing out policy and
developing sustainable approaches that address
the challenge, be it coping with famine in
Ethiopia, allocating irrigation water in Egypt,
countering the growing obesity problem in China
or assessing genetically modified food aid in
Zambia.
"[Students at] universities in many developing
countries suffer from lack of good teaching
material and outdated teaching methods, � boring
lectures based on irrelevant and outdated
textbooks given by unmotivated professors and
lecturers," says Pinstrup-Andersen, the J. Thomas
Clark Professor of Entrepreneurship and the H.E.
Babcock Professor of Food, Nutrition and Public
Policy at Cornell. "The goals of this program are
help motivate teachers and to replace lectures
with a participatory social entrepreneurial
approach that involves stimulating and
interactive sessions based on relevant and timely
case studies."
The social entrepreneurial approach, says
Pinstrup-Andersen, is intended to develop "a
mind-set," a way to approach policy analysis.
"Entrepreneurship education helps students become
leaders, innovators and creative problem-solvers
by teaching them how to apply what they've
learned in class to developing practical,
innovative and sustainable approaches to benefit
society, with an emphasis on those who are
marginalized and poor," he says.
"Social entrepreneurs have a social mission -- in
this case to reduce poverty, hunger and human
misery in developing countries in a sustainable
way."
Pinstrup-Andersen has pilot tested the course at
the University of Copenhagen, Wageningen
University and in a new course at Cornell last
semester (Food Policy for Developing Countries).
Others are doing so at the University of
Illinois, Tufts University and the University of
Colorado. Members of the program's advisory team
hail from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the
former Soviet Union and some 100 reviewers have
been involved in assessing the case studies.
Cornell colleagues, including Terry Ehling, David
Ruddy, Michael Wakoff and Peter Potter, have
assisted with the effort.
Pinstrup-Andersen also will ensure that the
educators worldwide will network so they continue
to get access to the most appropriate and latest
teaching materials, and he will regularly add
case studies to the Web site.
The project, which is in collaboration with and
co-funded by the University of Copenhagen,
Wageningen University and the CGIAR/IFPRI Open
University, also is supported by
Entrepreneurship@Cornell and the Division of
Nutritional Sciences' Babcock chair. The
international workshops are supported by the
Danish Development Assistance Agency.
--
Chronicle Online
312 College Ave.
Ithaca, NY 14850
607.255.4206
cunews@cornell.edu
http://www.news.cornell.edu
For subscription information:
http://www.news.cornell.edu/subscribe.shtml
