Boom and boost: Startups soar and Indigenous teachers get a leg up

1. United States

The University of Arizona is training more Indigenous teachers to expand their representation in elementary classrooms. In Baboquivari Unified School District in the southern part of the state, about 90% of students and 20% of teachers are Indigenous. Research shows that minority students often exhibit higher achievement when they have teachers who match their identities. To better support tribal communities, the University of Arizona’s Indigenous Teacher Education Program has trained at least 50 educators since 2016, with 11 bachelor’s degree candidates enrolled as of November 2023.  

Indigenous professors Jeremy Garcia and Valerie Shirley founded the program after soliciting input from Native people across the state. Funded by a federal education grant, the program provides tuition, housing, transportation, and a stipend. Students learn to develop curricula that include Native values and knowledge.

Educators and students say that the 19th- and 20th-century history of Indigenous students’ indoctrination in boarding schools is a source of apprehension over higher education, and many potential students have social and familial responsibilities in their home communities. But the University of Arizona has also made strides to increase Indigenous representation in the student body as a whole, implementing free tuition for tribal members in 2022.
Sources: Arizona Luminaria, Brookings Institution, ICT

2. Latin America

Startups are thriving in Latin America. As the pandemic surged between 2020 and 2023 and people sought to use services remotely, the number of startups backed by venture capital more than doubled to over 2,500. Latin American startups saw about $16 billion in investment in 2021 – roughly equal to the total amount of financing in the previous decade.

Some of the region’s startups aim to provide convenience services, such as food delivery. But others seek to fill gaps left by faulty or unreliable government services. The Chilean app Cornershop and Colombian app Rappi have expanded from food to include delivering small parcels, as a remedy to slow and loss-prone mail-handling. In Mexico, Kavak helps people buy secondhand cars; in Brazil, Loft remodels homes and sells them. Both add a layer of security to a process in which buyers often mistrust sellers.

Though Latin American governments have championed startups’ innovation, there remain few official avenues of support for entrepreneurs. But startup activity is expected to continue to grow beyond the more established hubs in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina.
Sources: The Economist, NASDAQ

3. Spain

In evaluating scientists, Spain is ending the “dictatorship of papers.” The country’s National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation of Spain (ANECA) has gauged academics’ eligibility for advancement and pay raises based exclusively on the number of papers they’ve published in influential journals. But scientists have long complained that the system negatively impacts their work, breeding lower research standards and prioritizing research over teaching as academics struggle to reach the quota of five papers in six years.

The new system considers other types of research accomplishments, including patents, exhibitions, and archaeological work. Factors such as whether the research reaches a lay audience will also play a role. Writing papers alongside nonacademics and local communities will be rewarded, and papers published on open-access platforms – which don’t charge authors to publish – will be counted. ANECA’s director said that the changes are an attempt to “recognize different ways of doing science.”

While academics have welcomed the move, some say even more reform – such as abolishing the six-year cycles altogether – remains necessary. ANECA’s new rules officially went into effect in January after the agency evaluated some 600 comments on the proposal.
Source: Science

World

From Kenya to Bolivia, countries are building “green roads” to create hardier infrastructure and divert a precious resource for agricultural use. Roads and water don’t mix: Roads can disrupt waterways and lead to sediment runoff, and floods can reduce vital thoroughfares to mud, particularly in developing countries, where many roads are unpaved. The Green Roads for Water initiative, pioneered by the Dutch consulting firm MetaMeta, seeks to lower roads’ environmental impacts, improve climate resilience, and boost farmer livelihoods.

The Green Roads method builds on rainwater diversion techniques that have long been deployed by farmers in some developing countries. They proved especially useful in southern Kenya, where climate change has intensified seasonal droughts and monsoons. Makueni County officials and farmers dug channels to direct floodwaters into nearby mango, banana, and orange fields. They also built farm ponds to store rainwater and planted fruit trees to absorb runoff. In nearby Kitui County, an analysis found that the increase in value of farmers’ yields after implementing road water harvesting methods, such as terracing, was more than double what was spent on the interventions.  

About 20 countries either have built or plan to build Green Roads, and thousands of kilometers of roads globally have already been retrofitted.  

Green Roads for Water has gained support from nonprofits such as the Global Resilience Partnership, and both the United Nations and World Bank have spread knowledge of its guidelines and case studies.
Source: Yale Environment 360