More than a year into the pandemic, Pakistan is fighting the third wave that is sweeping across its main urban centers. The hospitalization statistics increased manifold compared to the first and the second wave. However, after a relentless increase, the statistics are now beginning to register a slight respite. The seven-day moving average of the positive percentage now stands at 9.8%. Despite this trend, caution needs to reign supreme.
Isabel Macdonald, a Harvard doctoral student in public policy, was the recipient of a Mittal Institute Seed for Change grant in 2020. Isabel’s research focuses on education and financial inclusion, and her current projects include an analysis of training for microfinance borrowers in Pakistan, and a framework for the political economy of education reform. The following is a report on her project, KamyabiTest, a smartphone app that better helps Pakistani teachers track student progress.
Our political class must set aside differences to act quickly and with compassion to ensure economic security and well-being of the vulnerable, as we fight back second wave of Covid-19, says Vikram Patel in an Op-Ed for The Indian Express.
A fundraiser by South Asian students in the US in support of India’s fight against Covid-19. The fundraiser is running in partnership with GiveIndia, which works closely with organizations on the ground to address critical needs. The platform provides transparent information on fund disbursement and accepts USD, INR and other currencies.
On Monday, April 19, a panel of experts came together to discuss innovations in the public health sector, translating health research into practice, and the challenges of creating an enabling environment for these innovations to thrive.
On April 22, Professor Tarun Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, Harvard Business School, and Director, Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University, addressed the Thirteenth Session of the Distinguished Global Indian Speaker Series (DGISS) organized by Amity University Gurgaon.
The years of post-mortem that follow will dissect how we arrived here. But for now, the path out of the current inferno requires unwavering commitment to science, and perhaps tremendous rectitude. Let us examine what we can do in the coming months.
Harvard Professor Jinah Kim’s research, which was the topic of the Mittal Institute’s latest VAF Lecture Series, examines the role of women in South Asian art from a historical perspective, and attempts to understand how this depiction impacts the politics of gender and social status of women in the modern era.
The Global Alliance for Medical Innovation, a group of students and faculty based at
Harvard University working to increase access to healthcare via engineering and advocacy, was awarded a Mittal Institute Seed for Change grant in summer 2020. Their proposal explored the development of low-cost, scalable technologies to allow point-of-care diagnosis of common eye disorders in under-resourced regions of the globe.
This past Fall, the Mittal Institute began a program, Conservation of Culture, designed to support scholarship in art and conservation management, partnering with the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) Museum in Mumbai, the Harvard Art Museums’ Straus Conservation Center, and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
Through a collaboration between the Tata Trusts and the Mittal Institute, Project Empower is working to bridge the mental health provider gap in India by building a digital platform to provide virtual training and supervision to community health workers as they identify and treat common mental health disorders.
Panelists from around the globe gathered to explore the new book by Professor Ian Talbot, Director of the Centre for Imperial and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Southampton and Research Affiliate at the Mittal Institute. The book, The History of British Diplomacy in Pakistan, is the first study of the history of British diplomacy in Pakistan. It covers seven decades of British diplomacy in Pakistan, from 1947 through the “War on Terror.”