This second season of Unpacking Us focuses on technology and development in the Global South. We're talking about how technological innovation is fueling growth in these countries, about how it's enabling exchanges, and products and transactions that we couldn't dream of a few years ago, and yet at the same time its uprooting livelihoods, spreading discord, dis-enfranchising segments of the population. We'll talk about financial inclusion, education, AI, politics, and I'm sure other areas as well. We'll talk to builders and doers and thinkers - and I hope we will all learn a lot in the process.
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This second season of Unpacking Us focuses on technology and development in the Global South. We're talking about how technological innovation is fueling growth in these countries, about how it's enabling exchanges, and products and transactions that we couldn't dream of a few years ago, and yet at the same time its uprooting livelihoods, spreading discord, dis-enfranchising segments of the population. We'll talk about financial inclusion, education, AI, politics, and I'm sure other areas as well. We'll talk to builders and doers and thinkers - and I hope we will all learn a lot in the process.
How Do We Recover From the Worst Floods in Pakistan's History?
Unpacking Us
43 minutes
3 years ago
How Do We Recover From the Worst Floods in Pakistan's History?
Tahir Andrabi unpacks the stages of disaster recovery that Pakistan will go through. We use his experience working on the 2005 earthquakes to think through what an effective flood relief and rehabilitation effort will look like. We talk about what the long-term effects might be on livelihoods and on health and education outcomes, and the interventions that can help minimize these effects.
Tahir is the Stedman-Sumner Professor of Economics at Pomona College. He was the inaugeral Dean of the LUMS School of Education, and a co-founder of the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan. It's his research on education that has achieved the most prominence, but the reason I'm talking to him for this episode is his work on disaster recovery in the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan.
Some links to what we talked about:
* An archived version of RISE-PAK [https://web.archive.org/web/20051023004933/http://www.risepak.com:80/], the information aggregation portal developed by Tahir and his collaborators to aid recovery efforts following the 2005 earthquake.
* Tahir's paper [https://riseprogramme.org/publications/human-capital-accumulation-and-disasters-evidence-pakistan-earthquake-2005] (with Benjamin Daniels and Jishnu Das) on the effects of the 2005 earthquake on income, education, and health outcomes.
* Floods Impact Assessment [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mV3AAxfZKvkNA-TqA88rpwD6QVL8nbGdGNiGSHnsECA/edit#gid=1726894818] by Uzair Younis and Ammar Khan, the source for the $13B damage estimate we discussed.
* Abida Parveen's rendition of Ghalib's "Yeh Na Thi Hamari Qismat" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34MDD93NIyQ], from which Tahir quotes a couplet to illustrate Pakistan's climate crisis.
Unpacking Us
This second season of Unpacking Us focuses on technology and development in the Global South. We're talking about how technological innovation is fueling growth in these countries, about how it's enabling exchanges, and products and transactions that we couldn't dream of a few years ago, and yet at the same time its uprooting livelihoods, spreading discord, dis-enfranchising segments of the population. We'll talk about financial inclusion, education, AI, politics, and I'm sure other areas as well. We'll talk to builders and doers and thinkers - and I hope we will all learn a lot in the process.
