Carolina Center for Public Service - Public Service and Engagement at Carolina

UNC’s Engineers without Borders will work with the community of Cuidad de Dios, Peru to design a sustainable sanitation system. This indigenous Quechua community faces severe infant mortality from diarrheal disease due to a lack of sanitation infrastructure. This project aims to establish a community-run, ecological sanitation system in order to reduce incidence of diarrheal disease and decrease disparity between urban and rural sanitation in Peru.

Our team has already seen the tremendous impacts that seemingly basic projects can have. Two years ago, our team constructed a gravity-fed water system, which earned the former squatter-community recognition from the local government. Once formally recognized, Cuidad de Dios was able to start a kindergarten class and obtain electricity.

Blog: Not yet available

The Amani Fund-raising Initiative aims to create a new and sustainable network of financial support for the New Life Home Trust, a chain of homes for abandoned babies across Kenya. In addition to providing spectacular care for these children, New Life Homes gets most of them adopted into permanent, loving families. This project entails digitalizing the paper documents of all the children who have been adopted from New Life Homes, contacting their adoptive parents regarding their ability to now access those files electronically (which was previously impossible due to technological constraints), and informing them about the opportunity to financially support the life-saving work of New Life Homes through Carolina for Amani's new fund-raising program. The project also includes the development of a comprehensive report on New Life Homes, which will be a valuable tool in future fund-raising initiatives, while simultaneously assisting the administration in improving the efficiency with which they both manage the homes and carry out the adoption process.

Blog: http://www.newlifehometrust.org/index.html

The Ministry of Public Health of Thailand is committed to eliminating malaria from their country, but is struggling to detect and treat cases in migrants and vulnerable communities displaced by conflict. Malaria causes a decline in tourist revenue due to travellers who are deterred by malaria risk. Because tourism is the largest industry in Phuket, Thailand and contributes to improving infrastructure, healthcare, and public utilities, malaria poses a serious threat to Thailand’s economy and the welfare of Thai citizens. Current techniques for diagnosing malaria do not identify asymptomatic infections, and control strategies that do not include rapid treatment of asymptomatic cases are inadequate. Innovation in diagnostic tools is critical for active case detection. To improve the detection of asymptomatic malaria cases in Phuket, this project will implement and evaluate a surveillance program that uses a highly sensitive molecular diagnostic tool: pooled, real-time polymerase chain reaction. The widespread adoption of this technique for surveillance will contribute to the control of malaria in this region and improve the health of Thai citizens.

Blog: http://lizrogawski.wordpress.com/

A junior, Public Policy and Religious Studies major, Morgan implemented Carolina for Amani, which is designed to utilize college interns to update adoption files and psychosocial reports, as well as convert them to an electronic format, in conjunction with the New Life Home orphanages in Kenya. While there her team created the first fully digital and updated record of each of the children in the orphanage. This will allow each of the 350 children in the New Life Homes to be eligible for adoption sooner while making the adoption process more efficient, accessible and safe.

Blog: http://www.morganabbott.com/

A sophomore in Economics and Public Policy, Santiago partnered with Lemonade International, the Community Empowerment Fund, and Fundacion Micros to pilot a grassroots microfinance initiative, El Fondo de Apoyo Comunitario Internacional (FAC Internacional: the Community Empowerment Fund) in La Limonada, one of Central America's largest urban slums located in Guatemala City. FAC Internacional seeks to alleviate the poverty experienced by the people of La Limonada by empowering them through income-generating microloans, entrepreneurship workshops and savings opportunities. FAC loans are the base of a program that motivates borrowers to gain higher incomes and build assets to eventually integrate them into independent banking and the formal economy. While there, five loans were disbursed, 15 savings accounts were opened and one loan officer was trained. Since the summer term, all five clients have fully repaid their first loans, are on their second line of credit, and have experienced a significant increase in savings and take home pay. Given the program's initial success, FAC Internacional is in the process of disbursing an additional 10 loans with even future expansion in mind.

Blog: http://santigob.wordpress.com/

Jill is a Master of Science in Public Health/ Doctoral Candidate in Epidemiology. Due to strikes and political demonstrations that occurred around Sahsa immediately prior to starting her project, her work moved to the health center in El Sauce. The focus of her project also shifted to gathering primary data from a sampling of villages in El Sauce, and taking GPS points in order to create maps of clustered health issues. Given the data collected, areas for future intervention include HIV/STD prevention education, machete injury prevention, and HPV and cervical cancer awareness.

Blog: http://cshi2010.blogspot.com/

A second year medical student, Rebekah Macfie, used her fellowship to investigate a new test to detect HIV in the new born children of HIV-positive mothers in Lilongwe, Malawi. Traditional HIV tests cannot be used until children are 18 months old, as new born children still have their mother's circulating antibodies. This new test, the p24 assay, will be used to determine newly-delivered children's serostatus before they leave the hospital so that HIV-positive children can be immediately started on antiretroviral treatment. Due to a delay in her IRB process, she spent a good portion of the summer preparing for study enrollment. This included creating data collection forms and working with both clinical officers and pediatricians to understand their workload to create efficiency for when they could do the paperwork. In fall 2010, the study enrollment began.

Blog: http://mankwhalainmalawi.blogspot.com/