Prospective Students

AFST 305/6 is open to all undergraduates at Yale who can meet the requirements of completing the calendar year program which begins each new spring term. Class size is generally limited to 15 and is applications based. AFST 305/6 is cross-listed with Global Affairs and students of all majors are encouraged to apply. The class is particularly interested in students with either a historical or familial link to countries on the African continent, speak and African language, or are considering the African Studies major at Yale.

Simon & Nadira watch the sun rise over the Nile

By enrolling in AFST 305, students affirm their intention to participate in the summer field experience and to return to AFST 306 in the Fall. The summer experience is funded to the extent possible by the MacMillan Center and other travel grant sources available to Yale students which will require application. Complete funding is not guaranteed.

The summer field experience will be one of five curated assignments that professor Hopkins organizes prior to the spring term each year. Students will learn of the hosts early in the spring term and have the ability to apply for those that interest them the most. Generally speaking, hosts are private or non-profit organizations working on the continent in some market-based poverty solution. Areas of past projects have been in the field of education, health care, agri-business, water (WASH) access, financial inclusion and energy access.

Application to the class is not the same as acceptance. If selected, you will be working on a team with other students and acknowledge a responsibility to your teammates throughout the term, the summer field research period and during the subsequent fall term. It will be unfair to your classmates and the organizations you are paired with to not engage in the summer obligation (expectation is approximately 8 weeks depending on project selection and needs.

Students will be managing their projects on the ground without faculty supervision. Please review the remainder of this website carefully to gain a deeper understanding or commitments to the class and your project hosts.

Alumni Spotlights

Rahim Haliminski

Rahim graduated from Yale with a deep interest in small holder farming communities and the challenges they face gaining access to fair prices and export markets for their crops. During his junior year, Rahim attended our class “Social Enterprise: Market Solutions for Inclusive Societies” and spent his summer in Nairobi working with Bridge International Academies in their customer care team. This experience reinforces a central topic of our classwork—that user satisfaction (expressed through demand) is a critical element of success for any enterprise that seeks to build a financially sustainable platform. Bridge regards their primary age students and fee-paying parents as customers who have a choice in attending a Bridge school, and like other customers, have high quality standards relative to the status quo.

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Juli Cho

Juli Cho My first visit to Kenya was in September of 2014, when I was shadowing and interviewing a social enterprise project building retail kiosks that were not only profitable, but also providing access to clean water and energy in underserved communities in developing countries. I had been a college senior then, conducting research for an evaluation report as part of a yearlong course called “Market Solutions for Inclusive Societies.” It was my first time in Kenya, Africa, and in a developing country.

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At the time, I knew very little about international development. I was born and raised in South Korea and was attending college in the U.S. Even though I was broadly interested in the public and social sectors, these two countries made up the most of my world. I certainly did not know that I would be returning to Africa—both Kenya and other parts of the continent—frequently in the following years.

During the course of my time in Kenya and the process of the analysis and writing, I began to realize the vast potential for growth of economies in the African continent, driven by the burgeoning consumer market and the magnitude of its natural resources, particularly in the agricultural sector. I also learned that these countries often face unique and exceptionally difficult challenges and that markets and businesses can be a powerful tool to address them. Is there market demand for clean water, electricity, connectivity, and household goods in rural communities? Yes. Is there profit—and positive social impact—to be had by providing access to those goods and services? Potentially. Can the barriers to profitability and impact—such as the distance from infrastructure and large populations of urban cities, the need for durability, the lack of human resources, and the limited disposable income of the potential customer base—be addressed? Perhaps.

I became fascinated by these questions and keen to find answers. When I graduated from college, I joined TechnoServe, an international non-profit organization dedicated to developing business solutions to poverty—an organization I had come across in my studies of social enterprises and market-based solutions. For the past four years, I’ve been working at TechnoServe as part of a team that specifically identifies and establishes shared value initiatives in partnership with multinational corporations with footprint in emerging markets. I’ve found this work to be challenging, but also fascinating, with real potential to alleviate poverty sustainably and effectively.

Shortly before my first trip to Kenya, I read that five million children under the age of five die every year, mainly in the developing world, from preventable and treatable diseases. To this day, I still can’t think of anything more senseless than five million unnecessary deaths happening so disproportionately in certain parts of the world. My hope is that I have spent the past five years addressing this senselessness in some small way—and that I will continue to do so for many more years to come.