![]() ![]() Rarely do the different disciplines manage to speak to one another. Economic growth is to be applauded, but one can't assume its benefits will trickle down to the poor."Īcademic and policy debates, she says, are compartmentalised into areas such as agriculture or health. We want to tackle these challenges head on, combining new theory with practical solutions that make science and technology work for the poor, and create sustainable environments from building on people's own knowledge. "But we live in a world of dynamic change and uncertainty. "The Gates and Rockefeller foundations, for example, assume one size fits all, that solutions can be applied across a stable world," she says. ![]() This, she argues, may overlook opportunities to build on the ways farmers are already adapting to drought. She gives as an example the search for genetically modified maize seeds. Billions could be wasted because of a failure to respond to local needs. Leach says their "silver bullets", aimed at reducing poverty, are missing their targets. She hopes the research will be used by policy-makers, non-governmental organisations, philanthropic organisations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and United Nations agencies. "We are about producing scholarly research, and playing a public and intellectual role." "We have a thinktank role, but we are more academic than a thinktank," she says. It already has collaborators in China, India, Kenya and Argentina. ![]() Leach wants the centre to involve "citizens and decision-makers of all levels". It promises to question the "assumption that the world is stable, predictable and knowable through a single form of knowledge that assumes one size fits all". It will focus on food and agriculture, health, water and sanitation. The centre, which officially opened last month, hopes to develop a new approach to understanding why the gap between the poorest and the richest is growing, and to doing something about it. Now, at 42 and proficient in four African languages, she has been made director of a new global research hub known as the Steps centre (social, technological and environmental pathways to sustainability). But even the most academic of families - her brother Matthew is a senior lecturer in the engineering department of Imperial College London - might gasp at her achievements.Īt the age of 35, just 15 years after graduating from Cambridge with a starred first (distinction) in geography, Leach became professor of the prestigious institute of development studies at Sussex University. You might expect the daughter of Penelope Leach, one of the world's leading childcare academics, and Gerald Leach, an energy analyst who died three years ago, to be a high-flier. Leach argued that the polio vaccination campaign was using resources that weakened, rather than strengthened, local primary care health systems. Polio was either not seen as a priority, they found, or it was perceived as a spiritual affliction that was impossible to prevent. Leach and a local anthropologist in northern Nigeria uncovered the reasons for villagers' fears about taking the polio vaccine, administered to them by the World Health Organisation. Seven years later, she struck another blow for social anthropology. "A lot of my work since has been about trying to bring to life the knowledge of local people." A decade later, they are still being used to illustrate the power of anthropological methods. Their findings became a book, Misreading the African Landscape, and a film, Second Nature: Building Forests in West Africa's Savannahs. Leach and her colleagues had shown how experts can reach wildly wrong conclusions if local knowledge and history are not taken into account. The forest was in fact growing, because farmers had worked out how to turn savannah into forest. Leach, Fairhead and a Guinean researcher discovered - by talking to the villagers, researching the area's history and "viewing things through an anthropological lens" - that the opposite was true. The area was widely assumed to be experiencing a deforestation crisis, and experts held local villagers responsible. ![]() In the early 1990s, when Leach was a PhD student at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, she went to Guinea in west Africa with Fairhead, then her research partner. Her research, in the field of anthropology-cum-development-cum-medicine-cum-technology-cum-ecology, has consistently challenged public policy and the stance taken by government authorities. ![]()
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