UNDP

Papa Seck is a consultant for the statistics unit at the UNDP, and was one of the main writers for the latest human development report on climate change. For the 2006 report, he worked on topics related to child mortality, children’s education, child labor and household resource allocation decisions. Prior to joining UNDP, he taught undergraduate economics at Hunter College and participated in a World Bank project on land reform evaluation in developing countries. He earned a master’s degree, summa cum laude in Economics Special Honors Curriculum, from Hunter College of the City University of New York. He was awarded the Arthur Leon Hornicker Memorial Award for best CUNY thesis in 2005, on work related to orphan children in Tanzania.

UNDP

Ricardo Fuentes is a policy specialist. Prior to joining UNDP, he was director of statistical analysis and advisor to the Under Secretary of Social Development in Mexico. From 1999 to 2001 he also was part of the research department of the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington DC. He has published several articles and chapters in books on social security, social policy, regional development, income poverty and inequality. He graduated with honours from CIDE in Mexico City and earned a master’s degree in economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain.

Harvard Kennedy School

Illac Angelo Diaz is the Executive Director of CentroMigrante, in the Philippines, which was the inaugural winner of the Development Track at MIT $ 100 K Businessplan Competition. This innovative project has used self-help architecture and work-for-stay arrangements to grow an initial prototype of 40 beds into its current capacity of 1500 beds, and has served almost 80,000 transients since its inception. His team also won three prizes at the IDEAS competition, which have spun off into on-going projects in the Philippines under the umbrella of the MyShelter Foundation. The MyShelter Foundation is a non-profit organization that is engaged in the creation of sustainable alternative architectural solutions - primarily flexible earthbag clinics and classrooms in rural areas.

Other projects Mr. Diaz is working on are the Peanut Revolution, which was founded to help women who spend countless hours manually shelling peanuts by providing them with simple pedal-powered machines, and First Step Coral, which aims to restore the artificial coral reef system in coastal communities in order to attract fish stock to shallower waters and hasten the growth of the shellfish population – both being important sources of dietary nutrition for coastal communities. Prior to being a Fulbright Scholar at MIT, Mr. Diaz was an MBA at the Asian Institute of Management in the Philippines. In 2006 he was named one of the Ten Outstanding Young Persons of The World (TOYP) by Jaycees International.

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