During a trip to Botswana last spring, a group of juniors from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs studying social protection policies in Southern Africa came face to face with a frustrated local farmer named Mma Mogaetsho. Although she had cultivated her family’s fields for decades, Mogaetsho had recently struggled with local wildlife — primarily elephants — trampling her crops, which threatened not only her livelihood but also her family’s means of subsistence.

The night before the meeting, those same havoc-wreaking elephants had wowed the students while refreshing themselves at a nearby watering hole. The experience gave them an intimate understanding of the tension between the government’s efforts to strengthen the economy by protecting animals that draw tourists and the effects of those policies on local people trying to coexist with the animals.

“The utter joy I felt seeing the elephants was juxtaposed by learning firsthand what it really means to live with them,” said Cassie Eng, one of the four students on the trip.

The weeklong fieldwork in Botswana was part of SPIA’s Policy Task Force, a requirement for all of the School's undergraduates that charges them to actively engage with government officials and others with boots-on-the-ground experience and expertise while addressing questions of public policy.

While a separate cohort spent the spring semester at the University of Cambridge, Eng and her three classmates, Alexa Marsh, Evelyn Howe, and Joshua Worth, studied under Dr. Jeremy Seekings, a professor of political studies and sociology at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. His scholarship centers on inequality, social protection, and poverty reduction. To help make those issues more tangible, Seekings organized meetings with academics, local politicians, and political organizations during the trip north to Botswana.

“One of the school’s priorities is tapping into our global networks and relationships by sending students into communities around the world to learn about local needs directly from individuals with on-the-ground regional expertise via their own lived experience,” said Dr. Paul Lipton, SPIA’s senior associate dean for academic administration.

Eng was drawn to Southern Africa to gain a broader international perspective on public policy perhaps accessible only through studying abroad. A dual citizen of the United States and the Philippines, she has witnessed extreme poverty in Manila, where her grandmother lives, which informs her interest in how public policy and other structural forces affect inequality.