In Ethiopia, new perspectives on the challenges of development

In the weeks leading up to her arrival in Ethiopia, Shuaiqing Liu read plenty about the transportation challenges in the African nation. She still wasn’t prepared for the sheer scale of the difficulty getting even small distances outside the capital, Addis Ababa, her Wharton Global Modular Course group’s home base during their four-day visit. 

“We could have covered 10 activities in one day, and contributed more to the local economy,” says Liu, a first-year MBA student. “Instead, we covered only three. It made me think about how the local people might want to travel to a bank or to get health care and, because of the limitations of the transportation, they can’t.”

That’s exactly the type of impression Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) Professor Ezekiel Emanuel, who’s leading the course with Assistant Professor Heather Schofield, wanted the students to get. Both are affiliated with the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School.