LACS 20 – Nicaragua Programs

Latin American & Caribbean Studies 20

“The Politics and Ethics of Development in Latin America: The Nicaraguan Context”

This course was offered for the first time in the fall term of 2014 and was offered again in the fall term of 2015. It precedes the service trip that takes place in December. Here is the course description for LACS 20:

Increasing numbers of undergraduate students, public policy, engineering, and medical students are interested in experiential learning as a way to extend their regular academic course offerings. Many of these students may decide to travel to Latin America to participate in service-learning programs, to implement humanitarian engineering projects, to work on global health programs, or to conduct individual research projects around public policy and development issues. This course is designed to prepare these students for a range of different experiential learning opportunities in Latin America and draws upon over fifteen years of Dartmouth experience in development and medical projects in Nicaragua, which serve as some of the case studies for this course on the politics and ethics of development in Latin America. The central focus of the course, therefore, is to examine the politics and ethics of international development and health care delivery in the specific context of Nicaragua, in order to understand more clearly how these issues are relevant to other developing countries in Latin America and in the wider world.

This course investigates a range of characteristics of development projects and explores practical concerns for implementing and expanding successful and ethical partnerships in global health and development. Students research development programs between U.S. academic institutions, non-governmental organizations, and medical institutions and consider the political and ethical and ramifications of short- and long-term development in Latin America. Using Nicaragua as the central focus of study, we consider the implications of development and health care delivery in Nicaragua, and by extension, for other regions of Latin America and the developing world. Many volunteer medical brigades and community development projects are designed and implemented with the best of intentions, yet these responses to health care needs and community development projects are not without their problems. It is much more challenging to establish a model for development that will have a long-lasting and truly sustainable impact for countries in the developing world. In LACS 20 we consider some of the most effective models that have proven to be sustainable and how various development programs can best achieve ethical harmony and practical success in conjunction with the expressed needs of a region or community.

Throughout the term we consider the challenges that make the implementation of these programs difficult or problematic and students design solutions and practical projects that they will be able to implement in the field during subsequent service and research trips. During the fall term in LACS 20, through web-based communication (videoconferences, conference calls, email, and the Nicaragua Programs website), we establish relationships between the LACS 20 students and our partners in Nicaragua in order to foster a better appreciation of the local needs and then work with our partners to design collaborative solutions and practical responses for improving health equity and in order to appreciate more fully the developmental needs in this region of the world.