Title: Hoyas Team Up With Senegalese Students to Develop Public Interest Technology in Dakar

Throughout the year, many college students embark on immersion trips around the world to experience new cultures and complement their classroom learning.

Rajesh Veeraraghavan, an associate professor in the School of Foreign Service, wanted to turn that thinking on its head when he designed a new class, Senegal: Public Interest Technology.

“It’s not a typical class where American students go to different parts of the world and spend their spring break and learn about the culture, which is valuable,” Veeraraghavan said. “The class here is more symmetric, meaning it’s not just us going there. It’s also the Senegalese students coming here.”

The result is a Centennial Lab in partnership with the Dakar American University of Science and Technology (DAUST), an engineering university in Senegal. The class is led by Katherine Chandler, an associate professor in the School of Foreign Service; Sidy Ndao, the president of DAUST; and Veeraraghavan.

Students explore the role of public interest technology — technology that serves the common good for a large community — in addressing global challenges from an interdisciplinary perspective. This semester, nine Georgetown students teamed up with 10 DAUST students on technology projects that address community needs around the Senegalese capital.

Georgetown students traveled to Dakar over spring break to meet different communities and understand the local context of the problems they hope to address. And in April, the DAUST cohort visited Washington, DC, to meet experts and gain more insights for their final projects.

The class is part of the Georgetown Dialogues Initiative and builds on the initiative’s mission to promote civil discourse by engaging faculty from different academic disciplines. Veeraraghavan comes from a computer science and sociology background. Chandler from a critical humanities standpoint. And Ndao from an engineering perspective.

The students also bring their diverse academic backgrounds to the classroom. Georgetown SFS students share their expertise in global affairs and social science, and DAUST students provide the technical expertise to design their projects.

“It’s truly interdisciplinary in its organization and function,” Chandler said. “Building a technology is not just about coding or engineering. It is a social process, as well. Students share their expertise and learn from each other in the process.”

Meet two Hoyas in the class and discover how they collaborated with DAUST students on technology projects for the common good in the West African country.

Mitigating Floods in Dakar

Nikita Tatachar (SFS’26) grew up in Bangalore, India, and witnessed what torrential downpours could do to a community with inadequate flood mitigation infrastructure.

During the course, she connected her experiences to people around Dakar who live in flood-prone neighborhoods, particularly those in Dakar’s Wakhinane neighborhood.

“What ends up happening is there are whole areas of the city that get flooded, and in entire sections of neighborhoods, you can’t move anywhere,” Tatachar said. “There was a familiarity to what I was hearing in Wakhinane as some of the stories I’d heard in Bangalore or read in the papers or heard from friends who lived in those neighborhoods growing up.”

Tatachar’s team is designing affordable solutions to improve urban planning and an information campaign to raise awareness for better infrastructure in Wakhinane. The team is also creating a website called Flood Watch, which will include blueprints for a robot that can clear blocked drains.

“It’s a pressing issue because it isn’t a neighborhood that gets a lot of attention, and they need as much support as they can get, so we want to at least open up the conversation,” Tatachar said.

On their trip to Senegal, Tatachar visited the mayor’s office and met a water engineering expert and an official who manages the distribution of water evacuation pumps used during floods. She also met Wakhinane residents to better understand their experiences with flooding and the concerns they’d want addressed first.

When the DAUST students visited DC, they met with experts to help inform their projects, including an official from the DC Commission on Climate Change and Resiliency. In addition to showing the DAUST students the cherry blossoms and other DC staples, Tatachar presented her team’s project in the Global Impact Pitch Competition, an annual event hosted by the SFS for student entrepreneurs.

Tatachar said that working with the DAUST students allowed her to exercise socioeconomic and policy analysis skills while witnessing the Senegalese students flex their technical expertise.

“Georgetown makes you iterate your critical thinking, writing and communication skills,” she said. “I tested all of those in this class in a rigorous and in many ways more meaningful way because this isn’t just a class where I’m just learning for my open personal goals. What I do in this class is quite literally impacting people’s lives and needs.”

Making Rideshare Safer and Accessible

In Dakar, motorcycle taxis are an efficient way to get around and avoid heavy traffic. 

But taxi drivers can receive inconsistent wages and often operate in unsafe working conditions, including falling victim to harassment and robberies. It’s a problem that the DAUST students have noticed outside their campus.

Now, Connor Henry (SFS’26) and two of his DAUST teammates are working to address the issue. The team is designing a chatbot in Telegram to connect drivers with customers. It also introduces mechanisms to keep drivers safe. 

“We wanted to build a rideshare app but wanted it to be centered on improving the living and working conditions of these drivers and steer clear away from something like Uber,” Henry said.

In Dakar, Henry and his team visited popular locations where motorcycle taxi drivers wait for customers. They also interviewed potential customers and taxi drivers about their needs and received feedback for their chatbot features.

At the mayor’s office, Henry’s team spoke with city officials about their plan and its connection to recent legislation banning unregulated motorcycle taxis in a push to license all motorbikes.

“It was amazing to put some of the projects we are working on in their full context, see what life is like in Senegal, see how the projects we’re working on fit into people’s lives and livelihoods,” Henry said. “All the taxi drivers were enthusiastic about the possibility of a rideshare app-type solution.”

In DC, Henry and his DAUST teammates connected with Katie Wells, a senior fellow at the Groundwork Collaborative and a former Fritz Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown who studies the gig economy. 

After meeting with Wells about their project, Henry’s team decided to leverage drivers’ existing social networks to improve driver safety with location sharing between drivers and potentially sending multiple drivers for one ride.

Henry said he’s appreciated working with the DAUST students, who complement his international affairs background with technical expertise to make their chatbot come alive.

“The class has opened each side’s eyes to the other way of thinking … bringing that lens in and using our prior experience to think through ways this technology is embedded in a social structure and how to design technology that not only is technically feasible but also works in ways that are improving society and not to its detriment.”