My name is Sohum Kulkarni, and I am a senior at Parish Episcopal School in Dallas, Texas. For the past four years, I have been working on researching the water provision system of South Sudan through my school's Academy of Global Studies.

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The Parish Episcopal School Academy of Global Studies (AGS) is a four-year signature program whose participants research a self-selected global issue affecting a nation, geographical area, or community. Students, once accepted into the program at the beginning of ninth grade, spend the next four years engaging in components including coursework, extracurricular activities, and a capstone project. In ninth grade, the coursework consists of a global studies class that surveys the slate of problems encapsulated by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. In tenth grade, students select a topic for their capstone project and compile a fifty-source annotated bibliography. In eleventh grade, using this bibliography, students write a thirty-page research paper presenting the problem and innovative solutions. These papers will eventually be published in a compilation of all papers written by students in the same AGS cohort, which in my graduating class has fourteen members. Finally, in twelfth grade, students develop a website to present their results to a broader audience. Through the entire process, students, through an affiliation with the Junior World Affairs Council of Dallas-Fort Worth (JWAC), attend the SMU Tate Lecture series as well as JWAC-sponsored events and the AGS Distinguished Speaker Series at Parish Episcopal.

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The topic I elected to study, water provision in South Sudan, is one in sore need of attention. A sequence of civil wars has resulted in severely degraded infrastructure and an unstable political environment that cannot support traditional solutions. I studied systems for urban, peri-urban, and rural provision both in South Sudan and in similar situations globally to develop a federalized, community-led framework that effectively addresses the challenges unique to South Sudan. The capstone paper as follows is identical to the format presented in the compilation that will be published in 2020. 

 

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