Think Global, Listen Local: How Auburn graduate students are reimagining global development research
September 01, 2026
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The journey from a question to an answer does not always happen in a laboratory. Sometimes, it crosses an ocean.
Auburn faculty and graduate students are taking on some of the biggest questions in global development through Auburn University’s Global Development Solutions Lab (GDS Lab).
Working alongside researchers, nonprofits and community partners in Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and South Africa, they are looking at what communities need, what makes local organizations stronger and how research can lead to real change. Much of that research focuses on civil society organizations — nonprofits and other groups that can connect citizens with government or provide services where public infrastructure falls short — and what allows them to effectively serve the communities around them.
Kelly Krawczyk, co-founder of the GDS Lab and director of Auburn’s Master of Public Administration program, has spent years studying civil society and development across West Africa.
Her connection to the continent began in 2011, when she traveled to Liberia as a doctoral student to observe the country’s presidential election. Years later, she brought that experience to Auburn, taking students to Liberia to work alongside local university students and observe elections themselves.
“We strive to use participatory methods that involve the people [we’re helping] as true collaborative partners in shared work,” Krawczyk said. “This means identification of problems that are important to them, as well as having them contribute their knowledge and skills to create and implement solutions to community issues.”
In other words, the lab doesn’t arrive with the problem — or the solution — already decided.
The work doesn’t stop with research.
In Liberia, the lab has helped community leaders advocate for local needs, taught college students how to conduct research and given nonprofit leaders practical skills in fundraising, communications and planning. One research project uses participatory action research and nonprofit management education to enhance the capacity of Liberian civil society organizations to support development in their own communities.
Other projects examine how civil society can encourage political participation in Liberia, what kinds of community participation can make development programs more successful and how power dynamics between researchers and communities can shape the research process itself.
Different projects. Different needs. But each starts with the people who know their communities best.
Auburn students work alongside local partners during a research experience in Africa.
One size does not fit all
Peter Weber, an associate professor in Auburn’s College of Human Sciences, has watched partners in Liberia go from helping Auburn researchers make connections on the ground to helping lead projects and collaborating on papers.
“They are not just participants,” Weber said. “We are one team across the world.”
Those relationships have also shown why something that works in one place may not work somewhere else.
No one would expect a nonprofit in New York City to operate exactly like one in Valley, Alabama. They have different resources and face different challenges.
The differences seem obvious at home. But Weber said that thinking can slip through the cracks in global development, where organizations sometimes bring a program built for one place into an African community with entirely different needs.
“Suddenly it’s all, ‘Here is the model we made for this specific circumstance. Now do it,’” Weber said.
For the GDS Lab, that makes “localization” — how deeply an organization is embedded in and responsive to the place it serves — more than a buzzword. It can determine whether an organization earns trust, understands what people actually need, and ultimately makes a lasting difference.
Auburn experiences abroad give students opportunities to explore the communities and places surrounding their work.
Auburn students suit up in election observer gear during fieldwork in Liberia.
Face-to-face meetings are an important part of the GDS Lab’s approach, giving researchers and local partners a chance to shape projects together.
GDS Lab students and partners visit Tutu House in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Kelly Krawczyk, far left, and Serah Lagble, far right, connect with colleagues during a university visit in Africa.
For GDS Lab students, international research means taking what they learn at Auburn into the communities and countries at the center of their work.
Built with communities, not for them
What changes when communities help shape the research?
Chinonye Ekwujuru has seen it in real time.
Ekwujuru joined the GDS Lab while earning his Master of Public Administration at Auburn and has continued as he pursues his doctorate. His research involves civil society organizations in Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia.
“One thing that actually changed my perspective is how the lab was so firm in ensuring that those community voices must be involved in the research that we are doing,” Ekwujuru said. “If it means spending significant time to ensure that we get them involved in this, we have to do it.”
During one project in Liberia, community responses surfaced challenges the researchers had not fully considered and began shifting the direction of the paper.
That experience gets at another question the lab is studying directly: What kinds of participation actually work? One GDS Lab project is examining which forms of community participation do the most to engage people and improve the outcomes of development programs. Another looks inward at the research process itself, examining how power dynamics, local research partners and a researcher’s own position can affect what happens on the ground — and why researchers sometimes have to adapt along the way.
It’s an approach Lucky Umezulike understood even before coming to Auburn.
Umezulike came to Auburn in 2022 after working in international development and is now in the final stretch of his doctorate.
“They [African communities] know their priorities, they know what they want,” he said. “What they often lack is access to resources and the people making decisions that affect them. The process is as important as the solutions themselves.”
Kelly Krawczyk talks with Serah Lagble, in purple, and other university students during a visit to Ghana.
Halfway to full circle
In 2023, Krawczyk visited the University of Ghana and spoke with students about Auburn’s graduate programs.
For Serah Lagble, a classroom conversation in Ghana eventually led to a new life and research path at Auburn.
She was studying public administration and researching civil society organizations and participatory development, interests that closely matched Krawczyk’s work.
“I wouldn’t say it was luck,” Lagble said. “Maybe destiny or something.”
She looked up Auburn. She applied. Then she traveled 5,000 miles to join the same research community she had first heard about back home.
Lagble joined the GDS Lab while earning her Master of Public Administration and has continued that work as she pursues her doctorate. Her research examines development funding across Ghana, Nigeria, Liberia and South Africa, along with local government performance and citizen participation in Ghana.
The same path that brought Lagble from Ghana to Auburn may eventually lead back home.
“I hope to use this knowledge to give back to my home country someday,” Lagble said.
That international exchange extends beyond individual students. The lab also works with the Centre for African Philanthropy and Social Impact at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, on research exploring philanthropy, civil society and social justice across Africa, the United States and the African diaspora.
The lab also gives its graduate students experience beyond the classroom.
“They are exposed to the full research process,” Weber said, from designing a study, to project implementation, analyzing data, writing the paper and submitting it for publication.
Ekwujuru is already a co-author. Lagble has pushed herself into quantitative work she once found intimidating. Umezulike is bringing years of development experience to the research questions he now studies at Auburn.
They are not simply learning about global development. They are helping shape what Auburn learns about it.
More than a paper
For Umezulike, the impact has never been abstract.
“I’ve seen programs improve the lives of people,” he said. “I’ve seen international development in action. Communities smiling. Different range of interventions improving the livelihoods of people and saving lives.”
That is why he wants the research to go somewhere.
“Research is not the end point of what we’re doing,” Umezulike said. “Research is actually a tool.”
He wants the research to make its way back to the people and organizations across Africa who can use it to strengthen their communities.
It is also why the GDS Lab is interested not simply in whether civil society organizations succeed, but what allows them to succeed — how they find resources, build expertise, form partnerships, adapt to changing conditions and remain accountable to the people they serve.
To Weber, that feels “unmistakably Auburn.”
“If you want to make a difference, if you want to have an impact, you can,” Weber said. “Whether it’s in our region or across the globe, it’s possible.”
After years of research across continents, perhaps the biggest lesson is also the simplest.
Changing the world doesn’t start with having all the answers. Sometimes, it starts with knowing who to ask.
