Calistus Ngonghala, PhD

Monday 2 June, 19:30, AIMS Main Lecture Hall

Abstract: Understanding the causes of the persistence of extreme poverty continues to challenge policy and research at the interface between the ecological and social and sciences. The extremely poor depend on their immediate environment for subsistence and suffer high morbidity and mortality from infectious diseases. In pursuit of a general integrated mathematical framework for the ecology of poverty, we present a road map for modeling subsistence and health of the rural poor by coupling simple dynamic models of population ecology with those for economic growth. Feedbacks between the ecological and economic systems may lead to a state of persistent poverty. Analyses of a wide range of specific systems under alternative assumptions show the existence of three possible regimes corresponding to globally stable development, globally stable poverty, and bistability (co-existence of a stable wealthy/healthy development state and and an unhealthy/poverty state). Bistability consistently emerges as a property of generalized disease-economic systems for about a fifth of the feasible parameter space. The overall proportion of parameters leading to poverty is larger than that resulting in healthy/wealthy development. All of the systems are found to be most sensitive to human disease parameters. The framework highlights feedbacks, processes and parameters that are important to measure in studies of rural poverty to identify effective pathways towards sustainable development.​

About: Dr. Ngonghala is an Assistant Professor of Mathematical Biology in the Department of Mathematics and Emerging Pathogens Institute (EPI) at the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL, USA. He was an MMED participant in 2010 and joined the Workshop Faculty in 2016. His research focuses on developing mathematical frameworks of coupled natural-human systems to understand the ecology of poverty from the perspective of infectious disease dynamics, agriculture (renewable resources), environmental (land-use) change and socio-economic conditions.