Luna Borges, Lecturer in Law and Supervising Attorney at the Smith Family Human Rights Clinic, was awarded a President’s Global Innovation Fund (PGIF) grant. She will work along with a group of academics and civil society experts across disciplines and territories to conduct research on how urban communities in Nairobi and Rio de Janeiro respond to armed violence and socio-economic marginalization. 

Eduardo Moncada, Director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University, is the principal investigator, and Nicholas Barnes, visiting scholar at ILAS, is a co-investigator of the initiative.

Millions across the Global South live under the influence of criminal and extra-legal armed groups while facing socio-economic marginalization and limited access to public goods. Many urban communities develop creative strategies to navigate contexts of violence and precarity while advocating for development and justice, but top-down theories and advocacy strategies that prioritize armed state and criminal actors often overlook the reality of community agency.

The project “Community Resilience in the Urban Margins: Collaborative and Comparative Frameworks for Political Engagement” addresses this context through a novel design that compares neighborhoods across two major cities: Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Nairobi (Kenya). This interdisciplinary and transregional project will support participatory workshops and bring together researchers, practitioners, and community leaders to co-design frameworks for political engagement and advocacy grounded in lived experience. The Columbia Global Centers in Nairobi and Rio will host the workshops and harness their connections with civil society and government to help identify key stakeholders.

This project builds on Dr. Borges’ previous work at the Human Rights Clinic, where she has collaborated with students and partnered with Redes da Maré, a civil society organization that has been fighting for the rights of the population living in favela da Maré for over 20 years.

You can find more information about the project and the full list of the 2025 grant recipients at the PGIF’s website. The Redes da Maré website is available in English. Stay tuned for more updates on this transnational and collaborative project! (Photos by Douglas Loppes.)