Dr. Priti Parikh at the Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management took an interesting take on technology’s impact on global sanitization and poverty. COVID has proven that if there is a lack of infrastructure and equity, those who are underprivileged suffer the most. 2 billion people on earth do not have access to basic sanitation. Dr. Parikh’s suggestion is to invest in sanitation as it will hit all of the sustainable development goals we are looking to meet. An eye-opening point she made was that lower-class citizens make up the majority of the population, yet they are only responsible for around 10% of the world’s climate change. They still bear the burden of that poor infrastructure and feel pressured to reduce emissions. In the panel discussion on helping the climate using technology, Rajashree Rao, a technology leader & social entrepreneur who has previously worked in innovation ecosystems as well as cloud computing and data analytics, brought up an inspiring point on how you don’t have to be an engineer to understand and know about technology, and if you are passionate, you can do anything. Concluding the panel, Bhawna Singh adeptly summarized the discussions into a single sentence that resonated with me-“Technology is an equitable means to get the solution or power of what we are trying to solve for everybody.”