Tanguy Montandon wins the 2024 award for best undergraduate paper in International Development Studies
The 2024 prize for the Best Undergraduate Paper in International Development Studies is awarded to Tanguy Montandon. Tanguy graduated in 2024 with a First-Class Honours in International Development Studies, and minors in Economics and Management. At McGill, he was an Integrated Management Student Fellow and pursued research on the Economic and Environmental Impacts of BIXI under the supervision of Sanjith Gopalakrishnan. Outside of school, Tanguy is passionate about energy and food security. To help social and environmental startups scale their impact, he managed the Montreal Propel Impact Fund, Quebec’s first student-led impact investing fund.
His paper, entitled "Fueling Development in Ghana with Biogas from Livestock Manure: An Exploratory Analysis of the Socioenvironmental Benefits Of Anaerobic Digestion", presents an analysis of how methane capture from animal manure can be a source of energy for development in Ghana. A multidisciplinary approach is taken to quantify how gender, health, environmental, and economic factors would be affected by methane capture. It finds that using energy from livestock manure can replace the current wood fuel consumption of 1.156 million Ghanaians and create positive knock-on socioenvironmental effects, such as reducing gender inequalities, illiteracy rates, the risk of illnesses from indoor air pollution, and deforestation.
