Harvard Center for International Development

Originally recorded on February 12, 2021. Philippe Le Houérou, former CEO of the IFC continued the discussion after a virtual CID Speaker Series event held on February 12, 2021, exploring their work further with CID Student Ambassador Rohit Subramanian. Philippe Le Houérou discussed the reforms and changes implemented at the International Finance Corporations (IFC) from 20016-to 2020. The IFC is the arm of the World Bank Group that invests in (and with) the private sector in emerging and developing economies and shared his views on the role of the private sector and development finance in the 21st century, the link between public and private partnerships, and key challenges and constraints facing the poorest countries.

Originally recorded on January 29th, 2021. Michael Clemens, Director of Migration, Displacement, and Humanitarian Policy, Center for Global Development and Thomas Ginn, Research Fellow, Center for Global Development continue their discussion after a virtual CID Speaker Series event held on January 29th, 2021, exploring their work further with CID Student Ambassador Sama Kubba. Countries restrict the overall extent of international travel and migration to balance the expected costs and benefits of mobility. Given the ever-present threat of new, future pandemics, how should permanent restrictions on mobility respond? A simple theoretical framework predicts that reduced exposure to pre-pandemic international mobility causes a slightly slower arrival of the pathogen. A standard epidemiological model predicts no decrease in the harm of the pathogen if travel ceases thereafter and only a slight decrease in the harm (for plausible parameters) if travel does not cease. Researchers at the Center for Global Development, including featured speakers Michael Clemens and Thomas Ginn, test these predictions across four global pandemics in three different centuries: the influenza pandemics that began in 1889, 1918, 1957, and 2009. They find that in all cases, even a draconian 50 percent reduction in pre-pandemic international mobility is associated with 1–2 weeks later arrival and no detectable reduction in final mortality. The case for permanent limits on international mobility to reduce the harm of future pandemics is weak.

Originally recorded on December 4, 2020. Carolina Sanchez-Paramo, Global Director of Poverty & Equity Global Practice at the World Bank, continues her discussion after a virtual CID Speaker Series event on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated economic crisis on households, which are significant, pervasive, and worsening in some cases. The design and implementation of an effective policy response requires that decision makers have access to timely information about who is affected and how. With COVID-19 having brought traditional data collection efforts to a halt, last spring the World Bank launched an unprecedented data collection effort aimed at filling this critical information gap. As part of this effort, phone surveys are currently under implementation or preparation in over 100 countries to obtain real-time information on the socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic on households and individuals. Carolina Sanchez is the Global Director of Poverty & Equity Global Practice at the World Bank. In her talk, she drew from from this data and other analysis to present the latest evidence on the poverty and distributional impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated economic crisis.

Originally recorded on November 13th, 2020. CID Director Asim I. Khwaja joined us after CID's virtual Speaker Series event for further discussion on his research proposal for governments to face the challenges of COVID-19 faster and better, using the Smart Containment with Active Learning (SCALE) strategy. SCALE is an active learning strategy that tests and refines policy in real-time through a context-specific approach, according to the local prevalence of COVID-19. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments face a difficult tradeoff, particularly in developing countries. Government officials must decide either to keep their economies open and risk thousands of lives or implement a lockdown and risk economic collapse, which may also result in many non-COVID related deaths. Even worse they must make these decisions without knowing what the real tradeoff between them is. Lockdowns hit low-income countries especially hard. Larger informal workforces mean newly vulnerable populations are harder to target for support. Chains of food production and distribution are more fragile. With many people living on the margins of starvation, a higher prevalence of disease, and poor healthcare, non COVID related morbidity risks are high. The government also has limited money and public capacity to rely upon. ---- To learn more about SCALE, please visit CID's website: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/cid/publications/smart-containment-with-active-learning

Originally recorded on November 20, 2020 Jenny Perlman Robinson and Molly Curtiss joined us at CID's virtual Speaker Series event and sat down with us for further discussion on their work on scaling and education at the Center for Universal Education(CUE), Brookings Institution. Despite growing evidence on what works to improve access and quality in education, the world continues to face a global learning crisis, with 258 million children already out of school and 617 million children and adolescents in school but not learning the basics even before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools around the globe. While there are many initiatives working to address this challenge at a small-scale, they often do not translate into the large-scale, systemic change required. Since 2014, the Millions Learning project, led by the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at the Brookings Institution, has examined how and under what conditions education policies and programs have gone to scale in developing contexts. Drawing upon literature and case studies from around the world, the 2016 report, Millions Learning: Scaling up quality education in developing countries, identified 14 core ingredients that, in different combinations depending on the context, contribute to scaling effective practices and approaches that improve learning. Now in the second phase of the project, CUE is implementing Real-time Scaling Labs, an action research project undertaken in partnership with local institutions and governments in several countries to support, learn from, and document the scaling process in real-time. The ultimate goal of these labs is to support initiatives as they deepen and expand while simultaneously gaining deeper insight into how policymakers, civil society, and the private sector can most effectively work together to bring about large-scale transformation in the quality of children’s learning and their development. This presentation will share key insights and lessons learned from the Millions Learning project to date, including the key drivers of scaling impact in education and common scaling barriers, alongside illustrative examples from the Real-time Scaling Labs currently underway. Jenny Perlman Robinson is senior fellow at the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at the Brookings Institution where she leads CUE’s efforts to build the evidence and produce practical guidance for scaling effective education initiatives through the Millions Learning project. Molly Curtiss is a senior research analyst at the Brookings Institution Center for Universal Education (CUE), where she has worked on the Millions Learning project since 2017.

At this week's virtual CID Speaker Series event, Catalyzing Global Leadership to Contain the Impact of COVID-19 we are joined by featured guest Peter Sands, Executive Director of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria after his appearance at the virtual JKF Jr. Forum on October 28, 2020. How do we galvanize a global response to COVID-19 that truly leaves no-one behind? So far OECD countries have mobilized over $10 trillion for their own domestic responses, but foreign aid to low and middle countries remains broadly flat. Will we succeed in making everyone safe from COVID-19, or will we replicate what we did with HIV and tuberculosis, the two most recent big pandemics affecting humanity, which are largely eliminated as a public health threat in rich countries, but still kill millions in poor, vulnerable and marginalized communities?

At this week's virtual CID Speaker Series event we are joined by Neil Gregory, Chief Thought Leadership Officer of the International Finance Corporation or the private investment arm of the World Bank Group for a discussion moderated by Shawn Cole, a professor in the Finance Unit at Harvard Business School, where he teaches and conducts research on financial services, social enterprise, and impact investing. // Recorded virtually October 23, 2020. Impact investing in private markets could be as large as $2.1 trillion in assets under management, but only a quarter of that, $505 billion, is clearly measured for its impact, both for development impact and financial returns, according to the report Growing Impact—New Insights into the Practice of Impact Investing. Impact investing can be defined as “investments made into companies or organizations with the intent to contribute to measurable positive social or environmental impact, alongside financial returns.” This week's speaker is Neil Gregory, Chief Thought Leadership Officer of the International Finance Corporation, the private investment arm of the World Bank Group. The conversation moderator is Shawn Cole, a professor in the Finance Unit at Harvard Business School, where he teaches and conducts research on financial services, social enterprise, and impact investing. Neil is going to speak on The Operating Principles for Impact Management, launched in April 2019 to provide a framework for investors to ensure that impact considerations are purposefully integrated throughout the investment life cycle. The Impact Principles bring greater discipline and transparency to the impact investing market, requiring annual disclosure statements and independent verification of Signatories' impact management systems and processes. As the number of Signatories continues to grow, these asset managers, asset owners, Multilateral Development Banks and Development Finance Institutions have become a collaborative community, working together to shape the future of impact investing. Neil Gregory is Chief Thought Leadership Officer of the International Finance Corporation, the private investment arm of the World Bank Group. He has held a range of senior strategy and management roles at IFC, including research, business planning, investment and advisory functions. He was previously Adviser to the UK Executive Director of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and an Economic Adviser to the UK Government. He has extensive work experience in South Asia, China, Africa and the Caribbean. A British national, Neil has MA and MSc degrees in Economics from Cambridge and Oxford and an MBA from Georgetown.

On this week's Speaker Series virtual event, we were joined by George Gray Molina, Chief Economist at UN Development Programme's Global Policy Bureau. COVID-19 and the response to the pandemic is driving millions of informal sector and self-employed workers into poverty. George Gray Molina discussed the findings of a recent UNDP brief that provides estimates of a temporary basic income for all poor and vulnerable people in the developing world. // Recorded virtually on October 9, 2020. Speaker: ​George Gray Molina, Chief Economist at UNDP's Global Policy Bureau About the speaker: George Gray Molina is Chief Economist at UN Development Programme's Global Policy Bureau. His policy and research work focuses on poverty, inequality and policy reforms in the developing world. He has over twenty years of work experience in government, the United Nations, and academia. In his home country, Bolivia, he was head of UDAPE, the Ministry of the Presidency's economic think tank and professor of public policy at the Catholic University of Bolivia. He has also worked as Chief Economist at UNDP's Latin American and Caribbean bureau and has taught public policy at Columbia's SIPA MPA program. He holds a BA in Economics and Anthropology at Cornell University, an MPP at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, a Dphil in Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford University and has conducted post-doc research on global economic governance at Princeton and Oxford.

On this week's Speaker Series podcast, we are joined by Dr. Aditya Bahadur, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Earth Institute at Columbia University for a discussion on Urban Resilience Traps: Pivoting to A New Paradigm for Reducing Climate Risk in Cities of the Global South. Aditya sat down with CID's Executive Coordinator Rosemary Berberian for a conversation on his research and upcoming book. // Recorded on February 28, 2020 at Harvard Kennedy School. ABOUT THE TALK The fact that most of the world’s population now lives in urban areas that are facing sharply rising threats from climate change impacts means that the time for ‘business as usual’ is truly over. Since the advent of ‘urban resilience’ as a paradigm, governments and non-governmental actors have adopted certain modes of reducing risk that are no longer effective in dealing with the climate challenges that towns and cities face. Therefore, in this book we draw on empirical evidence from across the world to argue that the time is ripe to break out of these established ways of working or as we call them, ‘urban resilience traps’ and pivot to a new set of approaches that are fit for purpose. The book explores cutting edge examples of how big data and artificial intelligence can be coupled with traditional methods of collecting climate information to provide a richer and more granular picture of the challenges that cities face; it draws on emerging examples of transformative climate action to demonstrate pathways of building resilience sustainably and at scale; it illustrates the limits of formal planning and outlines approaches of engaging with informality as part of resilience; it makes a strong argument for balancing the prevailing emphasis on techno-managerial and infrastructure oriented solutions for resilience with a focus on building climate capabilities and competencies of those running cities; and finally, it argues for a shift from the singular focus on international climate finance as the primary source of funds towards a closer examination of the importance of the private sector, emerging innovative finance mechanisms and public budgets as sources of finance for building resilience at scale. ABOUT THE SPEAKER Dr. Aditya Bahadur is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York where he is writing a book on urban resilience. Previously he served as the Regional Programme Development Manager with the UK Government funded Action on Climate Today Programme (2016-2019) based at Oxford Policy Management. He has 12 years of experience in research, evaluation and practice of disaster risk reduction, climate change and development. In the past he served as the Research Coordinator of the BRACED Programme (one of the world's largest community level resilience building initiatives, running across 9 countries). He has also advised IFAD, the Hewlett Foundation, the Shell Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, ActionAid and a number UN organs on pathways of climate resilient development. He has published widely on these issues including in highly regarded academic journals. His work has been cited over a thousand times, including by the IPCC and he is a contributing author to the forthcoming IPCC assessment report (AR6). He completed his undergraduate studies at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University and has an MA and a PhD in Development Studies (focus on climate change resilience) from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK. Aditya was granted a Fellowship by the Royal Geographical Society (FRGS) in 2014 and the World Social Science Fellowship in 2015. He was Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute (2013-2016) and has been awarded the Fulbright-Kalam Postdoctoral Climate Fellowship in 2018.

On this week's Speaker Series podcast, we are joined by Marla Spivack, Research Fellow at CID’s Building State Capability program, and the Research Manager of the Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) program where she leads an array of research activities focused on synthesizing the findings of RISE country team work. Marla sat down with CID Student Ambassador Emma Cameron to discuss her research on Diagnosing Education Systems following her talk at the CID Speaker Series. // Recorded on February 21, 2020 at Harvard Kennedy School. The rapid expansion of schooling is one of international development’s most remarkable achievements. In nearly every country the average child can expect to complete basic schooling. At the same time, in many developing countries, more than half of children complete primary school without mastering basic reading and math skills. Despite laudable progress on schooling, much of the world faces a learning crisis. Large-scale efforts to address the symptoms of this crisis often take the form of “more” – pushing children to spend more years in school, providing more inputs, and spending more money – and have failed to produce significant learning gains. More of the same isn’t working, highlighting the need for systemic change. Systems change will require moving beyond identifying symptoms of the learning crisis towards articulating a diagnostic characterization of its causes. This talk will make the case for systems analysis and outline a new approach to education systems diagnostics, rooted in an accountability framework. We argue that this approach can explain systems’ poor performance, identify priority areas for reform, and suggest principals for effective intervention to make meaningful progress on national learning goals. ABOUT THE SPEAKER Marla Spivack is a Research Fellow at CID’s Building State Capability program, and the Research Manager of the Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) program. She leads an array of research activities focused on synthesizing the findings of RISE country team work. Prior to joining CID, she worked on social protection, rural development, and micro-credit programs with government agencies and the World Bank in a range of contexts including India, Mexico, and Zambia. She has also contributed to work on migration and development with researchers at the Center for Global Development. She holds a Masters in Public Administration in International Development (MPA/ID) from the Harvard Kennedy School and a BA in Economics from Tufts University. Learn more about Marla's work at: https://www.riseprogramme.org/people/marla-spivack