Devex Podcasts

This week we are in Antalya, Turkey, for the 31st United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP31 — and bring you insight into how it is on the ground, including a commute that can take up to three hours, standstill traffic, and severe logistical bottlenecks making it difficult to access the venue. With the United Kingdom as the only member of the Group of Seven advanced economies with a head o...

In this special edition episode of This Week in Global Development, sponsored by IDRC, Devex Executive Editor Kate Warren hosts Julie Delahanty, president of IDRC. and Margarita Gómez, executive director of Southern Voice, to discuss the shift away from traditional donor-recipient models toward equitable, co-created research partnerships. As cross-border challenges — from climate change and diseas...

For decades, international development has gravitated toward tangible interventions that produce quantifiable results: Specialized clinics, diagnostic machinery, donated pharmaceuticals, and targeted vertical programs designed to eliminate specific diseases. Yet the most sophisticated medical supplies remain useless without trained personnel, as Seed Global Health CEO Dr. Vanessa Kerry points out....

Across the global development landscape, the accelerating demand for critical transition minerals such as copper, nickel, lithium, and cobalt presents both a massive economic opportunity and a complex security challenge. However, moving past raw commodity extraction to deliver measurable, population-level energy resilience and value retention amid geopolitical supply chain disruptions is rarely a...

This week, we take a look at the results of the U.S. midterm elections, in which the Democratic Party flipped control of the Senate and Congress. We explore the results’ implications for the global development sector and how they could potentially impact the country’s approach to foreign assistance, including which key discussion points to keep an eye on. On the topic of the U.S. foreign aid, the...

In this special episode of This Week in Global Development sponsored by the Lipman Family Prize, Kate Warren, Devex executive vice president and executive editor, sits down with Kaushik Kappagantulu, co-founder of Kheyti, and Thabo Lenneiye, former prize committee member and inaugural managing director of the Carl H. Goldsmith Sustainable Agriculture Fund at Penn’s Kleinman Center for Energy Polic...

When former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios looks at the recent dismantling of the agency he once led, he sees both a national security crisis and a bitter irony. While Natsios believes U.S. foreign aid was due for a major overhaul, he blames a combination of pressures from outside the agency for undermining America’s commitment to long-term development. It was not the agency’s own failings tha...

Kanika Bahl has experience in both the world of frontier AI and the work of addressing global poverty. Until earlier this year, she led Evidence Action, which has delivered health interventions to hundreds of millions of people, and served as a founding member of Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust. When Bahl considered where to focus next, she weighed a role in AI safety. Instead, she chose anoth...

This week we learned that Dr. Mark Dybul will take over The Global Fund amid significant changes in global health, including declining traditional foreign aid and calls for institutions to consolidate their work. Having already led The Global Fund between 2013 and 2017, Dybul returns to the institution at a pivotal moment. We discuss what his appointment could mean for the future trajectory of the...

If a Washington, D.C., think tank publishes a voluminous policy paper, but barely anyone reads it, does it have an impact? Not really, according to Todd Moss, long-time development think tank leader and founder of the Energy for Growth Hub. Moss, who joined Devex’s Theory of Change podcast, sees a glaring mismatch between many organizations that claim to be in the business of informing policy deci...

In a live episode of Global Progress in the AI Era, Shalina Wadhwani discussed what Wadhwani AI has learned from building tools with governments — and what she hopes a new generation of AI philanthropists will fund. Shalina Wadhwani spent years working at digital health startups before joining the family office her father, Sunil Wadhwani, had built. Now, as the next-gen philanthropist assumes lead...

As governments face growing pressure to modernize public services and rebuild citizen trust, artificial intelligence offers new opportunities to improve service delivery. But turning AI experimentation into measurable, citizen-centered impact requires more than new technology. It calls for strong implementation, cross-sector collaboration, and a clear focus on human needs and accountability. In th...

This week, we take a look at the latest in the U.N. secretary-general race. In the latest informal straw poll to gauge support for the next U.N. secretary-general, Costa Rican diplomat Rebeca Grynspan secured the nine Security Council votes needed to advance but faced opposition from two permanent members — meaning the threat of a veto remains. The race is far from over, as new candidates can stil...

What happens when an organization built on maximum cost-effectiveness discovers that one of its flagship programs isn't delivering the results it promised? For Evidence Action, the answer was clear — if uncomfortable: follow the data, own the mistakes, and scale back. In a recent episode of Devex’s Theory of Change podcast, Evidence Action’s new CEO, Danielle Bayer, unpacked the nonprofit organiza...

Haiti has spent years dominating international headlines almost exclusively through the lens of political crisis and humanitarian emergency. But behind the headlines lies a resilient ecosystem of local organizations that continue to drive change. Recorded live at Devex Impact House in New York City on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, this special episode of the This Week in Global Devel...

This week we are coming to you live from Devex Impact House, our summit on the sidelines of the World Bank and IMF annual meetings. We unpack the bank’s push for “small AI” in developing countries to avoid the considerable costs of building data center architecture, while weighing the risks of deepening technological dependency on the U.S. and China. Alongside exploring the institution’s drive for...

The recent history of U.S. foreign aid has been dominated by budget cuts, institutional dismantling, and massive workforce reductions. Against this backdrop, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, feels less like a template for modern foreign policy and more like a relic of an unrecognizable past. In an era defined by political fragmentation and widespread skepticism of go...

This week, the Devex team is on the ground in Berlin for the World Health Summit. We explore how this year’s event stands apart from previous iterations and what makes it distinct from the World Health Assembly. During the conversation, we explore a major theme of the event: the intersection of global health and security. With geopolitical tensions rising, we examine how organizations are struggli...

In this special edition of the This Week in Global Development podcast, produced in partnership with the Global Disability Fund, Devex co-founder and Executive Vice President Alan Robbins sits down with the fund’s director Ola Abualghaib for a candid, personal conversation about why disability inclusion keeps getting treated as an add-on and what it would actually take to build it into the system...

At the World Health Summit in Berlin, leaders are aligning around critical pillars including Health Equity and Future-Ready Health Systems. Public health initiatives globally face intensified opposition from well-funded commercial interests, widespread health disinformation, and mounting pushback against health workers. For the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, this conversation is essential: having...

More than 90% of global vision loss is preventable or treatable with low-cost interventions such as cataract surgery or prescription glasses. Yet 1.1 billion people worldwide currently lack access to basic eye care — a number projected to double by 2050 without strategic action. In this special edition episode of the This Week in Global Development podcast, sponsored by The Fred Hollows Foundation...

The California-based drone delivery company Zipline made waves last year when it secured a $150 million pay-for-performance grant from the U.S. State Department to scale up its operations in Africa. That announcement came just months after the State Department took control of the U.S. government’s foreign aid portfolio in the wake of USAID’s dismantling, and the deal with Zipline was portrayed as...

This week we are at Building Bridges, a conference aiming to bring different stakeholders together to build investable solutions to global challenges. We discuss the key topics at the summit, including how the private sector can be effectively engaged in social impact and making financial instruments accessible for smaller businesses. We are also looking ahead to the World Health Summit, which wil...

Across the global development landscape, artificial intelligence promises to redefine how health, education, and social protection services are delivered. However, moving past small-scale piloting to deliver measurable, population-level impact amid tightening budgets is rarely a pure tech challenge — it is an organizational and human one. In this special edition episode of the This Week in Global...

The fundamental question of how development and growth are financed is undergoing a profound transformation. Over the course of a series of original essays and op-eds, The Next Frontier (https://pages.devex.com/thenextfrontier.html) – a Devex series in partnership with the Children's Investment Fund Foundation – has mapped a rapidly changing, pluralistic financing ecosystem shaped by philanthropy,...