Harvard Center for International Development

Argentina is currently facing yet another economic crisis. Eduardo Levy Yeyati, Dean of the School of Government at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, believes there are deep roots in Argentina that make the economic crisis Aristotelian in nature. There are both economic and political factors that have contributed to the current fiscal situation, which make it difficult to rectify when...

Since 2013, the Center for International Development has been collaborating with the Government of Albania to identify binding constraints to economic growth and create policy solutions to solve them. CID’s Growth Lab and Building State Capability programs have used the tools of growth diagnostics and problem driven iterative adaptation (PDIA) to help drive economic growth in the country. CID Rese...

The Other Slavery examines the system of bondage that targeted Native Americans, a system that was every bit as terrible, degrading, and vast as African slavery. Anywhere between 2.5 and 5 million Native Americans may have been enslaved throughout the hemisphere in the centuries between the arrival of Columbus and the beginning of the 20th century. And, interestingly, in contrast to African slaver...

Environmental degradation reduces the environmental capacity to meet social and ecological needs of societies, which is exacerbated by natural hazards and extreme climate events, and often intensify existing vulnerabilities. Marginalized groups in cities, particularly women and poor, are disproportionately at risk to face negative consequences of such environmental stressors. To better understand...

The majority of the world’s 450 million smallholder farmers and the 2 billion people who depend on them live in rural villages in developing countries, growing crops at close to subsistence levels to feed their families. Small changes in agricultural practices can substantially improve productivity and profitability, but farmers continue to lack the advice they need to close the yield gap and maxi...

The Building State Capability (BSC) program at CID uses the Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) approach to help organizations develop the capability to solve complex problems and to implement public policies. PDIA is a process of facilitated emergence, which focuses on problems (not solutions) and follows a step by step process (not a rigid plan) that allows for flexible learning and adapt...

At a time when 65 million people are displaced from their homes and more than 800 million people go to bed hungry every night, how can we make a real difference in tackling poverty & social injustices? Fatema Sumar has been a diplomat and development leader, working in the U.S. Senate, the U.S. State Department, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation. Currently, Fatema is Vice President of Globa...

Between 1999 and 2009, Jordan experienced a huge growth acceleration, tripling its exports and increasing income per capita by 38%. Since then, its economy has been thrown off balance, impacted by a number of external shocks that include the global financial crisis, the Arab Spring, and the Syrian Civil War. For the past year, CID has been working in the country with the goal of understanding what...

Earlier this year, thousands of Bangladesh garment workers clashed with the police as they tried to push for higher wages. One person was killed as the police fired rubber bullets and tear gas against the protesters. This is unfortunately common throughout low-end supply chains. Governments try to repress laborers in order to curb minimum wage increases and keep costs low. This week Salimah Samji,...

Salimah Samji, Building State Capability Program Director talks to Anjikwi Mshelbwala, who took the PDIA online course offered by the Building State Capability Program in the Fall of 2017. Anjikwi, an ICT Officer at ActionAid talks about his experience applying the insights from the program in his native Nigeria and describes how the learnings he got from the course have helped him solve complex d...

Over the last eight years, the Syrian Civil War has left millions of people internally displaced and many more have fled the country to protect themselves and their families. This humanitarian crisis has left the region and its people to face incredible challenges in their everyday lives. Andrew Mitchell, British Member of Parliament and former Secretary of State for International Development cons...

Following the brutal rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi in 2012, filmmaker Leslee Udwin traveled to India to examine the situation and attempt to understand what led to such a violent attack. She released her documentary “India’s Daughter” in 2015, and subsequently founded ThinkEqual, a non-profit organization with the mission to educate young children in social emotional learning to reduce...

Today on this BSC podcast, Salimah Samji, Director of the Building State Capability program at CID has a conversation with Professor Matt Andrews, Faculty Director of the Building State Capability program to discuss public policy implementation failures. To learn more about the Implementing Public Policy course, visit bit.ly/2QAnf69. To read the Public Policy Failures paper, visit bit.ly/2DWoLs5....

Across the world, people in urban rather than rural areas are more likely to support gender equality. To explain this global trend, Alice Evans has engaged with geographically diverse literature and comparative rural–urban ethnographic research from Zambia. Her research showed that people living in interconnected, heterogeneous, and densely populated areas are more likely to see women performing s...

Starting in November 2015, the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab has been engaged in economic policy research with the Government of Sri Lanka. Led by Professor Ricardo Hausmann, the team has focused on a single question: what is holding back investment in Sri Lanka – especially in new and non-traditional export-oriented sectors – and what can the government do about it? In this po...

This podcast comes from a panel discussion that took place at the Building State Capability program’s symposium on October 30th 2018. The panel discussion focused on How to Mobilize Political Elites and Citizens? as Salimah Samji, Director of the Building State Capability program, asked Alice Evans, Lecturer at Kings College London, Rakesh Rajani, Vice President of programs at Co-Impact and Lilly...

Practitioners face many challenges when diagnosing growth constraints and setting a country on a path to greater prosperity - including navigating the political context and getting good policy ideas implemented. Miguel Angel Santos, Douglas Barrios and Tim O’Brien are seasoned researchers at the Center for International Development’s Growth Lab that have worked in Jordan, Sri Lanka, Mexico, and ot...

Conducting business in fragile states can be a difficult challenge for corporations, governments, and other stakeholders alike. According to the Doing Business Indicators report by the World Bank, Afghanistan has historically been ranked near the bottom of the list. Based on economic reforms implemented by the government of Afghanistan, the country has seen significant positive improvement in this...

A contemporary challenge is inequality, which is reinforced when it’s taken for granted. But, it can be disrupted when marginalised people gain self-esteem; challenge hitherto unquestioned inequalities; and gain confidence in the possibility of social change. These ideas are illustrated with ethnographic research from Latin America, where income inequality has recently declined. By highlighting so...

Today on CID’s Research Spotlight podcast, Ghazi Mirza, graduate student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, interviews Professor Asim Khwaja, Co-Director of Evidence for Policy Design, who provides further insight on the work that he and EPoD are conducting, their “theory of change”, and the use of both quantitative and qualitative data to enrich their findings. // www.epod.cid.harvard.e...

Since 2000, a large and complex global infrastructure has emerged to help finance public health improvement in low- and middle-income countries. These institutions have helped drive historic improvements in child survival, HIV mortality, and access to modern contraception—yet serious questions have arisen about their long-term sustainability, their effects on country-led health systems, and whethe...

On this week’s podcast, Salimah Samji, Director of the Building State Capability program at CID and Tim McNaught, Building State Capability Fellow, have a conversation about the recently launched PDIAtoolkit. // download the PDIAToolkit at www.bsc.cid.harvard.edu // Interview recorded on October 24, 2018. About the PDIAtoolkit: The PDIAtoolkit is designed to guide you through the process of solvin...

The New Climate Economy’s (NCE) recently released their 2018 Report on Unlocking the Inclusive Growth Story of the 21st Century: Accelerating Climate Action in Urgent Times. The key findings of the report focus on five key economic sectors: Energy, Cities, Food and Land Use, Water, and Industry, as well as the cross-cutting issues of Finance and Just Transition. The report also highlights some exa...

Billions of dollars in cash payments are made daily in emerging and developing economies, including payment of salaries, social welfare and business transactions. The problem with these cash payments is their lack of transparency, accountability and security. Thanks to technology and connectivity, more people than ever now have access to mobile phones, the internet and cloud-based solutions. How c...

Since the end of the Second World War, the international rules-based system has been determined by developed countries with economic power who came together to form multilateral organizations like the United Nations. In today’s world, other nations with conflicting interests are challenging the foundations of the UN and this international rules-based system, making it difficult to reach consensus...