Ideas in Development

If every development economist stopped their research tomorrow, would Africa's growth rate in 2040 look any different?
Ken Opalo, associate professor at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service and author of the Substack An Africanist Perspective, joins Oliver Hanney to argue that the constraint on African growth is not knowing what to do but knowing how to get it done. He also explains why Kenya's evidence boom has coincided with declining policymaking, and what happens when policymakers outsource their ambitions.
In this wide-ranging conversation we cover:

Why the SDGs are the wrong goal for an ambitious minister.

How narrow evidence reshaped education policy in Tanzania and Kenya.

The craft of policymaking.

When a policymaker should actually listen to a development economist.

How to learn the right lessons from growth success stories.

What the third wave of philanthropy should fund.

Ideas in Development is a VoxDev podcast on economic policy and research. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, and read the full write-up on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/

GiveDirectly started out as a small nimble team founded by PhD economists, who had a novel approach to ending poverty – just give cash. But they are no longer the new kids on the block, and have been scaling their operations rapidly in recent years, a trend that could intensify if the third wave of American philanthropy materialises.
That’s a huge opportunity, but the potential of operating across entire countries is a radically different proposition. So what does an evidence-driven organisation research when it's trying to go from moving millions a year to billions?
Caitlin Tulloch, Senior Director for Research, Learning and Product at GiveDirectly, joins Oliver Hanney for a wide-ranging conversation on cash transfers at scale. We cover running a research portfolio like the treasury, the macro forecasting work around a new Malawi project, the trade-off between fraud and reach, building a global emergency response capability, and the politics of putting a lot of cash into someone else's economy.
Ideas in Development is a VoxDev podcast on economic policy and research. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, and read the full write-up on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/

The ultra-poor graduation approach has one of the strongest evidence bases in development. Almost all of that evidence comes from NGO delivery – but true scale typically requires government delivery.
Stephanie Brockerhoff, Director for Programme Design and Impact at BRAC's Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative, joins Oliver Hanney to explain why anti-poverty pilots often fall apart at handover, how BRAC partners with governments, and the bottlenecks to scale that remain.
Ideas in Development is a VoxDev podcast on economic policy and research. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, and read the full write-up on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/

This interview was conducted by Exporters Without Borders (ESF), which incubates entrepreneurs to start new export industries in low and middle income countries. The video version of this podcast, an accompanying article, and their ongoing research are at exporterswithoutborders.com

Thomas Kehler started his career teaching at a New England prep school, before he landed in Uganda, where he started guiding fishing tours of Lake Albert. Here he came to know a young Joseph Nye – later a key architect of US foreign policy – who got Thomas thinking about development economics, and how to have impact with his career.
In the decades to follow, Thomas would go on to start two export industries from close to nothing. Between them, Colombian cut flowers and Chilean farmed salmon are now worth ~$9 billion a year and employ over 300,000 people. On a combination of willpower and luck, he managed to solve one of the biggest open questions in development economics – how countries enter new industries, and capture the jobs that come with them – twice.
Read more on Substack: https://exporterswithoutborders.substack.com/p/how-to-start-an-export-boom

What should development economists be working on – and how does their work actually reach the people making decisions?
Rachel Glennerster, President of the Center for Global Development, whose career spans the research and policy sides of development, joins Oliver Hanney to discuss her proposal for a radical simplification of aid, why she feels the micro-macro debate is largely a false one, the messy but vital process of building consensus, and what impactful careers look like in economics.
In this wide-ranging conversation, we cover the Smart Buys evidence panels in education and how cross-disciplinary consensus gets built, her three-box framework for evidence-based policymaking, why AI tools move too fast for RCT-based procurement, and what it would take to fix development economics' concentration problem.
Read the full show notes on the Ideas in Development Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/