Rethinking Development Podcast

Latest Episodes:

2.12 Constructing and Reconstructing Power Jun 22, 2020

Show notes

Qi Cui has over 18 years of experience as a senior professional in leading global health programs. She has especially worked to develop alliances with multi-sectoral partners to catalyze investment in health for higher impact and to identify and mitigate mission critical risks. She is currently the Senior Fund Portfolio Manager at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and focuses on managing a portfolio of infections disease resilience and health system strengthening programs in the Philippines, Cambodia and Thailand. Previously she served as Program Director at Marie Stopes International in China, where her work focused on sexual and reproductive health and rights for adolescents and young people as well as HIV/AID prevention. She speaks to us about working in China on taboo topics with stigmatized groups at a time when NGO’s where a new concept, her decision to pause her work in program implementation to get more training, her work at the Global Fund, actualizing country ownership and local governance structures, implementing robust and transparent financing measures, mutual accountability, promoting dialogue and public debate, gender discrimination, microaggressions, fluid power dynamics, gendered leadership stereotypes, measuring progress over time, the coronavirus pandemic, the need for common decency and much more. She joins us from Geneva, Switzerland.

2.11 China, Africa and the Toolbox of Development Jun 15, 2020

Show notes

Hannah Ryder is an economist by training, a former diplomat, and has close to 20 years of experience in international development. She is the founder and CEO of Development Reimagined, a pioneering international development consultancy firm and the first Kenyan wholly foreign owned enterprise in Beijing. Development Reimagined has built a niche in providing strategic advice and practical support to African, Chinese and international stakeholders on issues from the Belt and Road Initiative, to Africa’s growth markets, green growth and China’s foreign aid. Hannah also sits on the Executive Board of the British Chamber of Commerce in China and has played various advisory roles for the UN. She speaks to us about working with the UK government as an economist, disparities in capacities of global north and global south negotiating teams, the challenge of country ownership, centring developing country perspectives, the resource limitations of the UN, establishing Reimagining Development, China-Africa relations, debt as one tool in development, going beyond lazy solutions, working with and pushing the private sector, systemic change vs tinkering at the edges and and much more. She joins us from Beijing, China.

2.10 Swedish Development Cooperation Jun 08, 2020

Show notes

Magnus Saemundsson is currently the Senior Education Specialist at SIDA, the Swedish governmental agency for development cooperation, based in Cambodia. He initially worked as a secondary school teacher and lecturer in Sweden before transitioning to the Swedish Ministry of Education. He joined SIDA in 2003 and over the years has been serving as a Senior Education Expert in the Nordic region, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Laos, Cambodia and other countries. His work with SIDA Cambodia has focused on supporting the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport in improving quality assurance systems in learning and teaching, creating the first multi-donor trust fund to support capacity development at all levels of the education sector, supporting skills training programmes, through private-public partnerships and much more. He speaks to us about the historical and problematic ideas around development work, the Swedish approach to development cooperation, systematic and behaviour change, long term donor investment, the challenge of corruption, building trust, institutional memory residing with local staff and partners, the importance of communication in leadership, the power of knowledge, the role of art and culture, rethinking development support in the context of the pandemic and much more. He joins us from Phnom Phen, Cambodia.

2.9 A Whole of the River Approach: Science and Sustainable Development Jun 01, 2020

Show notes

Professor Shahbaz Khan is the Director of the UNESCO Regional Science Bureau for Asia and the Pacific and also serves as the UNESCO Representative for Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Timor-Leste. His key leadership and management areas at UNESCO have included science capacity building and policy advice across the region. He has coordinated key programs such as Water Education for Sustainable Development, Ecohydrology, water and ethics and many others. He is a founding fellow of the Academy of Engineering and Technology of the Developing World. He previously served as the Research Director of the Irrigated Systems and Rural Water Use areas of The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia and as Professor of Hydrology and Director of the International Centre of Water at the Charles Sturt University in Australia where he conducted policy research on the nexus of water, energy and food. He also continues to serve as Adjunct Professor at numerous universities in Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan and China. He speaks to us about some of his scientific research, the importance of understanding the perspective of different stakeholders, data sharing across national boundaries, having tangible impact on the lives of beneficiaries, using a whole of the river and a whole of society approach, social inequalities and the environment, public-private partnerships, mobilizing all sectors of society, UNESCO’s COVID-19 related work and much more. He joins us from Canberra, Australia.

2.8 Championing Mental Health May 25, 2020

Show notes

Devora Kestel is a senior global mental health policy expert with more than twenty-five years of international experience in Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America working on implementing and advising governments on national policies related to mental health systems. In 2000 she joined the WHO as a Mental Health Officer in post-war Kosovo and later served as WHO Representative in Albania. In both countries, she worked closely with the Ministries of Health to help establish comprehensive community-based mental health systems. In 2007 she joined the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) where she first worked as the Mental Health Advisor for the Caribbean Countries, and then at the headquarters in Washington DC, providing technical cooperation in the mental health field to the entire region of the Americas. In 2015 she became the Unit Chief for Mental Health and Substance Abuse and since 2019 has been serving as WHO's Director of Mental Health and Substance Abuse. She speaks to us about outdated views of mental health issues and mental health reforms, her transition from clinical practice to public policy, strategies and tools to advocate for increased government investment in mental health, fighting against the stigmas associated with both mental health and substance abuse, the building back better approach, the bureaucratic challenges of working in UN agencies, country level vs regional level work, the presence of corporate lobbying in the sector, the importance of having a more inclusive global representation in initiatives, mental health as the shadow pandemic behind the coronavirus pandemic and much more. She joins us from Geneva, Switzerland.

2.7 Shifting the Power: Decolonizing Aid and Development May 18, 2020

Show notes

Arbie Baguios is currently a Programme Quality and Accountability Specialist at ActionAid UK. He studied development studies at the Ateneo de Manila University and the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has worked with Save the Children, the British Red Cross, ActionAid and others in the Philippines and the UK with missions to other countries. In Sept 2019 he founded Aid Re-Imagined, an initiative to help usher the evolution of aid towards justice and effectiveness through deep, radical, and evidence-based reflection and research. He has drafted a “re-imagined aid model” in a bid to offer a framework for designing, implementing and evaluating aid projects that are just and effective. He speaks to us about how development is taught in different countries, decolonizing project management tools such as the logframe, power dynamics amongst donors and agencies, pushing back against the status quo, audit culture, working in crisis mode, being more reflective, ActionAid's feminist principles, accountability as the responsible use of power, the new frontiers of the aid and development sector, his Aid-Re-Imagined project, and much more. He joins us from London, UK.

2.6 Financing at the Nexus of Gender and Climate May 11, 2020

Show notes

Dr. Jeanette Gurung is a forester and gender equality and climate expert with many years of experience in the international development sector. She is the founder and Executive Director of WOCAN – Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management, a global network with over 1,300 members in 113 countries to support capacity building for women’s leadership and empowerment. She is the innovator of the W+ Standard ™ to measure, quantify and monetize impacts of projects on women, through the use of a results-based financing approach, providing ways for companies, governments, organizations and individuals to confidently drive and measure social and economic empowerment for women. She has managed projects for the Asian Development Bank (Harnessing Climate Change Mitigation to Benefit Women) and other UN and bilateral development agencies and led and served on numerous committees such as The Forest Dialogue Steering Committee, Gender Expert of the CGIAR Participatory Research and Gender Analysis Program, Advisor to the Forest Stewardship Council, FAO’s Policy Committee on Incentives for Ecosystem Services, and UNFCCC’s Expert Group on Gender and Climate and more. She speaks to us about being a female forester, pursuing gender mainstreaming in male dominated organizations, her Phd thesis on the same topic, the devaluation of women's labour in natural resource management, being motivated by frustration, innovating new standards, the struggle for financing gender and climate projects, working across sectors and silos, inclusive feminine leadership, climate reliance, nature based solutions, the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic and much more. She joins us from Hawaii, USA.

2.5 Learning and Accountability May 04, 2020

Show notes

Ann-Murray Brown is Jamaican and lived and studied in South Korea for some years before adopting The Netherlands as her second home. She is a seasoned monitoring and evaluation expert and has been involved in consultancies funded and implemented by the United Nations, the European Commission and others. She has conducted and commissioned many evaluations and designed Results-Based Management (RBM) systems to measure performance of programmes implemented in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Burundi, Colombia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Jamaica, Sierra Leone and several countries in Asia. The main focus of her work is Evaluation Capacity Building (ECB). Using visual storytelling, she translates technical M&E concepts and jargon into accessible language and conducts virtual and onsite workshops to this end. She speaks to us about monitoring and evaluation capacity building, participatory and bottoms up approaches, working as a civil servant, going beyond the idea of evaluation as a policing role, the importance of learning and accountability, having a seat at the table and representation, communities of practice, adaptive management and the COVID-19 pandemic, learning from mistakes, donor requirements, the different priorities of NGO vs private sector clients, applying a gendered lens, and much more. She joins us from Amsterdam, Netherlands.

2.4 Doing the Right Thing: Whole World Discussions on Humanitarian Ethics Apr 27, 2020

Show notes

Hugo Slim is a leading authority on the ethics of war and humanitarian action with a career that combines academia, diplomacy and operations. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC) at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. He was Head of Policy and Humanitarian Diplomacy at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from 2015-2020 and Chief Scholar at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue from 2003-2007. From 1994-2003 he worked as a frontline humanitarian for Save the Children and the United Nations in Morocco, Sudan, Ethiopia and the Palestinian Territories. He is the author of 30 refereed journal papers and several books, including: Killing Civilians: Method, Madness and Morality in War (Hurst/OUP, 2007) and Humanitarian Ethics: A Guide to the Morality of Aid in War and Disaster (Hurst/OUP 2015). He speaks to us about human rights and human duties, humanitarian diplomacy, working in academia, moral dilemmas, protection of civilians, the Geneva Conventions, the importance of public deliberations, localizing aid, resilience and empowerment, ethical leadership, rich world vs whole world discussions, the COVID-19 pandemic and much more. He joins us from Oxford, UK.

2.3 Youth Participation in Development Apr 20, 2020

Show notes

Pelumi Fadare is a polyglot who speaks nine languages. Her various professional experiences include working at the Spanish Embassy in Belgium, a consultancy with CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, where she supported the resourcing of young changemakers from the global south by designing and launching a pilot program called the Youth Action Lab and a current consultancy with Plan International. She is the co-founder of the social enterprise ApplicAid, an online mentorship platform that helps students apply for grants, financial aid and other subsidized educational opportunities. She also has a YouTube channel, Ninjanspiration, devoted to providing information to youth about educational funded opportunities, such as international conferences and study abroad programs. In 2018 she was a Youth Representative at the European Youth Hearings and in 2014 was a Youth Delegate at the Many Languages, One World Youth Forum held by the United Nations Academic Impact initiative. She speaks to us about her experiences as a youth changemaker, being a global citizen, co-design and participatory processes, founding a startup, improving access to and awareness of funded education opportunities for youth, being a 'doer', her thoughts on leadership, the importance of a multi-stakeholder approach, and much more. She joins us from Brussels, Belgium.

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Rethinking Development Podcast

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected