Devex Podcasts Devex

This week we discuss the establishment of the Africa Club by the African Union, an initiative that the continent’s leaders hope will drive reform of the global financial architecture. With African states currently spending more on debt repayments than they are on health care or climate action, the goal is for the alliance to leverage more funding for global development efforts.

On the topic of Africa, we also reported on a gathering of African leaders who outlined their funding priorities for the International Development Association, the World Bank's fund for the lowest-income countries. From building climate resilience to greater energy and digital access, we examine why IDA is such an important tool for countries in the global south.

We also break down leaked documents from the European Commission that outline its development vision for the next five years. To almost nobody’s surprise, it appears as though the EU is planning to pursue a foreign aid agenda based on its own economic interests rather than prioritizing issues linked to poverty and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. And like the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is struggling to meet its localization objectives, the EU also faces issues around staffing that affect its ability to carry out effective aid delivery.

To analyze these stories, Devex President and Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar sits down with Bidjan Nashat, managing director of Aequitas Human Capital, and Senior Reporter Adva Saldinger for this week’s edition of our podcast series.

Sign up to the Devex Newswire and our other newsletters:
https://www.devex.com/account/newsletters

IDA, or International Development Association is the world bank’s fund for the poorest countries. IDA provides grants and low-cost loans that countries can use for a variety of needs from health to education to infrastructure. This year it's up for replenishment and so the bank is going to donors to ask for a new influx of capital.

In this episode, we speak to Dirk Reinnerman, the Director of the IDA Resource Mobilization and IBRD Corporate Finance at the World Bank, about his pitch to donors in the IDA replenishment, and how it ties to broader bank reforms.

We also hear from Garghee Ghosh, the president of global advocacy and policy at the Gates Foundation about what makes IDA unique, and Serah Makka, the Africa Executive director at the ONE Campaign.

In this episode of the Devex Book Club podcast, President and Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar sits down with Microsoft's Juan M. Lavista Ferres to talk about how he got his start with computer science, what AI can do (and what it can’t), and how Beluga whales can help detect war crimes in Syria.

Juan M. Lavista Ferres got his start with AI for good in an unlikely way: He really didn’t want to go hiking.

While working at Microsoft running randomized control experiments, Ferres had a colleague who was raising money for research on sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, to which he had lost a child. The campaign involved climbing the Kilimanjaro mountain — decidedly a no-go for Ferres.

Ferres didn’t want to climb a mountain, but he did want to contribute to his friend’s cause. So rather than lacing up his hiking boots, he got together with a group of colleagues to analyze the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s cohort-linked birth/infant death dataset, an open-source dataset that’s logged tens of thousands of SIDS cases in the United States.

Using machine learning models, Ferres and his colleagues were able to manipulate the vast amount of data in ways that had never been done before, revealing new links between risk factors in infants and SIDS. It was through this effort that Ferres realized how powerful artificial intelligence could be for solving some of the world’s most intractable problems.

For many of us, AI means asking ChatGPT for recipe suggestions or, more darkly, ruminating on the possibility that the machines will soon eclipse human intelligence. But “AI for Good,” both the name of Ferres’s book and the lab he directs at Microsoft, demonstrate the enormous power of AI to improve the world as we know it.

In this episode of the Devex Book Club podcast, President and Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar sits down with Ferres to talk about how he got his start with computer science, what AI can do (and what it can’t), and how beluga whales can help detect war crimes in Syria.

Last week we were the media partner at the Global Inclusive Growth Summit hosted by the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth. The conference focused on how access to financial services are key to helping drive global development in low- and middle-income countries.

During one of the events, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley stressed the importance of debt restructuring in order to help low- and middle-income countries overcome health and climate change challenges. We discuss the value of cash transfers for building resilience to crises by providing money to those in need quickly and efficiently, as well as how they can help increase financial inclusion globally.

We also published a story on Grant Assistant, an AI tool supporting its users in the writing grant applications. From speeding up the process of navigating the paperwork to helping local and smaller organizations access USAID grants, we discuss the tool’s potential impact on the global development sector.

This week, the U.S. Congress passed a bill, which would unlock around $9.2 billion in humanitarian aid. We contemplate what this means for USAID and where the money could go.

To dig into these stories, Devex Managing Editor Anna Gawel sits down with Yolande Wright, vice president of partnerships at GiveDirectly, and Devex Senior Reporter Michael Igoe for the latest episode of our weekly podcast series.

Sign up to the Devex Newswire and our other newsletters:
https://www.devex.com/account/newsletters

As finance ministers and central bank governors from the G20 nations concluded their recent meetings, concerns over the pace and stability of global economic recovery took center stage. In an exclusive conversation with Achim Steiner, the Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), key insights emerged regarding the discussions surrounding coordination, the global financial architecture, and pressing challenges facing developing economies.