Behind The Noise with Adam Bornstein Adam Bornstein

This week’s podcast which features Tom McCormack, Ethiopia Country Director for Mennonite Economic Development Associates (or MEDA) whose mission, since 1953, has been to create business solutions that reduce poverty. In Ethiopia, Tom focuses on increasing sustainable employment and income generating opportunities in agriculture for women in Amhara region of Ethiopia.

Tom is also the co-founder of Addis Ababa Homebrew Association, a platform that looks to develop and support agriculture value chains through the promotion of locally grown material used in beer making from Ethiopian small holder farmers.

Tom and I discuss where his passion for beer has landed him, the multi-billion dollar value chain that has come to support the beer industry, the development case for entrepreneurial small hold farmers, and the need to completely rethink how aid and development organisations program interventions in highly fluid and unpredictable environments.

If you have questions or comments of this podcast please tweet us at @DRCInnovation or @Adambornstein




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This week’s podcast features Lawrence Camp, former Director and now Senior Adviser with USAID’s Private Capital and Microenterprise Office  which is part of the Bureau for Economic Growth, Education and Environment.  

We get into: (1)  how developmental finance has changed over the past 25-30 years, (2) the role of alternative financing structures (i.e. blended finance and pay for performance) in a development context, (3) the evolving role of development banks as catalytic funders rather than principal funders, (4) how to facilitate coordination between development and humanitarian, and (5) the future of development assistance.

I actually had a ton of questions for Lawrence but we ran out time. It good show. Hope you enjoy it.

Note: Lawrence's views do not represent those of USAID, he did this podcast speaking on his own behalf, and not the Agency's.

If you have questions or comments of this podcast please tweet us at @DRCInnovation or @Adambornstein

Articles highlighted:


Structural factors in the economic reforms of China, Eastern Europe, and the Former Soviet Union (Jeffrey Sachs, 1994)
THE NEW DYNAMICS OF FINANCIAL GLOBALIZATION (McKinsey, 2017)
Pay for Results in Development A Primer for Practitioners (USAID, 2018)




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Our special guest this week is Sofie Blakstad, CEO and founder of HiveOnline, who seeks to help financially excluded entrepreneurs thrive, is author of Blockchain: Gateway to Sustainability Linked Bonds, an avid cyclist, a self proclaimed opera nut, and fake Dane. You can contact Sofie at here.

If you have questions or comments of this podcast please tweet us at @DRCInnovation or @Adambornstein

Articles highlighted:


The new science on AA and 12-step facilitation




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Our special guest this week is William Hynes, Head of The New Approaches to Economic Challenges Unit at OECD. 

We originally recorded this podcast on the 11 February 2020. 

William and I discussion how traditional economic theory, which strives for market optimisation, inherently overlooks and fails to address social and environmental resilience. We get into new modalities such as complexity and chaos theory, agent-based modelling, and the recognition that we should be thinking about the resilience of economies/societies rather than the triggers. I think this last point may challenge the growing interest (and investment) in trigger (or forecast) based humanitarian interventions.

If you have questions or comments please tweet us at @DRCInnovation or @Adambornstein

Articles highlights:


Currency experts fear IMF no longer has firepower to act as world’s lender of last resort (The Telegraph, 9/2/2020)
Beyond Growth (OECD, 9/2019) 




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Today’s podcast looks at the impact of pandemics on migrants and vulnerable communities and specifically in the context of the evolving dynamics between Africa and China. Our special guests include Dr. Erin Sorrell and Dr. Claire Standley from Georgetown University's Centre for Global Health Science and Security.  

This podcast is sponsored by the Danish Red Cross Innovative Finance and System Change Team. If you want more information about the Team please tweet us @DRCInnovation or @AdamBornstein.

Learn more about what the Danish Red Cross and its work around migration and refugee you can click here.

Click here for Prof. Sorrell's profile

Click her for Prof. Standley's profile




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I'm joined by my friends Will Ruddick (Grassroots Economics Foundation) and Nick Williams (Sempo) outside the Boma Inn in Nairobi, Kenya, today, having just spent the past 12 hours hashing out 12-month game plan for the Community Inclusion Currencies project we're working on. A couple Tuskers in and the conversation lent its way toward the viability and probability of a US FED Digital Currency (or Central Bank Digital Currency).  If you are interested in some additional information, check out these articles:


Designing Central Bank Digital Currencies (IMF, Nov 2019)
Fed looking into central bank digital coins, Brainard says (Reuters, Feb 2020)
The current landscape of central bank digital currencies (Brookings, Dec 2019)




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