Devex Podcasts

For decades, international development has gravitated toward tangible interventions that produce quantifiable results: Specialized clinics, diagnostic machinery, donated pharmaceuticals, and targeted vertical programs designed to eliminate specific diseases. Yet the most sophisticated medical supplies remain useless without trained personnel, as Seed Global Health CEO Dr. Vanessa Kerry points out. “Shots don’t put themselves in arms,” Kerry said on Devex’s Theory of Change podcast. “You can put as much tech or as many medicines as you want into a system, but if you don’t have someone to deliver them, the system falls apart. You need someone to catch a baby; you need someone to hang a bag of blood.” Kerry outlined a critical bottleneck across global development: While sub-Saharan Africa shoulders roughly a quarter of the global disease burden, it commands barely 3% of the world’s health workforce. Kerry traced her own realization of this imbalance back to her medical training in Rwanda, where an unattended, complicated birth threw the stark absence of frontline skilled personnel into sharp relief. That formative episode inspired her to create Seed Global Health, an organization dedicated to long-term partnerships with governments to train doctors, nurses, and midwives along national priorities rather than temporary donor whims. Today, global health is facing a series of compounding crises. Accelerating climate shocks, emerging epidemics, and sweeping bilateral aid contractions threaten to roll back decades of hard-won progress. Yet Kerry, who was recently appointed WHO director-general’s special envoy for health resilience, argued that prevailing development models continue to repeat the mistake of fragmentation. Donors routinely earmark billions separately for pandemic preparedness, noncommunicable diseases, and climate adaptation, without recognizing that all three initiatives rely on the exact same clinical staff, laboratories, and supply chains. Kerry called for a shift toward systemic resilience, underpinned by country ownership. Instead of forcing finance and health ministries to juggle dozens of disjointed bilateral programs and competing reporting frameworks, Kerry argues donors must rally around a streamlined principle: “One health plan, one budget that aligns to that health plan, and one reporting metric.” In Uganda, this country-led approach to emergency medicine and triage training has cut the 24-hour mortality rate in emergency rooms by nearly 40%, Kerry said. As Silicon Valley heralds artificial intelligence as a potential leapfrog tool for low-resource health delivery, Kerry pushed for a vital dose of frontline reality. While AI algorithms and portable diagnostics hold genuine promise to empower clinicians, technology remains a multiplier — not a substitute. “You can’t multiply by zero,” Kerry warned. “If we don’t have the fundamental infrastructure and pieces in place ... it doesn’t matter how fast AI can take us. You need to have a health care worker that is holding the ultrasound.” Beyond clinical logistics, Kerry insisted that compassionate care in moments of terror or bereavement remains an irreplaceable human transaction.

Across the global development landscape, the accelerating demand for critical transition minerals such as copper, nickel, lithium, and cobalt presents both a massive economic opportunity and a complex security challenge. However, moving past raw commodity extraction to deliver measurable, population-level energy resilience and value retention amid geopolitical supply chain disruptions is rarely a pure mining challenge — it is an organizational, policy, and human one. In this special edition episode of the This Week in Global Development podcast, sponsored by the Open Society Foundations, Devex Executive Vice President and Executive Editor Kate Warren sits down with Deprose Muchena, director of Resources Futures in Africa at Open Society Foundations, and Faris Abdurrachman, executive director of Industrial Policy Lab Indonesia. Together, they unpack why resource-rich nations in the global south currently retain less than 20% of mineral value, how Indonesia’s nickel export restrictions expanded domestic processing, and how stronger ASEAN-Africa cooperation, collective bargaining, and community-centered governance can transform raw mineral wealth into shared industrial power and domestic clean energy access.

This week, we take a look at the results of the U.S. midterm elections, in which the Democratic Party flipped control of the Senate and Congress. We explore the results’ implications for the global development sector and how they could potentially impact the country’s approach to foreign assistance, including which key discussion points to keep an eye on. On the topic of the U.S. foreign aid, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, is rolling out the second tranche of a $1.8 billion funding round from the Department of State. While the 12-month initiative nearly doubles direct funding to local nonprofits, U.N. agencies are still receiving the bulk of the $756 million disbursed to date. We assess the details of the initiative and examine how the recent Democratic sweep in Congress might impact U.S. funding strategies. To dig into these stories, and others, Adva Saldinger sits down with Michael Igoe and Elissa Miolene for the latest episode of our weekly podcast series. In the sponsored segment of the podcast, hosted in partnership with The Pfizer Foundation*, Devex co-founder and Executive Vice President Alan Robbins speaks with Dr. Pearl Nanka-Bruce, country director of Jhpiego Ghana, about how community-centered innovation and local leadership are being leveraged to improve access to timely breast cancer detection, diagnosis, and care in low- and middle-income countries through The Pfizer Foundation’s Action & Impact initiative. *Founded in 1953 by Pfizer Inc. as a charitable organization, The Pfizer Foundation is a separate legal entity from Pfizer Inc. with distinct legal restrictions.

In this special episode of This Week in Global Development sponsored by the Lipman Family Prize, Kate Warren, Devex executive vice president and executive editor, sits down with Kaushik Kappagantulu, co-founder of Kheyti, and Thabo Lenneiye, former prize committee member and inaugural managing director of the Carl H. Goldsmith Sustainable Agriculture Fund at Penn’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. Together, they explore what it actually takes to turn a working solution like Kheyti’s Greenhouse-in-a-Box into policy that can scale beyond one organization and why practical, ground-level experience is crucial for shaping effective, sustainable change.

When former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios looks at the recent dismantling of the agency he once led, he sees both a national security crisis and a bitter irony. While Natsios believes U.S. foreign aid was due for a major overhaul, he blames a combination of pressures from outside the agency for undermining America’s commitment to long-term development. It was not the agency’s own failings that left it vulnerable, but a series of “clashes” between development and other power structures inside the U.S. government. Speaking on Devex’s Theory of Change podcast, he argued that the growth of the federal “counterbureaucracy” — oversight entities such as the Office of Management and Budget and rigid Federal Acquisition Regulations — paralyzed the agency long before it was formally disassembled. By forcing development officers to produce short-term quantifiable outputs and spend money rapidly, Washington made genuine, multiyear institution building nearly impossible. “What they’re asking us to do is two things which are diametrically opposed,” Natsios argued. By demanding instant statistical proof of success while berating the agency for not offloading programs to partner governments, the counterbureaucracy trapped the U.S. Agency for International Development in an impossible double bind, Natsios said. The Republican former politician led the agency from 2001 to 2006, during the George W. Bush administration. His forthcoming book, “Guns Are Not Enough: Foreign Aid in the National Interest,” provides an intellectual framework for understanding how the U.S. development bureaucracy worked — and why it often didn’t. Natsios rejected the idea that Elon Musk’s dismantling of USAID through the Department of Government Efficiency was about government effectiveness or balancing the budget. Instead, he sees it as another example of backlashes that tend to follow socioeconomic crises in American history. “All of those previous events in American history were accompanied by massive isolationist, anti-immigrant, ultranationalist, protectionist, high tariff trends in American politics,” he said. He also shared his own theory for why U.S. foreign aid efforts struggle to garner public support from Americans — and his own experience accompanying the conservative media commentator Rush Limbaugh on an eye-opening trip to Afghanistan. Looking ahead, Natsios insisted that piecemeal fixes under the U.S. State Department will fail. Instead, he called for the creation of a cabinet-level, independent department that unifies the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and global health programs into a single operational agency. Natsios sees Cold War-era breakthroughs such as the Green Revolution and South Korea's economic transformation as proof that America’s development work succeeded precisely when its mission directors had operational autonomy and field-level authority.

Kanika Bahl has experience in both the world of frontier AI and the work of addressing global poverty. Until earlier this year, she led Evidence Action, which has delivered health interventions to hundreds of millions of people, and served as a founding member of Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust. When Bahl considered where to focus next, she weighed a role in AI safety. Instead, she chose another challenge: building the ecosystem needed to get useful AI tools to people who could benefit from them. She now leads the AI Access Initiative, which aims to reach tens of millions of people in low- and middle-income countries through existing public systems. Speaking during a live recording of Devex’s Global Progress in the AI Era podcast at Devex Impact House on the sidelines of the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly, Bahl called that work her “comparative advantage.” Without “active efforts” to spread AI’s benefits, she warned, “the gap between the global south and the developed world will explode.” The initiative has an early test of its approach in India’s Telangana state, where it has delivered AI-enabled weather forecasts through WhatsApp to 1 million smallholder farmers. Working with the state government ahead of the monsoon season, the team turned technical forecasts into images and voice messages in the Telugu language, then tested them with farmer groups to improve the design. “Our scale channel is the government,” Bahl said. “We’re not asking farmers to go to a channel they’ve never explored. We’re not asking patients to go outside of their normal system.” Reaching farmers is one milestone. The larger test is whether the forecasts help them make better decisions and whether the approach can expand through government systems. Bahl said she hopes to reach 10 million farmers within six months, though her team’s more cautious target is 5 million. Weather forecasting is one of three “big bets” the initiative identified after reviewing 50 ideas for effectiveness, affordability, the potential to reach large populations, and whether artificial intelligence could make a meaningful difference. The others are clinical decision support for health workers and tools that help patients recognize when to seek care. The AI Access Initiative has secured $20 million in new funding to “supercharge” its work, Bahl said. And it appears that some of the “big bets” the organization has identified are gaining traction among other funders. As Devex reported, the OpenAI Foundation recently announced a $60 million commitment to bring AI-powered weather and crop disease forecasts to 100 million smallholder farmers over three years. Bahl’s approach draws on years spent working through governments and existing delivery systems at Evidence Action and the Clinton Health Access Initiative. When Devex spoke with her earlier this year, she warned that promising AI projects could end up in “digital graveyards” if their backers failed to address funding, policy, trust, and last-mile delivery. In healthcare, her team is exploring whether clinical decision support could be incorporated into India’s national telemedicine network. That work remains at an early stage and depends on the government and other partners adopting it. Bahl also wants the initiative’s work to travel further than its own programs. She said her team plans to make tools and lessons open source, publish playbooks and keep updating its research on promising applications. She also plans to establish an incubator to test “the next set of big bets” that others could take to scale.

This week we learned that Dr. Mark Dybul will take over The Global Fund amid significant changes in global health, including declining traditional foreign aid and calls for institutions to consolidate their work. Having already led The Global Fund between 2013 and 2017, Dybul returns to the institution at a pivotal moment. We discuss what his appointment could mean for the future trajectory of the institution, along with the reaction from the broader global health community. One year into its rollout, the America First Global Health Strategy has fundamentally reshaped how the United States delivers global health assistance. Although U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Jeremy Lewin have served as its most visible champions, executing this overhaul has relied on a broad network of officials operating out of the spotlight. We take a closer look at the key behind-the-scenes players driving this strategy forward. To dig into these stories, and others, senior editor Rumbi Chakamba sits down with reporters Jenny Lei Ravelo and Sara Jerving for the latest episode of our weekly podcast series.

If a Washington, D.C., think tank publishes a voluminous policy paper, but barely anyone reads it, does it have an impact? Not really, according to Todd Moss, long-time development think tank leader and founder of the Energy for Growth Hub. Moss, who joined Devex’s Theory of Change podcast, sees a glaring mismatch between many organizations that claim to be in the business of informing policy decisions and the government officials who actually make those decisions. “The top 10 think tanks in the U.S. produced 1,500 reports last year,” Moss said, referencing recent estimates. “Some of them have real nuggets of wisdom, but lots of them are just incredibly boring and pointless, and no one will read them.” For Moss, the insistence on producing heavy reports and staging ceremonial public panels represents a deeper structural failure: losing sight of actual policy outcomes. Busy government officials, buried under back-to-back 15-minute meetings, rarely have the bandwidth to digest 14-page executive summaries, let alone full-length volumes. What they need instead, he said, is clear decision memos, outside experts who understand institutional politics, and — in many cases — years of strategic patience. Moss points to a recent breakthrough his own organization contributed to by deploying that playbook: the World Bank’s decision to lift its long-standing ban on financing nuclear energy projects. Changing the mind of a notoriously risk-averse, multishareholder institution took seven years of painstaking mapping, cross-party coalition building, and direct engagement with inside allies, he said. “I was literally told, you will never be able to change this. We will never do this,” Moss said. “When I think about lessons from this, I think about tactics, alliances, and patience.”

In a live episode of Global Progress in the AI Era, Shalina Wadhwani discussed what Wadhwani AI has learned from building tools with governments — and what she hopes a new generation of AI philanthropists will fund. Shalina Wadhwani spent years working at digital health startups before joining the family office her father, Sunil Wadhwani, had built. Now, as the next-gen philanthropist assumes leadership of the Wadhwani Family Office’s work, she is helping guide efforts such as Wadhwani AI, which uses artificial intelligence to improve health, education, and livelihoods in India and beyond. Check out Cutting Edge Issues in Development Thinking & Practice: https://cuttingedgeissues.transistor.fm/

As governments face growing pressure to modernize public services and rebuild citizen trust, artificial intelligence offers new opportunities to improve service delivery. But turning AI experimentation into measurable, citizen-centered impact requires more than new technology. It calls for strong implementation, cross-sector collaboration, and a clear focus on human needs and accountability. In this special edition episode of This Week in Global Development, sponsored by Salesforce, Devex Co-founder and Executive Vice President Alan Robbins sits down with Wendy R. Anderson, senior vice president of government and global public affairs at Salesforce. Together, they explore how governments can move beyond AI pilots to build lasting institutional capabilities, where AI is already improving public services, and why trust, human judgment, and mission-driven partnerships are essential to delivering meaningful outcomes for citizens.