CID Faculty Spotlight: Fatema Z. Sumar on the Future of Development and Building Bridges Across Worlds

Late one night her junior year at Cornell University, Fatema Z. Sumar, Executive Director of the Harvard Center for International Development and an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, came across a news article about a house fire in Tompkins County in upstate New York. Emergency responders couldn’t communicate with the Spanish-speaking family, leading to devastating losses.

“I remember thinking, up on this prestigious hill, we have access to world-class resources, including people who speak almost every language in the world,” recalls Sumar. “And just a few miles down the hill, we have some of the highest levels of poverty in the state, and huge, diverse immigrant communities. How come we haven’t figured out how to connect the dots?”

Sumar picked up a phone directory (the internet then was mostly empty web addresses) and began calling county service providers – hospitals, schools, courts, police and fire departments, inquiring about their language needs, and creating a manual database to document the service gaps. As a government major specializing in international relations and studying multiple languages, she knew Cornell’s language community well and discovered a knack for matching needs and capabilities.

Today, the award-winning Translator-Interpreter program Sumar founded is turning 25 years old and a nationwide model for college engagement with local communities. Since its founding, it has provided free translation and interpretation services to over 300 community agencies in and around Tompkins County.

Since that early discovery of an ability “to build bridges between worlds,” Sumar has expanded her focus to creating impact at scale, particularly for communities in need. After earning an MPA from Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, where she received the prestigious Stokes Award, she trained as a Presidential Management Fellow in the U.S. State Department and on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia; oversaw Global Programs for Oxfam America; and led compact operations at the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a U.S. government development agency – accomplishing most of this before she was 40 years old.

In roles that took her across Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and much of Asia, including to Kabul as an economics officer at the height of the U.S. War with Afghanistan, and Ulaanbaatar, where she helped negotiate a historic grant to ensure sustainable water supply in Mongolia’s capital city during an impending water crisis, Sumar has seen the best and worst of government – where it’s broken and where it fulfills its promise. She’s been in the position of criticizing development agencies and leading them. She has seen what works to empower communities and what continues to hold them back. She’s helped build energy grids, schools, and roads in countries such as El Salvador, Côte d’Ivoire, and the Philippines, while also championing gender and social inclusion, and human and community development.

Over the course of a distinguished career that has taken her to over 70 countries, Sumar’s point of departure has always been grounded in shaping systems to serve people better – an ethos inspired by her upbringing as an immigrant in the United States with global ties, as she recounts in her book, The Development Diplomat: Working Across Borders, Boardrooms, and Bureaucracies to End Poverty.

Just one generation out of extreme poverty, Sumar’s family migrated from India and Malaysia to California before settling in Central New Jersey, to a life of middle-class precarity. While her parents – the first in their families to earn college degrees – secured stable positions as, respectively, a psychiatrist and an engineer, they believed that true financial self-reliance came from owning a small business. Her father left his engineering job to open a suburban hardware store in the late 1980s, right before Lowe’s and Home Depot took off.

“We ended up becoming a one-income household again very quickly, on my mom’s salary,” says Sumar, who grew up working at the store. The struggle intensified when her father passed away (when she was 14 years old). The oldest of four girls, Sumar took on multiple jobs starting in high school and then college to help make ends meet.

An extended clan of aunts, uncles, and cousins came and went; some were able to immigrate to the U.S. permanently, others stayed in India and Malaysia. Always, she says, there was a “sense of responsibility of care, to take care of others…that’s how my family survived for generations.” In a sense, she didn’t have to study development because she “grew up seeing the consequences of when you get things right as a society, as a government – and when you don’t.”

Her deep understanding of different aspects of development – from community-based projects to global diplomacy to building physical infrastructure – led CID Faculty Director and the Sumitomo-FASID Professor of International Finance and Development at Harvard Kennedy School Asim I. Khwaja to recruit Sumar to help him reimagine development, starting with rethinking the nexus between research and practice.   

Among the challenges researchers face is figuring out how to ensure “research has a real impact in the world,” and then, once you have a working model, finding the best way to implement and scale it, says Khwaja. “Fatema’s experience in government, in the world of NGOs… her understanding of bureaucracy, politics, and global [systems] has been especially helpful” in creating more robust connections between research and practice, he notes. "She also brings tremendous intellectual energy and created a very comprehensive and deep engagement with students” as a mentor and teacher of policy design and delivery and development diplomacy at the Kennedy School.   

As CID’s Executive Director since 2022, Sumar has worked closely with Khwaja and the CID team to transform the center in just a few years into the official university-wide hub for international development, working with undergraduates, graduate students, fellows, alumni, and over 140 faculty affiliates across Harvard’s many schools and their networks in over 115 countries to advance critical research and policy.

“We’ve created a community deeply committed to building a thriving world for all,” she says. “And we’re doing it in a way that involves impacted communities from the start; we’re investing in world-class research and local expertise in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, all over the world…to co-create knowledge and design policy.”

In an age of polarization, CID acts as a convening power, bringing together diverse and often divergent voices – researchers and practitioners, government agencies and NGOs, policymakers and community leaders  – to address the world’s most pressing development problems. The CID model breaks away from top-down hierarchies between the West and the so-called Global South; it sees regions that may be materially poor as inherently rich in people and talent; it seeks to invest in that talent to build a thriving world, and aspires, not only to end poverty, but to enable flourishing.

It’s an ambitious vision that signals what development might look like in years to come: more reciprocal and collaborative, more iterative and entrepreneurial, more resilient and resourceful.

And it comes at a critical juncture.

2025 has been a year of dizzying upheaval: the overnight gutting of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the defunding of foreign aid across Europe, and the cancellation of billions of dollars in research grants mark a massive dismantling of the global development sector.

In July, as USAID officially closed its doors, the Lancet published a study projecting over 14 million deaths by 2030 if the agency’s defunding is not reversed. The collateral fallout for the entire foreign aid sector – job cuts, employment prospects for graduating students, research and knowledge loss, restructuring costs – is still to be determined.

Yet, amidst the crisis, a historic opportunity has arisen. For decades, resources, expertise, and capital flowed largely one way, from industrialized nations to “developing” regions. Today, those flows are increasingly multi-directional, with knowledge, investment, and innovation moving across continents and countries in many forms.

CID is championing a wholesale reimagining of the development sector. Not since the global consensus around the Millennium Development Goals in 2000 and more recently the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 has the moment been so propitious for a bold, new development discourse.

To all those who signed up “for a career to help figure out better ways to improve people’s lives, we need you,” Sumar says. “If ever there was a time to figure things out, it’s now.”