Rethinking Development Finance at the 2025 World Bank Spring Meetings

Harvard CID Brings Student Voices and Policy Innovation to the Global Stage

Amid growing global challenges and constrained financial resources, the 2025 World Bank Spring Meetings brought together key stakeholders to explore the future of international development and global economic cooperation. This year’s meetings focused on reshaping how development is financed, delivered, and assessed in an increasingly interconnected and complex world.

As part of this important global convening, CID Research Fellow Wasim Tahir and the CID team organized a high-impact learning opportunity for students. Building on the momentum of last year's United Nations delegation, CID facilitated direct engagement with decision-makers from multilateral development banks (MDBs), development finance institutions (DFIs), major philanthropic organizations, and leading global think tanks.

These conversations gave students valuable insights into modernizing development finance strategies, fostering blended finance models, and advancing more effective, inclusive, and accountable approaches to global development outcomes.

Engaging with Multilateral Development Banks and Global Finance Leaders

Visiting the Center for Global Development (CGD), the group heard from a panel who discussed the widening gap between development finance needs and available official development assistance (ODA). The recognition of the human dimension was appreciated with Eleanor Furtado, Harvard Kennedy School MPA/ID student, commenting on the “shared sentiment to build the aid system back better by taking a 'radical simplification' approach and focusing on fewer interventions with higher effectiveness.”

It was striking to see the CGD team emphasize that the next frontier of development finance lies in the strategic mobilization of private capital. Highlighting how recent multilateral reform efforts are seeking to make development institutions more responsive and innovative, the panelists noted the potential of these reforms to crowd-in private finance while preserving a focus on equitable impact.

The concept of private finance carried through the visit to J.P. Morgan. Arsalan Mahtafar, Head of J.P. Morgan DFI, examined how private financial institutions can deliver commercially viable returns while adhering to robust development impact standards. He explained how applying transparent, evidence-based criteria to evaluate projects before commitment can ensure both their financial and developmental viability. As concessional finance becomes more constrained, models such as these offer a pathway to scale impact through disciplined, outcome-oriented investment.

The growing influence of private sector participation was echoed in meetings with the British International Investment and IDB Invest. The importance of integrating impact at the core of investment strategies was seen as crucial, rethinking project design in order to prioritize digital inclusion, resilience, and measurable outcomes in underserved and fragile contexts. Emphasizing that the best way out of poverty is through private sector job creation, the team from IDB Invest saw their goal as helping to create a conducive regulatory environment and de-risk investment opportunities through demonstration effects to crowd-in private capital.

Practitioners at CrossBoundary, who have built their organization around effectively mobilizing capital, described how the de-risking process requires a dual focus on actual and perceived investor risk. With the changing global development aid environment, with declining aid from the U.S. and EU and a greater emphasis on DFIs, there is a critical need to maximize the leverage of ODA and grants to catalyze private capital.

Throughout the meetings, it became evident that philanthropy retains a vital role, particularly in de-risking innovation and supporting public goods. However, philanthropic and concessional funding alone will not suffice. Future progress will depend on the ability to unlock private capital at scale, using scarce donor resources to catalyze broader investment and systemic transformation.

What We Learned About the Future of Financing Development

The 2025 Spring Meetings served as a timely reminder that development is no longer a purely technocratic domain. In a world facing intersecting crises, from climate shocks and pandemics to debt distress and geopolitical fragmentation, development actors must demonstrate not only impact but also relevance and legitimacy. Institutions will need to evolve their governance, methods, and partnerships.

What emerges is a moment of both challenge and opportunity. The contours of global development are shifting, and with them, the expectations placed on public, private, and philanthropic actors. Reimagining development will require moving beyond legacy paradigms and embracing a future defined by innovation, inclusion, and evidence-based practice. As several speakers noted, the task ahead is not to revise existing strategies, but to write an entirely new playbook; one in which DFIs will play an increasingly central role.

The group's time in Washington catalyzed their thinking, providing an unmatched experience both professionally and personally. A huge thank you to Wasim Tahir and CID's Crystal Nayiga for their efforts in organizing the trip and to CID Executive Director Fatema Z. Sumar for her vision and dedication to providing a truly experiential learning experience.