What Abidjan Taught Us About the Future of Development

As we waited at the gate in Logan Airport for our flight to Paris last month en route to West Africa, we found ourselves cheering loudly. Côte d'Ivoire had just scored against Ecuador in its opening match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. By the time Les Éléphants' played again a week later, the tournament had drawn more than a million fans in its opening days. African countries from Senegal and Morocco to the tiny island nation of Cabo Verde had captured the imagination of soccer fans around the world.  Beyond the African teams, African influence was on display across many of the tournament’s traditional powerhouses from France and England to the United States and Canada, underscoring the continent’s extraordinary influence on the global game.

During our time in Abidjan, the World Cup was everywhere. Matches played on televisions in cafés spilled into conversations in classrooms, government offices, and hotel lobbies. People debated tactics, celebrated remarkable performances, and spoke with a confidence that reflected something larger than sport. This World Cup felt different. African talent was no longer simply hoping to be part of the tournament, but arriving as serious contenders.

That same confidence shaped every conversation we had about development.

We traveled to Côte d'Ivoire with three purposes and one shared question. We would lead a seminar on public policy at one of West Africa's premier economics schools, advance collaboration with the African Development Bank, and continue a conversation that began at Harvard CID’s Global Empowerment Meeting (GEM26), specifically asking, “What should international development look like in a rapidly changing world from the perspective of Africans?”

It was an incredible visit where we heard from a wide variety of people. Through multiple perspectives, one thing was clear: Africa is already making its mark on the future of development. 

Talent is Africa's greatest asset

At the invitation of Dr. Hugues Kouadio, Director General of the École Nationale Supérieure de Statistique et d’Économie Appliquée (ENSEA), we led a seminar on public policy design and implementation and discussed career pathways in research and policy for more than seventy master's students in statistics and economics. It was, by the school's own account, the first time Harvard had engaged in this type of engagement at ENSEA, and the students treated the opportunity accordingly. They came ready each day to challenge one another's assumptions, connect the lessons to their own countries, and continue the conversations well after each session ended. Several told us they appreciated working through a real policy dilemma through case studies rather than discussing theory in the abstract.

The experience was a reminder that the appetite for rigorous, policy-relevant thinking is not something Africa needs to build. It already exists. What is still needed is stronger institutional infrastructure to capture, teach, and scale that knowledge from locally grounded research to teaching cases that document African policy successes and failures for students around the world. Too often, the continent’s most important development innovations and lessons of leadership remain under-documented, even as they offer lessons with local and global relevance. Expanding the body of African case studies is not simply about filling a gap in the curriculum but ensuring that the next generation of global leaders learn from Africa as readily as they do from examples elsewhere. 

Watching Côte d'Ivoire compete on the world's biggest sporting stage while sitting in classrooms in Abidjan filled with equally ambitious future economists, policymakers, and researchers made the parallel hard to miss. The continent's greatest resource is not only its markets or its natural wealth. It is its people. It is time to seriously start investing in the continent’s greatest asset by developing their skills and creating pathways for that talent to shine. 

Taking the conversation to the continent

One of the clearest messages to emerge from GEM26 was that the future of international development cannot be reimagined from Cambridge, Washington, D.C., or any city alone. If the conversations we began at Harvard were to be meaningful, they needed to continue with the leaders, institutions, and communities shaping development every day. We needed to bring the discussion from our campus to the communities grappling with how to move their societies forward. Abidjan became the first stop on CID's listening tour following GEM26.

Over the course of our visit, we met with entrepreneurs, researchers, senior policymakers, development practitioners, students, and alumni to ask a simple question: What does a new era of development look like for Africa?

Our conversations spanned every sector. We joined a remarkable roundtable of women leaders hosted by President of the National Assembly Patrick Achi and moderated by Manon Coulibaly of Novartis, where we heard from women leading across business, government, philanthropy, and civil society. We met with Koffi N'Guessan, Côte d'Ivoire's Minister of National Education, whose perspective on investing in human capital grounded the discussion in the realities of public service delivery. Leaders from the private sector offered a market-based perspective on where development finance has succeeded and where it has fallen short, while discussions with development officials highlighted the opportunities and challenges facing the continent in a rapidly changing global economy. We also visited Life TV and Radio, one of West Africa's leading commercial media networks, to discuss how development is understood, communicated, and debated by the broader public.

These conversations culminated in a joint CID and ENSEA public dialogue, building on the themes of GEM26, with Stanislas Zeze, founder of Bloomfield Investment Corporation; Valérie Dabady, Division Chief at the African Development Bank and Harvard alumna; and Professor Alban Ahoure of the Center for Economic Policy Analysis (CAPEC). The discussion did not produce easy consensus, nor should it have. 

What it arrived at instead was a shared diagnosis. Development has fallen short, not when measured by some external benchmark, but by Africa's own potential in both the capabilities of its people and the wealth of its natural and financial resources. The panelists' call was not for more of the same with better execution. It was for a different framework altogether, one built around long-term planning, institution-building, and sustained investment in talent, rather than around the short cycles of project financing that have too often defined the field.

It is worth pausing on that diagnosis because it did not come from an external framework applied to Africa. It came from people who live inside the system, speaking in their own institutional language, and analyzing on their own terms the gap between their countries' potential and the development architecture that has too often constrained it.

Reimagining new ways of investing

Our discussions also built on the visit of the African Development Bank’s President, Dr. Sidi Ould Tah, to Harvard earlier this year, where he engaged with CID and the Harvard Center for African Studies. Through a series of meetings concluding with a session with Dr. Ould Tah, we focused on opportunities to strengthen collaboration around research, talent development, and institutional exchange. We remain collectively obsessed with how best to invest strategically in the talent of Africans. 

We ended our trip where the future of this work must live, with the people who carry it forward every day. Development is painstaking work, laid brick by brick, person by person. Ultimately, it is people who are the future of development, and investing in these networks is how we build global public goods together.  We were excited to convene our first-ever in-person gathering of CID’s inaugural THRIVE network, bringing together Valérie Dabady, HLS ’92, and the Harvard alumni lead in Côte d'Ivoire, Mini Kouame, HKS MPA/ID ’21, and several other alumni. It was a fitting close, a small group already doing the work, embedded in the institutions that matter, and building the community that no single visit can substitute for.

What we took away

There is one thing we did not hear in Abijdan. No one was calling for a return to traditional development models or infusions of foreign aid. Whether it was the student who engaged deeply on regional case studies, the rating agency executive who questioned the viability of dependency on external financing, or the researcher who insisted that local analysis deserves the same standing as analysis produced anywhere else, they were all making variations of the same point. Africans will be the authors of their next chapter of development, not merely development’s intended beneficiaries. 

The future of development will be shaped in places like Abidjan by entrepreneurs building companies, researchers generating evidence, public servants strengthening institutions, students preparing to lead, and regional institutions increasingly defining their own priorities.

As African teams demonstrated throughout this World Cup, the world is beginning to recognize what many on the continent have long known: Africa is not waiting for permission to compete at the highest level.

The same is true in development.

The work of reimagining international development cannot be done for Africa. It must be done with and by the people for whom the stakes are not academic. Abidjan was the first stop. It will not be our last.