Seismic shifts over the past year, including reduced funding following the collapse of USAID programs, rising geopolitical tensions, and rapid technological advances, have heightened the urgency to rethink the approach critical development work.
In this video, HKS professors share “one big idea” to build a thriving world given the multitude of challenges facing our geopolitical landscape.
Asim Khwaja: What is the one thing we could do to build a world where everyone can thrive? So that's a great question.
Matthew Andrews: If I could change one thing in, especially international development practice, that would facilitate a thriving world. It would be to encourage organizations who are involved in development, whether they are from the north, whether they're from the south, whether they are small NGOs, whether they are big financial organizations, to focus less on the money and more on the people, to focus on building capabilities. Because what we see is that if you build capabilities in places, those capabilities allow people to find their own solutions. If you build capabilities where people can look at the world in a different way and they can try things in a different way, then we find that they just keep getting better and better and better and better. That is what causes them to thrive. That is the key to development.
Eliana La Ferrara: In order to build a world where all can thrive, I would design policy to build in ways to receive feedback from local communities and learn from them. Too often, we scale inputs instead of mechanisms, but I think local actors are the ones who have the knowledge of the expectations, norms, and mechanisms that make policy effective.
Gordon Hanson: To build a world in which we can all thrive, we need to try and create bespoke opportunities for career advancement. That may sound hard, but in a world in which we have digitized data about how you perform in school and who you work for, how much you earn, and how you transition between different employers, it's not nearly as difficult as it might seem. If we're able to have that data, we could then craft individual work plans at very low cost, suggesting different sectors, different employers, particular workers, suggesting workers to particular employers, and help remove the glue that is, gumming up the way in which labor markets operate.
Asim Khwaja: I would say if there's literally one thing I could pick, which you could do tomorrow, in theory, and I think in practice as well, is I would simply broaden the measure of skills that we acknowledge, we measure, and then we teach for.
Perhaps the easiest thing is is simply introduce a new class starting from kindergarten all the way up to college and high school, which is a life skills class. Formalize it, recognize that building teamwork, building curiosity, building empathy, building interpersonal skills is something that can be formally done. And once we measure it, it's something that we can showcase individuals as having those attributes, which will help things like college admissions or job success.