Agenda

Investing in Human Capital

Faculty Lead: Asim I. Khwaja (Harvard Kennedy School)

Practitioners: Sandeep Aneja (Kaizenvest), Béatrice Leydier (gui2de)

We all recognize – both from personal experience and cross-country evidence – that investing in human capital is immensely powerful and transformative. Yet funding remains woefully inadequate, despite mounting evidence – including decades-long longitudinal studies – showing very high lifetime returns. This incubation room will explore how we can substantially increase investments in human capital and how those investments must evolve to meet a rapidly changing global landscape. Participants will brainstorm ideas that respond to labor market shifts and rapid advances in technology and AI, support multiple pathways of human capital accumulation (public and private schools, higher education, TVET, etc.), and build resilience to climate change and conflict, with a particular focus on misalignments between evidence-based programs and capital flows in education—such as the chronic underfinancing of effective, low-cost private schools in LMICs—and how new financing mechanisms, partnerships, and policies can unlock more effective, long-term human capital gains.

Who Speaks for Global Health? Building Visibility, Voice, and Accountability

Faculty Leads: Margaret Bourdeaux, MD, MPH (Harvard Medical School), 

Practitioners: Gabby Stern (World Health Organization), Dr. KJ Seung (endTB, Brigham and Women's Hospital), Mara Kardas-Nelson (Boston Globe)

The recent disruption of global health financing and delivery architectures—illustrated by the dismantling of U.S. institutions such as USAID—has revealed a broader systemic vulnerability: the fragility of global health programs in the absence of visible, engaged constituencies. The intended beneficiaries of these programs are geographically and politically distant from decision-makers and funders. Their needs and experiences remain invisible, leaving even highly effective interventions exposed to abrupt shifts in political and financial priorities.

These disruptions are not confined to a single country. The collapse and retrenchment of U.S. global health funding has triggered ripple effects across multilateral institutions, bilateral programs, and philanthropic initiatives, accelerating funding gaps, program interruptions, and organizational realignment. At the same time, new global health models—such as increased reliance on government-to-government partnerships—are being advanced by decision-makers in capital cities with little interest in feedback from the communities they aim to serve.

This Incubation Room will explore a range of models for generating real-time, ground-level visibility into health systems. The focus is on identifying approaches that can surface lived realities at scale and communicate them effectively to global stakeholders, complementing traditional data systems and strengthening accountability.

Participants will work across sectors to:
 

• Develop and compare models: Brainstorm and assess alternative approaches for generating and validating ground-level information, including paid local correspondents, community-based reporting networks, crowdsourced documentation of events and failures, and simple, high-frequency quantitative indicators (e.g., drug stock-outs, service availability).
• Define the infrastructure: Identify the technical, organizational, and financial requirements to support these models at scale.
• Translate insight into influence: Specify the outputs and channels that move data to decision-makers (e.g., briefs, dashboards, alerts, media).
• Assign response and incentives: Define who acts on signals, what actions are triggered, and how follow-through is tracked.

The Why and How of Development Cooperation

Faculty Lead: Dean Karlan (Northwestern University)

Practitioners: Håvard Nygård (Norad), Michelle Nunn (CARE), Kirsten Schuettler (World Bank)

In an era of fiscal constraint, political backlash, & shifting power, the current system of development assistance is being contested. This interactive session will explore how to rebuild a durable consensus in donor and recipient countries around development cooperation while reshaping its narrative for a changing global context. 

First, the session will examine how to rebuild support and trust in donor countries. We will discuss how to align development cooperation and related communication more closely with constituent preferences—recognizing sustained support for solidarity besides the calls to better serve national interests—and delve deeper into how to communicate the more complex long-term, sustainable impact of development efforts beyond short-term humanitarian aid. 

Second, the session will address how to bridge perspectives and align interests between donor and recipient countries. This includes moving away from traditional power asymmetries toward a partnership in mutual interest, including a shift in language from “aid” to development cooperation, and defining what the actual benefits will be. 

Third, the session will engage with questions around the role of evidence and “smart buys” in guiding effective interventions without overpromising on what cost-effectiveness analyses can deliver and identify key knowledge gaps and priorities for action. The session will actively leverage the collective experience in the room through a highly participatory format to challenge assumptions and co-create actionable insights.

The Future of Development Finance: Mandate, Capital, and Legitimacy in a Fractured World

Faculty Lead: Brian L. Trelstad (Harvard Business School)

Practitioners: Nick O’Donohue (British International Investment), H.E. Rania A. Al-Mashat (Former Minister of Planning, Economic Development & International Cooperation, Arab Republic of Egypt), Wasim Tahir (Harvard Kennedy School)

The architecture of development finance was built for a world of broad consensus, abundant concessional capital, and OECD-led institutions. That world no longer exists. DFIs are being instrumentalized for geopolitical ends, catalytic capital is disappearing as bilateral aid retreats, private capital mobilization consistently underdelivers, and new actors – Gulf sovereign wealth funds, Chinese policy banks, Indian development finance – operate outside traditional frameworks. This incubation room will work through the full DFI lifecycle, from governance and mandate through to deployment and sustainability, asking at each stage: what is broken, what is emerging, and what should be reimagined for a multipolar, fiscally constrained era? Participants will develop actionable proposals, whether pilots, research agendas, coalitions, or policy reforms, that can be advanced after GEM26.

Faculty Leads: Adnan Khan (London School of Economics and Political Science), Zoe Marks (Harvard Kennedy School)

Practitioners: Gomez Agou (Harvard CID/CAS, former IMF)

International development is facing a structural collision: as aid budgets contract sharply — accelerated by the dissolution of USAID, sharp reduction in funding for other donors like FCDO, and shifting donor priorities including security spending — the needs of developing countries are rising faster than ever, driven by demographic pressure, climate vulnerability, geopolitical frictions on international trade and deepening debt distress. This is not merely a financing crisis. It is a moment of reckoning for a development model that was never designed to build the economic autonomy it promised — and a stress test for the global cooperation frameworks that once sustained it.

This incubation room asks three connected questions: How are developing countries — and African governments in particular — responding to the collapse of the old aid architecture? What does genuine developmental sovereignty look like when fiscal resilience, productive capacity, and locally embedded knowledge replace external scaffolding as the foundations of growth? And how do we rebuild the space for global and south -south cooperation in ways that serve mutual benefit rather than reinforcing dependency?

Drawing on new empirical evidence, emerging frameworks for sovereignty-building, and perspectives from across the development landscape, participants will explore what a reimagined development model looks like — one grounded in strategic autonomy, renewed multilateralism, and shared responsibility for global public goods.

The goal is not to mourn the old model but to incubate the new one.