Join CID for upcoming Road to GEM26 events with leading practitioners shaping the conversation around the future of global development.
Harvard CID’s Road to GEM: Shaping the Future of Global Development
Harvard University’s Center for International Development (CID) is proud to host critical conversations with practitioners, researchers, and global change-makers in the months leading up to the annual Global Empowerment Meeting (GEM).
Engaging Global Leaders Across Sectors
CID's Road to GEM programming brings together influential voices from business, government, public policy, and nonprofits, offering unique opportunities to explore key global challenges and solutions. These discussions set the stage for GEM26, where cutting-edge ideas in development take center stage.
This year, GEM26: Reimagining International Development, will examine present challenges and pathways forward. How do we design development strategies for a world of constrained resources and shifting power dynamics? What new frameworks for growth, equity, sustainability, and cooperation are emerging, and what ideas deserve to be incubated and scaled?
All Road to GEM events are open to the public, inviting a diverse audience to engage in meaningful discussions about the future of international development, innovation, and economic empowerment.
Road to GEM26 Featured Events:
Why Education Reform Fails: Leadership & the Missing Middle
Professor Fernando Reimers (Harvard Graduate School of Education) argued that ambitious education reforms often stall not because of weak ideas, but because systems lack the capacity to implement them—especially in the “missing middle” of district leaders, principals, and local administrators who translate policy into classroom practice.
Why Development Becomes Harder: The Political Economy of the Possible
Muhammad Chatib Basri, Visiting Scholar at Harvard CID and former Minister of Finance of Indonesia, examined a paradox confronting many middle-income countries: growth continues, and poverty declines, yet politics grows more fragile. Across Southeast Asia and Latin America, steady economic expansion has not translated into the broad sense of mobility and security that once sustained reform momentum.
Modernizing Development Cooperation
Alexia Latortue (Head of Secretariat, Future of Development Cooperation Coalition) argued that the traditional aid-based model of development is no longer fit for today’s challenges. While past approaches delivered major gains, today’s landscape—shaped by climate risk, conflict, and geopolitical fragmentation—demands a broader framework that goes beyond aid to focus on country priorities and the full set of drivers of development, including domestic resources, private investment, institutions, and state capacity.
Road to GEM26 on CID Voices
Road to GEM26 Podcast
Revisit the critical conversations on AI and Global Development from GEM25: Catalyzing AI for Inclusive Change on our YouTube channel