About Harvard Center for International Development
Incredible progress has been made throughout the world in recent years. However, globalization has failed to deliver on its promises. As problems like unequal access to education and healthcare, environmental degradation, and stretched finances persist, we must continue building on decades of transformative development work.
The Center for International Development (CID) is a university-wide center based at the Harvard Kennedy School that seeks to solve these pressing development problems—and many more.
At CID, we believe leveraging global talent is the key to enabling development for all. We teach to build capacity, conduct research that guides development policy, and convene talent to advance ideas for a thriving world. Addressing today’s challenges to international development also requires bridging academic expertise with practitioner experience. Through collaborative, in-country partnerships, CID’s research programs, faculty, and students deploy an analytical framework and context-dependent approaches to tackle development problems from all angles, in every region of the globe.
Women, Peace, and Power: Lessons from Africa's Frontlines
Guest: Binta Diop, Former Special Envoy on Women, Peace and Security, African Union
Host: Sumedha Tanwar, MPP Candidate, Harvard Kennedy School
This episode of the CID Voices Road to GEM podcast examines the role of women in conflict resolution and peacebuilding across Africa. The conversation traces how women from the Mano River region, Burundi, and the DRC pushed their way into peace processes and shaped outcomes, from influencing peace accords to entrenching gender parity in constitutions. It explores the root causes of conflict on the continent, including poor governance, inequality, and lack of accountability, and asks why women remain largely absent from formal negotiations despite evidence of their impact. The discussion also turns to economic empowerment, particularly in agriculture, and what it would mean to reimagine international development around human capital and sustainable growth.
16 Apr 2026
Rethinking Development Finance: Impact, Leverage, and the Private Capital Push
This episode of CID Voices explores how development finance institutions have evolved from counter-cyclical lenders during the financial crisis into impact-driven investors operating under mounting fiscal scrutiny. The conversation moves through the tensions shaping DFIs today: the push toward private capital mobilization and what it means for additionality, the segregation of capital pools across risk and return profiles, the challenges of local currency financing in emerging markets, and the growing pressure from governments to instrumentalize DFIs as part of national strategies. It closes on the geopolitical turn in development finance, including the DFC's reframing around national security, and what a future that blends development, climate, and defence finance might look like.
7 Apr 2026
State Capacity in a Shifting International Development Landscape
In this CID Voices Road to GEM26 podcast episode, Harvard Kennedy School student Carissa Tridina speaks with Professor Chatib Basri, former Finance Minister of Indonesia and current visiting scholar at CID, about the structural shifts reshaping development and financing today. As global aid shrinks and countries’ debt burdens rise, governments face tighter fiscal space and more complex political trade-offs as they try to build sustained growth.
During the episode, we explore how building state capacity in domestic financing, institutional credibility, and leadership is critical. The conversation also looks at Professor Basri’s experience with Indonesia’s political economy reforms, and whether the lessons learned can be applied to the present and across different contexts in an increasingly fragmented global economy.
Whether you're interested in international development, financing, or state capacity, this episode offers timely insight into how the shifting landscape affects all development actors.
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Apple Podcasts (US)
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20 ratings
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5.0 / 5
1 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 72 / 100
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69
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YouTube
93
Engagement
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