Devex Podcasts

This week USAID released its long-awaited localization update. Despite the progress made, not least due to the success of the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, the agency is yet to come close to reaching its target of spending 25% of funding on local organizations by 2025.

From the U.K. government reclaiming official development assistance via taxes to India’s renewable energy push threatening the country’s food security, the past week has been filled with controversies that have the potential to hinder the drive toward meaningful change.

Tune in to the latest episode of This Week in Development to hear our take on the issues.

For this episode, I was joined by Dr. Jen Kates, senior vice president and director of global health & HIV policy at KFF, as well as Devex Managing Editor Anna Gawel to discuss the most important news from the past week in the global development sector.

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French President Emmanuel Macron is hosting the Summit for a New Global Financial Pact in Paris this week, which aims to strike a new post-World War II pact between high-income nations and those most at risk from climate change and crippling debt.

However, with key players not attending, including U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, U.S. President Joe Biden, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, serious doubts remain over whether the decisions made during the summit will translate into meaningful action. There are also major disagreements between French organizers and participants over reforming international institutions, including multilateral development banks.

For this special episode, I talk to Devex Brussels Correspondent Vince Chadwick, who is connecting from the French capital, to get an insider perspective on the discussions happening at the summit.

The conversation also touches on Vince’s interview with Peter Sands, the head of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, who argues that innovative financial instruments and private sector mobilization should not be a “proxy” for giving money to help the world’s poorest.

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Seven years ago, the United Nations' World Humanitarian Summit proposed the "humanitarian-development nexus" to improve collaboration between the two ends of the aid sector.

Although it was initially a good idea to enhance efficiency and reduce costs, this framework has struggled to deliver amidst the increasing number of humanitarian disasters and prolonged crises.

Recently, Devex's Teresa Welsh discussed the cracks surfacing in the "humanitarian-development nexus."

This week, another global development topic made headlines when USAID Administrator Samantha Power informed the U.S. Congress that the agency would find it difficult to achieve its localization targets, as reported by Adva Saldinger on Devex.

To make sense of these and other significant news stories of the week, tune in to This Week in Global Development.

This weekly podcast analyzes the major headlines in global development and invites top experts to help us understand them. In this week's episode, I was joined by Nasra Ismail, policy adviser and ICAP Aspen fellow, and Anna Gawel, Devex managing editor.

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The World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s Spring Meetings have come to an end this weekend. A great sense of change was anticipated for this year’s event, as Devex wrote last week.

But what do we make of the talks now that they are over? That’s the question we asked our guests in the first episode of “This Week in Global Development,” a weekly podcast where we break down the big headlines in global development and bring in top experts to help us do it.

For this episode, I was joined by Rachel Kyte, the dean at The Fletcher School at Tufts University, and Jeremy Hillman, senior vice president of external engagement at the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth.

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Davos 2023 has wrapped, and Devex was there to experience it all. In this installment of Davos Dispatch, Devex President and Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar compared notes with reporter Vince Chadwick on what the conference means for development, the private sector and how the two can, and must, work together. And despite their differing Davos experiences—Raj moderated a number of WEF panels while Vince joined a frozen press scrum waiting in vain for Greta Thunberg—they both agree that the conference is quite unlike anything else.

In the final episode of COPcast, chef, food advocate and filmmaker Oliver English sits down with Kate Warren to discuss how regenerative agriculture and support for small scale farmers can help transform the global food system.

Rémy Rioux is chief executive officer of the French Development Agency, or AFD. But before that, in 2015, he worked as chief negotiator on the finance track of the landmark Paris Agreement on climate. Since then the United Nations Conference of the Parties has grown into a behemoth, with COP 27 in Egypt attracting 40,000 people.

Devex sat down with Rioux on the sidelines of COP 27 to hear his thoughts on how the summit has changed since 2015 — and if it’s become an opportunity for greenwashing.

In this wide-ranging interview, Rioux also discussed the prospects of the AFD providing loss and damage financing and supporting nuclear energy programs through its aid program, and whether human rights in Egypt were helped or hindered by the summit.

At the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, the calls for the restructuring of multilateral development banks are echoing through the halls, with the hopes that with reforms, finance will flow more readily to lower-income countries to allow them to green their economies and help their populations adapt to the changing world.

In the 12th episode of the COPcast, Devex sat down with Phyllis Cuttino, the new president and CEO of the Climate Reality Project, who emphasized one reform in particular: A switch up in leadership at the World Bank.

"Davis Malpass ... has a past where he has denied climate science and I think that makes him unsuitable to lead the World Bank at this time," she said, adding that the bank also needs to commit to only financing fossil fuel projects in the "most extraordinary of circumstances."

The private sector has a key role to play in investing in climate change adaptation – and yet, currently, only 1.6% of all adaptation funding comes from private investment.

Matthias Berninger is the Head of Sustainability and Public Affairs at Bayer, but he’s seen many sides of the food and agriculture space over the course of his career: in the public sector, he was a vice minister in Germany’s Green Party; and in the private sector, he previously worked on health and nutrition strategy at Mars.

In this episode of COPcast, Berninger tells Devex President and Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar what three critical words the 5,000-word Glasgow Declaration left out, plus three things every company should be doing in order to achieve net zero by 2050.

In the twelfth episode of COPcast, Devex sat down with Solomon Quaynor, vice-president for private sector, infrastructure and industrialization at the African Development Bank to discuss the continent’s climate financing needs.