Displaced

Last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced a sharp reduction in the number of refugees the U.S. would take in over the next year: 30,000. Grant and Ravi talk to IRC colleague Nazanin Ash for some context on this dramatic shift. Nazanin is Vice President of Global Policy and Advocacy at the International Rescue Committee, and discusses the current administration’s approach to refugee admissions, and how it contrasts not just to previous administrations, but also to public support for refugees.

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Stefan Dercon is professor of economic policy at the University of Oxford, and is the former chief economist at the Department for International Development (DFID) in the UK, where he was involved in political discussions about how to shape aid. This episode is a deep dive into the financing model of humanitarian response, and how insurance instruments could change that model, and potentially reshape how we respond to crises.

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Almost a quarter of the world’s population now live in some form of fragility, and we talk often about fragile states and fragile contexts - but what does the term mean? Nancy Lindborg is the president of the United States Institute of Peace, and she explains why the definition of fragility matters so much to shaping foreign policy and humanitarian response. 

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This episode looks at how humanitarian response works - the rules of the game, the players, their incentives - and how these elements impact lives of displaced people. Jeremy Konydyk calls this the ‘humanitarian business model,’ and as senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development and former director of USAID’s Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance, he has unique insight on that model and its flaws. He offers potential solutions, and also shares his experiences on leading the U.S. response to humanitarian crises under President Obama. 

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"When people look back on our time they will wonder why we tolerated refugee camps for so long.” Owen Barder, Vice President at the Center for Global Development, talks in this episode about why we should abolish refugee camps, and what’s wrong with the humanitarian aid system more broadly. Barder talks about the alternatives to keeping displaced people in camps, and how to make the humanitarian system more simple, more focused, and serve the interests of displaced people receiving aid, rather than those providing it. 

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In this episode, we speak to Alix Zwane who is the CEO of the Global Innovation Fund – an organization that invests in generating and growing products and services that help people on less than $5 a day. During the conversation, Zwane talks about the weaknesses of traditional philanthropy, the challenge of delivering financial returns and social impact, and the solutions she’s invested in that she’s most excited about.

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Education in low- and middle-income countries is becoming increasingly private: as many as one in four young Africans could be enrolled in some form of private education by 2021. Paul Skidmore is CEO of the Rising Academies Network, which is part of this sea change in education, and which started its first school in Sierra Leone in the height of the Ebola outbreak in 2014. In this conversation, Skidmore discusses how he built his network of schools, the lessons he's learned, and why the conversation about private education versus public is missing a major point. 

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David Halpern is the Chief Executive Officer of the Behavioural Insights Team in the UK - unofficially known as the ‘Nudge Unit'. In this episode, we dive into how behavioral science works to change people’s behavior and how small tweaks can actually create massive change. This is the episode to listen to to understand how behavioral science can help prevent malnutrition, reduce inter-group conflict, generate savings for retirement, and help NGOs and government craft more effective policy. 

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No conversation about social impact is complete without an understanding of randomized control trials, or RCTs. In this episode, we delve into what they are and how they measure impact with Rachel Glennerster, the new chief economist at the Department for International Development (DFID) in the UK. In an episode recorded in London, Glennerster gives her insights on the randomization movement, and also talks about the divide between academics and policy makers, and why it’s important that they find ways to work together better.

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Geoff Mulgan, head of the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) talks about what he calls ‘Collective Intelligence’: how machines and humans can collaborate to solve problems -- like dealing with epidemics, predicting war and conflict, or collecting data during natural disasters.

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