Global Development Institute podcast

This episode comes from the African Cities Research Consortium podcast.

“It’s not our data as SDI, it’s not ACRC data, it’s not their data. It’s the community’s data. So you have to have that understanding that, at the end of the day, it has to benefit the community.”

In this episode, Miriam Maina talks to Charity Mumbi and Jane Wairutu from SDI-Kenya about community-led mapping and data collection, participatory planning processes, and the role of research in inclusive urban transformation.

Charity Mumbi is an urban and regional planner and a project officer at SDI-Kenya, supporting community-led planning, research and data management activities.

Jane Wairutu is a sociologist and programme manager at SDI-Kenya, working closely with data and project implementation teams.

Miriam Maina is from Nairobi and is a postdoctoral research fellow at the African Cities Research Consortium, working on the housing domain.

The African Cities Research Consortium is a major six-year investment by FCDO to fund new, operationally-relevant research to address intractable development challenges in African cities.

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In the latest Global Development Institute podcast Amani Abou-Zeid, African Union Commissioner in charge of infrastructure, energy and ICT, talks to Seth Schindler about energy security and infrastructural development in Africa.

Ahead of COP27 in Egypt, they reflect on Africa’s energy “evolution” in relation to climate change, why integration is key to bridging the continent’s infrastructure gap, the impact of rising interest rates on foreign and local investment, and the regional innovation and cooperation that has emerged in response to multiple crises, including Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine.

Amani Abou-Zeid is the twice-elected African Union Commissioner in charge of infrastructure, energy and ICT, and is also chair of African Cities Research Consortium's advisory group, which is based at GDI. She holds a PhD in social and economic development from the Global Development Institute at The University of Manchester.

Seth Schindler is senior lecturer in urban development and transformation at The University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute and co-research director of the African Cities Research Consortium.

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Development studies often focuses on the negative: constraints, challenges, negative impacts, etc. But what if we could use new digital datasets to identify positive deviants: outlier individuals, households, districts and others that outperform their peers in achievement of development goals?

In this episode, Basma Albanna and Richard Heeks discuss the “Data-Powered Positive Deviance” (DPPD) programme. The programme built on an original idea by GDI researcher, Basma Albanna, that was fleshed out in a paper co-authored with Richard Heeks, GDI’s Professor of Digital Development. It argued that traditional methods of identifying positive deviants relied on costly and time-consuming primary data-gathering from the field. Instead, it might be possible to identify outliers in the growing number of digital datasets already available.

Basma Albanna studied for her PhD at the Global Development Institute. She is now a lecturer at Ain Shams University and a Consultant for the GIZ Data Lab

More about Basma Albanna:

• Basma Albanna
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Richard Heeks is Professor of Digital Development in the Global Development Institute, part of the School of Environment, Education and Development.  He is Director of the Centre for Digital Development.

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• Richard Heeks
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More about the“Data-Powered Positive Deviance programme

• Find out more about DPPD 
• Read the paper: Data-powered positive deviance: Combining traditional and non-traditional data to identify and characterise development-related outperformers 
• Data Powered Positive Deviance blog
• Data Powered Positive Deviance handbook 
• Contact the Data Powered Positive Deviance team  

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In this episode, Stefano Ponte talks to Aarti Krishnan about his research into sustainability, the wine and seafood value chains in South Africa and his recent book Business, Power and Sustainability in a World of Global Value Chains

Dr Stefano Ponte is a Professor of International Political Economy at Copenhagen Business School. His research looks at transnational economic and environmental governance, with a focus on overlaps and tensions between private authority and public regulation. Dr Aarti Krishnan is a Hallsworth Research Fellow at the Global Development Institute

More about Stefano Ponte:

• Stefano Ponte
• Contested Sustainability: The Political Ecology of Conservation and Development Partnerships in Tanzania
• Business, Power and Sustainability in a World of Global Value Chains
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More about Aarti Krishnan

• Aarti Krishnan 
• Read Aarti’s recent article on Multichain strategies and economic upgrading in global value chains: Evidence from Kenyan horticulture

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In the second of our Shifting South series, Stephanie Barrientos talks to Margareet Visser and Maggie Opondo. They reflect on the project and their research into horticultural value chains. 

Shifting South investigated:

• the rise of South-South trade through regional and domestic markets
• what this means for decent work – especially women in precarious jobs
• and looked at specific commodities and value chains in the horticulture and garment sectors in South Africa, Lesotho and Kenya.

Panel

• Prof. Stephanie Barrientos, Global Development Institute, The University of Manchester
• Dr Maggie Opondo, The Institute for Climate Change and Adaptation, The University of Nairobi
• Margareet Visser, Institute of Development and Labour Law, University of Cape Town

• Read a transcript of the podcast

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In the first of our Shifting South series, Stephanie Barrientos talks to Khalid Nadvi and Shane Godfrey. They reflect on the project and their research into regional garment value chains, and decent work in Southern Africa.

Shifting South investigated:

• the rise of South-South trade through regional and domestic markets
• what this means for decent work – especially women in precarious jobs
• and looked at specific commodities and value chains in the horticulture and garment sectors in South Africa, Lesotho and Kenya.

Panel

• Prof. Stephanie Barrientos, Global Development Institute, The University of Manchester
• Dr Shane Godfrey, Institute of Development and Labour Law, University of Cape Town
• Prof. Khalid Nadvi, Global Development Institute, The University of Manchester

• Read a transcript of the podcast

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In the latest episode of the GDI podcast, Professor Stefan Dercon talks to Dr Sophie van Huellen.

They discuss Stefan's new book, "Gambling on Development: why some countries win and others lose", his recent departure from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and his advice to academics wanting to work with civil servants and policymakers.

Stefan Dercon is Professor of Economic Policy at Oxford University. Between 2011 and 2017, he was Chief Economist of the Department of International Development (DFID), and from 20200- 2022, he was the Development Policy Advisor to successive Foreign Secretaries at the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Sophie van Huellen is a Lecturer in Development Economics at the Global Development Institute.

• Transcript and more information

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GDI’s Resources, Environment, and Development research group have recently organised a series of talks on ‘Red Talks: on the Politics of Resources, Environment and Development'

The first event welcomed Dr Maria Christina Fragkou, an environmental scientist currently working as an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Chile to discuss ‘Urban metabolism, water scarcity and seawater desalination in Chile under a neoliberal paradigm’

In her talk, Maria shared her research on the current water crisis in Chile, and the hydro-social implications of desalination (widely promoted as a solution to the crisis) from an urban socio-economic metabolism perspective. The increasing water shortages along Chile, and the consequent pressure on the country’s continental water sources, has resulted in the consolidation of seawater desalination as the Chilean State’s main strategy for supplying drinking water to coastal populations in arid areas. Despite the growing expansion of this technology, the social implications of desalinated water distribution for human consumption in Chilean cities have not yet been studied.

• A transcript of the talk 

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While the Covid-19 pandemic has caused enormous devastation and disruption in health, social and economic terms, the remarkably quick development of Covid-19 vaccines is an enormous achievement. Yet despite frequent statements that “it's not over anywhere, until it’s over everywhere”, the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines has been grossly inequitable – defying what the world needs epidemiologically and economically, as well as ethically.

The panel of leading academic and activist experts reflect on one of the biggest immediate problems facing the world – looking back at how global Covid-19 vaccine inequality has emerged and exploring what needs to happen now and in the future to address the ongoing issue, and help prevent similar future problems. It will explore aspects including the roles and limitations of technology transfer, patent protection, vaccine nationalism, COVAX as a multilateral initiative.
Speakers:
Karrar Karrar is a Senior Advisor – Pharmaceutical Policy, Save the Children
Lara Dovifat is Campaign Manager, Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF)
Prof. Ken Shadlen is a Professor of Development Studies, LSE)
Chair:
Rory Horner Senior Lecturer, Global Development Institute, University of Manchester

• Read a transcript of the podcast

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Yeling Tan discusses her book, Disaggregating China, Inc: State Strategies in the Liberal Economic Order. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 represented an historic opportunity to peacefully integrate a rising economic power into the international order based on market-liberal rules. Yet rising economic tensions between the US and China indicate that this integration process has run into trouble. To what extent has the liberal internationalist promise of the WTO been fulfilled? To answer this question, this podcast breaks open the black box of the massive Chinese state and unpacks the economic strategies that central economic agencies as well as subnational authorities adopted in response to WTO rules demanding far-reaching modifications to China’s domestic institutions. Tan explains why, rather than imposing constraints, WTO entry provoked divergent policy responses from different actors within the Chinese state, in ways neither expected nor desired by the architects of the WTO.

Yeling Tan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at The University of Oregon

• Read a transcript of the podcast

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