Trump is back in the White House and as anticipated, his administration is moving fast and breaking things. One of the first aspects of government to get stepped on was USAID, one of the biggest financiers and administrators of global development, including programs like PEPFAR. To understand the implications of this for the wider global philanthropy sector, ePODstemology reached out to Shonali Banerjee, Assistant Professor of International Development at the University of Warwick. She was previously a postdoc at the University of Cambridge’s centre for strategic philanthropy. Her work has been published in Third World Quarterly and Development in Practice, and she has a book, Horizontal Development: Shifting Power and Privilege in Aid, forthcoming with Bristol University Press. We discuss not just Trump’s impact but her work more broadly, especially the rapidly rising momentum of ‘trust-based philanthropy’. 

Shonali’s website

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/banerjee-shonali/

Shonali’s book

https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/horizontal-development