San Pedro Garza García was the first municipality in Mexico hit by COVID-19 and the first to declare an emergency. In this interview with Mayor Miguel Treviño and Dino Cantú-Pedraza (Secretary for Innovation and Public Engagement), we hear about what it's like as a person to run a city and make decisions during a pandemic with a heavy human toll, how Mayors around the world and their teams are trading notes, and some of the major transformations cities are thinking about following the immediate crisis. This interview was recorded May 6, 2020.

This week, we dive into how the Bangladesh government is adapting to serve millions of children who are suddenly out of school. Also: why coming out of lockdown is so much harder than going into it and why we need a more nuanced view of a “health-first” lockdown in a country where many people are at risk of going hungry. This interview with Anir Chowdhury was recorded May 1, 2020.

How do you get essential goods to people through e-commerce when the majority of your country isn’t online? Introducing p-commerce. Also: updates on the effort to build a social safety net for 5 million people and how getting intra-government buy-in for projects has changed in the age of coronavirus. This interview with Anir Chowdhury was recorded on April 24, 2020.

Anir Chowdhury, who is at the frontlines of Bangladesh’s COVID-19 response, tells us how government gets things done fast, how some pre-COVID investments by government are turning out to be a lifeline for deploying national programmes, and how the Bangladesh government is assembling a safety net for 5 million people in two weeks.

In this episode, we interview Anir Chowdhury, policy advisor with UNDP and the Government of Bangladesh and Member of the Prime Minister’s National Digital Task Force, about the work that is happening to serve millions of people in Bangladesh in the first weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak. This interview was recorded on April 10, 2020.