This Week in Global Development

During the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai, more than 110 countries committed to triple renewable energy capacity worldwide by 2030. Africa, in particular, is a key source of critical minerals such as copper, lithium, nickel, and cobalt, which are needed to power clean technologies ranging from electric vehicles to wind turbines. But without proper safeguards in place, there is a risk that the mining of minerals for the green energy transition could end up exacerbating existing inequalities.

“One key element is social equity; prioritizing vulnerable communities to ensure that they benefit from the transition, including job creation, access to affordable clean energy, and protection from adverse impacts,” said professor Youba Sokona, former vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Professor Sokona was joined by Yamide Dagnet, former director of climate justice at Open Society Foundations, and Devex’s Raj Kumar for a special episode of This Week in Global Development.

2023 was the hottest year on record. So it’s no surprise that the climate emergency was a big focus of last week’s World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

Devex’s Raj Kumar sat down with several leaders to discuss how the climate crisis intersects with their work: Peter Sands, the executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; Sophie Atiende, CEO of the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery; and Jonathan Reckford, CEO of Habitat for Humanity.

Together, they explore the interconnections between climate change and the issues they are focused on, as well as the urgency for action.

Sands describes a visit to northern Nigeria with Muhammad Ali Pate, the country’s minister of health and social welfare, where they saw “a shocking number” of children who were malnourished and severely ill with malaria.

“It’s a good example of how the climate change interaction is sort of multifactorial,” he said, explaining how climate change is harming agricultural productivity, leading to malnutrition, and changing the epidemiology of malaria.

“The combined impact of that is more severely ill children and more deaths of small children,” Sands said. “That's the kind of thing we're still trying to understand. But my view is we need to act while we learn. We can't wait for a perfect answer; we need to be doing more in anticipation of how we see this unfolding.”

Listen to the episode to hear more from Sands, Atiende, and Reckord, who joined Kumar for the Davos Dispatch podcast, recorded from WEF in Davos, Switzerland.

There are a growing number of social entrepreneurs using technology to address a range of development challenges in Africa, from agriculture healthcare to education. But many of them say that financing is the greatest barrier to scale.

At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2024, Devex’s Raj Kumar sat down with three social entrepreneurs: Temie Giwa-Tubosun, CEO of LifeBank, a healthcare technology and logistics company delivering critical medical supplies, Gerald Abila, founder of BarefootLaw, a non-profit in Uganda providing access to justice through technology, and Mayur Patel, chief commercial officer at M-Kopa, an asset financing platform in Africa.

Their conversations point to several ways social entrepreneurs are using technology to address social challenges, as well as the crucial role financing must play in scaling their impact.
"The big barriers for growth are not demand,” Patel said. “They're not the scalability of the platform, or the opportunity. The big barriers to growth are figuring out how you solve the working capital cycle.”

Listen to the episode to hear more from Giwa-Tubosun, Abila, and Patel, who joined Kumar for the Davos Dispatch podcast, recorded from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.