We have released a new episode in our podcast series A Decade of Building State Capability. In this episode, BSC Director Salimah Samji interviews Cara Myers, who we met in 2018 when she took our MLD103 class as an MPAID student at the Harvard Kennedy School.
In this episode, Cara discusses her work with Mozambique School Lunch Initiative which provides school lunches to children in drought-stricken areas of Mozambique. She shares her journey scaling this work, iterating along the way, and ensuring the work remains locally driven.
Cara is Co-founder and Director of Development and Innovation at the Mozambique School Lunch Initiative (MSLI). She is passionate about systems change to address complex problems, particularly among children and youth in Mozambique. In parallel to her work with MSLI, Cara has also held a number of other roles in the international development sector. She is currently a Program Officer for the Women’s Economic Empowerment team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where her work focuses on generating data and evidence for increasing women’s income and agency in sub-Saharan Africa. Previously, she has also worked as a consultant for the World Bank, specifically with the Global Poverty and Equity Practice in Mozambique and Uganda, where she contributed to the analytical work on poverty, vulnerability, and inclusive growth. She has also worked as a Research Associate for Innovations for Poverty Action in Kenya, led independent research as a Fulbright Research Fellow in Brazil, and worked on livelihood development programs for Samaritan’s Purse in Mozambique. Cara holds a Master’s in Public Administration in International Development (2018) from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a B.A. in International Politics and Economics (2013) from Middlebury College.
To learn more about Cara’s work, visit Mozambique School Lunch Initiative, read this BSC blog post, or read this HKS magazine article.
