Event: “Ask Me Anything” featuring Lant Pritchett

Lant Pritchett, an Associate at Building State Capability and Research Director at Labor Mobility Partnerships (LaMP), visited the Harvard Kennedy School for a Q&A session on December 4, 2025. He addressed students’ most pressing questions on international development.

During the discussion, Pritchett offered a provocative reframing of the current crisis in international development. Rather than viewing recent funding cuts and institutional collapse as a demand-side problem, Pritchett argues that the demand for people who can effectively help governments achieve development has never been higher. The financing model for development, however, has collapsed. Pritchett draws a sharp distinction between development work and charity work. Development involves helping countries accomplish a four-fold transformation: building a higher-productivity economy, cultivating a more capable state, establishing a more responsive polity, and advancing equality and social cohesion. Charity work, on the other hand, mitigates the consequences of development’s absence. The post-1990 drift of development institutions toward financing humanitarian work was always politically unsustainable, and the current changes represent the end of that financing model rather than the end of development itself. The shift may restore clarity about what it means to be an effective development professional.

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