Guest blog by Moses Sitati When I received a work email asking for my interest in taking the Leading Economic Growth course, I quickly had a look and was not entirely sure that it was the one for me. I did some quick mental calculation to check whether it made sense for me to devote scarce…Continue Reading A Hands-on Deconstruction of Youth Unemployment in Kenya
Guest blog written by Dr Himanshu Jha Dr Himanshu Jha is a Lecturer and Research Fellow at the Department of Political Science, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University. What engenders state capacity in a weak state? How do weak states develop state capacity? And Under what conditions do policy paradigms succeed in historically weak states? In this…Continue Reading Developing State Capacity in a Weak State
Guest blog by Maggie Jones Finding contractors in Texas right now is hard. Really hard. Finding contractors to work on a niche federally-funded home repair program with lots of red tape and paperwork is nearly impossible. Or so we thought. Fortunately for us, the many lessons from Leading Economic Growth over the last 10 weeks have…Continue Reading What Scrabble-playing Monkeys Have to Do with Contractors in Texas: Lessons from Leading Economic Growth
written by Michael Woolcock Half-way through my HKS course on ‘Social Institutions and Economic Development’ I host a class, usually timed to be given on the eve of spring break, on what it means to be a “development expert”, especially as it pertains to engaging with social institutions. For better or worse, I now have…Continue Reading On being and becoming a “development expert”
Guest blog by Urkhan Seyidov Urkhan Seyidov is an expert in the field of innovation and strategic communication, a senior fellow of the Center for Political Psychology in Azerbaijan, and the author of two books: Innovation – Implementation Guidelines and Soft power and Public Diplomacy of Azerbaijan in the Digital Age. Imagine a gleaming government office tower in…Continue Reading Anticipatory Government
written by Michelle Kaffenberger, Danielle Sobol, Deborah Spindelman, Marla Spivack A new paper shows that girls who are learning are more likely to stay in school. Improving learning could be key to achieving both schooling and learning goals. The G7 recently agreed to two new education objectives: ensure that 40 million more girls attend school and that…Continue Reading To Increase Girls’ Schooling, Improve Girls’ Learning
Guest blog written by Murtala Mohammad Abubakar The understanding of Public Policy Implementation became a necessity for me after my appointment as the Senior Special Assistant on SDGs to the Executive Governor of Nasarawa State, Nigeria. My career path has, up till then been in the Private sector where the main aim is profiteering as…Continue Reading Encouraging Nigeria’s youth to engage in agribusiness
written by Salimah Samji Solving public problems is a hard and thankless job. One that is undertaken with a shortage of time as well as resources, and often under pressure to deliver results. A common approach used to solve public problems is to develop a plan, sometimes with experts, and then to assume that implementation…Continue Reading Building a Movement of Public Problem Solvers
Guest blog written by Francisco Castro-y-Ortíz I work for a multilateral development organization—the Inter-American Development Bank—and am a citizen from a Latin-American Middle-Income Country (MIC). Because of this background, the main economic problem I am most concerned about relates to my own country—Mexico—and the Latin-American and Caribbean region (LAC) as a whole. It is about…Continue Reading Can PDIA approaches help to enhance the development of Institutional Strategies in Multilateral Organizations
Guest blog written by Harry Fletcher-Wood What do these have in common? All three ran late and overbudget: Crossrail is 3 years late and £2 billion overbudget; the Edinburgh Tram was half-finished 3 years late and £231 million overbudget; the NHS IT programme was abandoned after 10 years and £6 billion. Most big projects exceed…Continue Reading Better school improvement through Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation
