InvestZambia and the Unknown Economics

Guest blog by Cindy Xin, Zeeshan Ali, Aleksandar Jakovljević, Kelly Jian

The 6-week adventure of how four people who have never been to Zambia fell in love with the country and its challenges in attracting investment.

January 2024. In our first week of the PDIA course, Salimah Samji (the Instructor) listed 8 possible topics that teams would eventually tackle. Of all the big challenges, one stood out as particularly intractable: how do you attract investment into Zambia, a country known as the first COVID-era country to default on its sovereign debt?

Empowering Papua New Guinea’s Youth through Art

Guest blog written by Hananiah Dickson, Nelson Kokoa, Jasmine Kuliniasi, Emmanuel Wanya

In the heart of Papua New Guinea, where the rich tapestry of tradition and culture intertwines, our team: Radical Renaissance, stands resolute in our mission. Comprising four individuals from Art Activism PNG, we are on a quest to tackle a daunting challenge – youth unemployment. Our weapon of choice? Art. Armed with the Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) Program, we’re forging new pathways, empowering young artists and creative minds to shape their destinies. We’re on a mission to ignite a movement, where the creative industry in Papua New Guinea becomes a beacon of opportunity and cultural growth, while we celebrate our nation’s rich heritage.

Improving Learning of K-9 Students in Brazil 

Guest blog by Ig Ibert Bittencourt, IPP’23

The main lessons from this course were:

• Implementation is about people
• Complex problems demand learning every time to overcome the unknowns
• Building acceptance and authorization is as important as tackling the implementation challenge
• Iterate, iterate, iterate
• Implementation success is about celebrating small wins along the way
• Trust in the process

Reimagining the Future of Wyoming

Guest blog by Anna Rhee, Barkha Tripathi, Naomi Beyth-Zoran, Freddy Guevara

Key Learnings from the Course

Working in teams: As aspiring policy practitioners, we never thought as fundamentally and structurally about group-work as we did in this course. Oftentimes, work is not mobilized or its potential remains unmet because people are struggling to align and keep working together. This course showed how imperative it is to have a solid working dynamic with your group and how that shows in the final outcome. For us, the team-work process was fairly smooth because we kept accountability to each other and to our authorizer as the baseline throughout the 6 weeks. We were consistently available for each other, and tried our best to pick up the submissions, stakeholder conversations, and so on whenever someone on the team could not meet their share of the work. The team spirit and camaraderie were high throughout, and especially remained intact during mild disagreements. Because most of us could not collectively engage with all stakeholders, we came in with different questions/perspectives to team meetings, and it was challenging to align on the “head of the fish” as we kept iterating. However, most of us found the process of brainstorming valuable for our individual learning! We learnt a lot from each other each week.

Commuting Challenges in New Orleans: It’s been Quite a Ride! 

Guest blog by Alexandra Lastra Andrade, Bran Shim, Giovanna Lia Toledo, Mannat Singh, and Courtney Young

 “The Drive Alone Mode is too high.” In a span of just six weeks, our team was tasked with learning and applying Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) to understand what this statement meant to us—and what it meant for the people of New Orleans. 

We are a group of public policy students trained in economics, urban planning, and finance with experience spanning the public, private, and non-profit sectors. We were presented with the challenge of car ridership in New Orleans, a seemingly simple problem but one that we would come to realize was incredibly hard to address. With group members from Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, India, and the United States, it was safe to say that none of us were familiar with the issue we were about to tackle. Fortunately, we were led by a team of experts who guided us along the way. Matt Andrews and Salimah Samji presented us with clear frameworks to breakdown a problem and iterate along the way. Derek Chisholm, a senior-level project manager at AECOM, who served as our authorizer, brought expertise in the field of transportation in New Orleans and helped us develop a nuanced understanding of the issue. 

Addressing the High Rate of Objection of Property Valuation Assessments in Uganda

Guest blog by Gilbert Kermundu, IPP’23

As I reflect on my journey through Implementing Public Policy (IPP) program, my challenge focused on the regulatory gaps in property valuation in Uganda. Despite existing legislative pieces like the Land Act Cap 227, Land Acquisition Act Cap 226 and the 1995 Constitution, a principal legislation addressing valuation practices is notably absent and this has contributed to inconsistencies and challenges with the valuation profession, hindering its effectiveness and potentially impacting property related decision making. As a result of this program, I am compelled to share the profound learnings and experiences that have shaped my understanding of the policy implementation process. 

Enabling Emerging Developers to Increase Housing Development in New Bedford, MA

Guest blog by Joshua Amaral, LEG’23

I was fortunate to be in a very diverse group, in terms of geographic location, industry, and experience. But given this, I was especially struck by the similarities, or common threads, that ran between all of our economic growth challenges. My challenge is a fairly small one in the grand scheme of things – spurring housing development in one midsize American city – and at first glance, you would assume has little to do with economic empowerment of women in Saudi Arabia, or economic development in reserve lands of Vancouver. And yet, much of the types of interventions are identical. Making connections, increasing the surface area of your approaches, and building skills are all the same. It was clear that these issues all have a Dunning-Kruger effect to them – they appear really simple to solve, and then endlessly complex and intractable, and then end up distilled down to a relatively simple intervention.  

Developing a Holistic Approach in Education to Improve Students’ Wellbeing and Academic Achievement in Lebanon

Guest blog by Hilda El Khoury, IPP’23

The main key learnings from this course were many; among them I can name “taking risks on things we care about, and disappointing people in a way they can absorb”. This message became a continuous alarm for me, I keep assessing what could be the threshold of people I work with and those I work for, in the middle of all the unknowns that we are experiencing in the region. Sometimes, disappointment reaches me first, especially when it comes from the system. So, I have to absorb it first, manage it, mitigate its damage, then pass the absorbable disappointment to my team. 

Who Owns the Future and How to Lead Economic Growth in Egypt?

Guest blog by Ghada Abuzaid, LEG’23

Cities and countries can create vibrant economies out of the blues, putting in place the right ingredients, driven by the right people and institutions, using the right tools. But it takes a steep climb. It takes action, learning, agility and patience, trust and legitimacy to pursue higher scale the right of change/reforms. There is no one blueprint for nations’ building. On the contrary, growth has a specific DNA: the mix of the know-how, the way it relates and mixes with one another other, the way it is coordinated and orchestrated is unique to that specific place at that specific time. 

Reforming Governance Process for Accelerating Economic Reforms in Azerbaijan 

Guest blog by Vusal Shikhaliyev, IPP’23

The aspirations for accelerating economic reforms required a new approach in the reform governance process to enable a much faster process desired by the government to improve the business environment and attract investments into non-oil sector.