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    CGD's Masood Ahmed reflects on long arc of development

    The Center for Global Development's outgoing president says development has slipped from its golden moment in the sun and needs to adapt.

    By Anna Gawel // 12 March 2024
    After 35 years of working in development, Masood Ahmed has seen the sector in both its heyday and the new day it’s facing now. Ahmed is stepping down from the well-known Center for Global Development, which he has led since January 2017. His presidency capped a long career driving economic development policy initiatives relating to debt, aid effectiveness, trade, and global economic prospects at major institutions including the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the U.K.’s defunct Department for International Development. That department, then known as DFID, was subsumed by the Foreign Commonwealth Office in 2020. Before that merger, Ahmed served in what he called the “heyday” of U.K. aid from 2003 to 2006. “And also, I would say it was a period when development cooperation itself was going through a moment in the sun,” he told Devex Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar in an expansive interview. “Everybody wanted to be able to show that what they did, in whatever government ministry they were in, whether they were in education or in defense or in foreign policy, that it was going to have some spillover positive effect on development, because being able to show results on development was seen as a plus for everybody else,” he said. Ahmed described it as a remarkable period of progress. “If you write up this story in the big headlines in 200 years, it'll be like this was the most successful period in human history in terms of raising living standards for billions of people in ways that had never been seen before,” he said. “And you'll see that average incomes have gone up, all the indicators, whether it's child mortality, whether it's life expectancy, all of these things have improved.” But he said while “this rising tide has lifted most boats,” there remained places of extraordinary destitution, which did not have the capacity to take advantage of improved living standards. “So it's almost like you've got a boat, which is wedged in between boulders or rocks,” he said, “so when the water, the tide, is rising, all that's happening is that it's getting drowned rather than being lifted by the tide.” He said these places required custom-built solutions and multidisciplinary thinking, rather than relying on standard development practice. “So it requires you to go outside your comfort zone,” he said. He said it also requires understanding that development is in a very different place today than when communism fell; a unipolar world emerged, and “the next big global project” was to eradicate poverty. Ahmed ascribed some of the shifts to the COVID-19 pandemic, when vaccine hoarding and nationalism engendered an “erosion of trust” between the global south and global north “in ways that really are quite corrosive.” He pointed out that countries in the global south also see “double standards” in the financial tap that the West opened up for Ukraine, while many other humanitarian crises remain sorely underfunded. Another factor, he said, is that the geopolitics of aid has become much harder. “There's great power rivalry between the U.S. and China … so in all of this, the development offer has to adapt and change,” he said. “I do feel that for development cooperation to have a seat at the table, where the political decision-makers are grappling with this agenda, we have to bring our expertise, but bring also our willingness to recognize that it is a different world in which we live.” A big part of that change is, of course, climate change — which he said requires trillions of new funding to tackle, even as donor budgets are increasingly strapped. The World Bank, where Ahmed worked for 21 years, is currently grappling with addressing the issue alongside its traditional anti-poverty mandate. Ahmed sees the challenges of climate and poverty as interwoven. A school that was built to function in the summer at particular temperatures will now have to be built to withstand much higher temperatures — factors that have to be taken into account when planning out investments. And, he added, the issue becomes more complicated when it comes to mitigation. “To what extent do you use the existing institutions that we have to also help developing countries who are short of access to resources from capital markets undertake the kinds of investments that will have an impact on the future trajectory of carbon emissions?” he said, noting that this balancing act is a “legitimate conversation.” At the end of the day, Ahmed said the “really important issue that we should be focusing on is how do we make sure that the money we spend is spent in the most effective way.” But it’s important to recognize that development from the outside has its limitations, he said, and that the biggest influence on a society’s development comes from within. “I think the one lesson that took me a while to learn but I'm pretty convinced of now is that the primary trajectory for whether societies make progress in ways that we think of as improved material conditions, improved living conditions, human development for people, the primary determinants of that trajectory come from within that society,” he said. “You can bring a lot of help. Sometimes money is very important, resources are important,” he added. “But while you can bring these things to countries, it's much harder to ensure that they will be taken up and used in ways that are effective, unless there are people within those countries who are committed to doing so. And I think that's one of the lessons — is just humility.”

    After 35 years of working in development, Masood Ahmed has seen the sector in both its heyday and the new day it’s facing now.

    Ahmed is stepping down from the well-known Center for Global Development, which he has led since January 2017. His presidency capped a long career driving economic development policy initiatives relating to debt, aid effectiveness, trade, and global economic prospects at major institutions including the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the U.K.’s defunct Department for International Development.

    That department, then known as DFID, was subsumed by the Foreign Commonwealth Office in 2020. Before that merger, Ahmed served in what he called the “heyday” of U.K. aid from 2003 to 2006.

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    About the author

    • Anna Gawel

      Anna Gawel

      Anna Gawel is the Managing Editor of Devex. She previously worked as the managing editor of The Washington Diplomat, the flagship publication of D.C.’s diplomatic community. She’s had hundreds of articles published on world affairs, U.S. foreign policy, politics, security, trade, travel and the arts on topics ranging from the impact of State Department budget cuts to Caribbean efforts to fight climate change. She was also a broadcast producer and digital editor at WTOP News and host of the Global 360 podcast. She holds a journalism degree from the University of Maryland in College Park.

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