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.