Devex World: The dawn of a new era

On Tuesday, Devex brought together a range of established and unconventional players in the global development community for a day of conversations designed to converge, exchange, and inspire.

The day-long drumbeat was about the new era of development — echoed one final time by the United States government’s top development official.

“Hopefully we’re always in a new era,” said Gayle Smith, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s administrator, in the closing session of Devex World. But today’s landscape is characterized by a much richer menu of options for countries to pursue their development goals, a wider array of partners — necessarily so because of the government’s budgetary constraints — and, overall, more tools on hand to “do” development. All told, having a broader toolkit to pursue development makes what were previously considered agency-critical issues just a decade ago seem like a walk in the park today, said Smith.