BURLINGTON, Vt. — The pandemic has created new rules for international travel, and the global development industry has not been spared.
While restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have created significant disruption across the health, development, and humanitarian landscape — interrupting a range of basic services, and threatening some long-held goals — they have also created an opportunity for introspection and could serve as a catalyst for changes that many agree are overdue, experts told Devex.
“I think there are a lot of things in the industry that we’ve said for years about local capacity building, local agency, using local partners, and moving away from a completely expat-driven model, that — I hope — this is forcing the hand on,” said Keith Ives, co-founder and CEO of monitoring and evaluation firm Causal Design.