The Center for International Development (CID) at Harvard University is a university-wide center that works to advance the understanding of development challenges and offer viable solutions to problems of global poverty. CID is Harvard’s leading research hub focusing on resolving the dilemmas of public policy associated with generating stable, shared, and sustainable prosperity in developing countries. Their ongoing mission is to apply knowledge to and revolutionize the world of development practice.

CID's primary activities and programs seek to:

• - Change the way in which growth strategies are conceived, designed, and implemented
• - Reinvent development policy to facilitate countries’ move to higher productivity activities
• - Extend markets to the underserved and empower the disenfranchised
• - Improve service delivery in education, health, and other social services
• - Design institutions, policies and practices that promote sustainable development which meet human needs while conserving the earth’s life support systems

In order to effectively address the world’s most intractable problems, CID seeks to bridge the gaps between disciplines. By convening Harvard’s leading experts and engaging colleagues throughout the world, CID pursues the science of explaining the sources of and remedies for entrenched global poverty, and the political and environmental circumstances that surround it. 

As a University-wide research center, CID draws upon faculty, staff, and researchers from the:

• - Kennedy School
• - Faculty of Arts and Sciences
• - School of Public Health
• - Medical School
• - Graduate School of Education
• - Graduate School of Design
• - Law School
• - Business School

Though housed at the Kennedy School, connections with all of these schools positions CID to engage directly with governments and to access policy makers to effect good policy decisions and increase prosperity in all regions of the globe.

The leadership of CID recognizes that solutions to global challenges are possible, but will require breakthroughs in approaches at the cutting edge of the hard sciences, the social sciences, ethics and politics.

Ricardo Hausmann, Professor of the Practice of Economic Development at the Kennedy School, became the Director of CID on October 12, 2005.

Harvard’s students of international development will be future policy leaders of the world. Through both graduate and undergraduate fellowships, as well as close ties to the Master’s of Public Administration in International Development (MPA/ID) at the Kennedy School, CID is investing in the future of global development.

Research at CID is conducted through three primary programs that address the core intellectual challenges of sustainable development: The Growth Lab, Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD), and Building State Capability.