Welcome to the Harvard Center for International Development’s Beyond COVID podcast. This podcast is a series of conversations with CID faculty experts on various key dimensions of COVID response and recovery. Our goal with these conversations, and with CID’s Beyond COVID research initiative, is to make use of lessons learned and capitalize on emergent innovations sparked by the pandemic in order to address losses and reimagine global development in the post-COVID era.

On March 3, 2022, we were joined by Walter Willett, Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. CID Student Ambassador Kerianne DiBattista sat down with Walter to discuss nutrition, climate change, and COVID-19.

Nutrition, Climate Change, and COVID-19

Join Harvard University's Center for International Development for the inaugural episode of 2024’s Road to GEM podcast series, setting the stage for CID's annual conference, which this year focuses on gender and development. In this episode, CID Executive Director Fatema Z. Sumar and Research Fellow Mara Bolis engage in a thought-provoking conversation about gender and international development—reflecting on the sector's progress, current status, and the path ahead. Drawing from their extensive field experiences, Fatema and Mara offer compelling perspectives on the necessary actions to shape a future where every individual, regardless of gender, can thrive. 
Hosted by Evy Peña, MPA student at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government

Centering Gender in International Development

In this episode of Road to GEM, Harvard Kennedy School’s Dr. Aarushi Jain speaks with Dr. Bhaskar Chakravorti, Dean of Global Business at Tufts University’s Fletcher School and Founding Director of Digital Planet, about the uneven global spread of artificial intelligence.

While AI holds promise for breakthroughs in healthcare, agriculture, education, and governance, Dr. Chakravorti sounds a note of caution: these benefits are far from equitably distributed. The conversation explores how AI is being built on deeply unequal data, why access and usage remain skewed across geographies, and how business models, environmental costs, and trust deficits might further widen the digital divide.

Drawing on insights from the Digital Evolution Index and years of work across policy, tech, and consulting, Dr. Chakravorti outlines six key divides shaping our AI future — data, income, usage, geography, production, and sustainability. He also shares tangible examples where AI can support smallholder farmers, underserved patients, and young learners, if deployed wisely.
This episode is a must-listen for anyone grappling with AI’s role in development, digital governance, and the urgent need to build inclusive systems before inequality becomes algorithmically entrenched.

Guest: Dr. Bhaskar Chakravorti, Dean of Global Business at The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Host: Dr. Aarushi Jain, Edward S. Mason Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School


Algorithms and Inequality: Who Wins in the Age of AI?

HKS Professor Thomas Patterson, author of an ongoing series of reports out of the Shorenstein Center on the media's coverage of the 2016 election cycle, discusses what he sees as troubling consequences of how the press approaches reporting on the campaign.

How the Press Covers the Election | PolicyCast

Originally recorded on December 4, 2020.

Carolina Sanchez-Paramo, Global Director of Poverty & Equity Global Practice at the World Bank, continues her discussion after a virtual CID Speaker Series event on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated economic crisis on households, which are significant, pervasive, and worsening in some cases. The design and implementation of an effective policy response requires that decision makers have access to timely information about who is affected and how. With COVID-19 having brought traditional data collection efforts to a halt, last spring the World Bank launched an unprecedented data collection effort aimed at filling this critical information gap. As part of this effort, phone surveys are currently under implementation or preparation in over 100 countries to obtain real-time information on the socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic on households and individuals. 

Carolina Sanchez is the Global Director of Poverty & Equity Global Practice at the World Bank. In her talk, she drew from from this data and other analysis to present the latest evidence on the poverty and distributional impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated economic crisis.

Emerging Evidence On The Socio-Economic Impacts Of COVID-19 On Households

Incredible progress has been made throughout the world in recent years. However, globalization has failed to deliver on its promises. As problems like unequal access to education and healthcare, environmental degradation, and stretched finances persist, we must continue building on decades of transformative development work.

The Center for International Development (CID) is a university-wide center based at the Harvard Kennedy School that seeks to solve these pressing development problems—and many more.

At CID, we believe leveraging global talent is the key to enabling development for all. We teach to build capacity, conduct research that guides development policy, and convene talent to advance ideas for a thriving world. Addressing today’s challenges to international development also requires bridging academic expertise with practitioner experience. Through collaborative, in-country partnerships, CID’s research programs, faculty, and students deploy an analytical framework and context-dependent approaches to tackle development problems from all angles, in every region of the globe.

Algorithms and Inequality: Who Wins in the Age of AI?

Harvard Center for International Development

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