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

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

On this week’s podcast, Salimah Samji, Director of the Building State Capability program at CID and Tim McNaught, Building State Capability Fellow, have a conversation about the recently launched PDIAtoolkit. 

// download the PDIAToolkit at www.bsc.cid.harvard.edu //
Interview recorded on October 24, 2018.

About the PDIAtoolkit: The PDIAtoolkit is designed to guide you through the process of solving complex problems which requires working in teams. We call it a Do-it-Yourself (DIY) kit, where the ‘you’ is a committed team of 4-6 people mobilized to work together to solve a complex problem that cannot be solved by one person.

Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA), is a step-by-step approach which helps you break down your problems into its root causes, identify entry points, search for possible solutions, take action, reflect upon what you have learned, adapt and then act again. It is a dynamic process with tight feedback loops that allows you to build your own solution to your problem that fits your local context.

The PDIAtoolkit draws from two key resources. The first is the Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action book which is available as a free download and the second is a set of short videos explaining the key concepts of PDIA.

While the PDIA process is not linear, we recommend that you first read this toolkit in sequence to understand the steps. The toolkit has eight sections. Each section introduces a new concept and has one or more worksheets which are the tools to help you try PDIA for yourself. All the tools are dynamic and should be reviewed and adapted on a regular basis.

We hope that you find this toolkit useful and wish you the best on your PDIA Journey.

This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution –Non Commercial –No Derivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

PDIAtoolkit: A DIY Approach to Solving Complex Problems

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.

PDIAtoolkit: A DIY Approach to Solving Complex Problems

Harvard Center for International Development

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