The Development Leaders Conference

CGD's Masood Ahmed speaks with Sida's Carin Jämtin and MCC's Alexia Latortue about their takeaways from the 2021 Development Leaders Conference, including the tensions between national and global challenges, how development agency leaders can address them, and what these decisions might mean for agency mandates going forward.

With the world still in the tight grip of the COVID-19 pandemic, development cooperation partners are facing unprecedented challenges. With increased poverty rates, limited fiscal space due to the pandemic and a heightened need to adapt to global challenges like climate change, partner countries face overlapping crises that urgently need to be tackled. Meanwhile, donor countries and their development cooperation agencies also face a variety of obstacles: stagnant or decreasing aid budgets, political demand to link development cooperation spending to domestic interests and a more volatile global world order. These issues will set the stage for the 2021 virtual Development Leaders Conference (DLC) taking place next month.

In the build up to the 2020 Development Leaders Conference, the organizers outline the key themes that will be discussed and give an overview of development cooperation in the era of COVID-19.

The big takeaway from the 2018 CGD Development Leaders conference was that all agencies, new and old, face similar opportunities and challenges—of relevance, responsiveness, communication, capability, and resilience—and there is much to learn from sharing experiences, especially at this time of profound change in the world of international development. CGD’s 2019 Development Leaders conference, co-hosted with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), in Beijing, China, will again bring together the community of Heads and Directors of development cooperation in aid agencies and ministries from around the world.