Tagged: Global development

  • September 19, 2017

    Eight takeaways about the SDGs

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360

    Since January, through my monthly podcast, A Deeper Look, I have engaged in candid, in-depth conversations with leaders on the frontlines of social change to explore what it will take to ensure that the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) become a reality. We have examined specific sectors, such as health, education and gender, and have also tackled megatrends in development, such as technology and innovation.

    Each one of the development leaders I’ve talked with so far has provided me with distinct views and fresh ideas on how to understand some of the most complex human development challenges facing the world today. Delving into the SDGs has been stimulating and fun and has produced a boatload of valuable insights. I’ve summarized 8 key takeaways below. You can join in by listening to the entire series on SoundCloud or iTunes and leaving a comment or sharing your thoughts through social media.

    And there’s more to come! We’ll continue to take A Deeper Look at the SDGs through the end of this year.

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  • August 28, 2017

    R&E Search for Evidence: Highlights from the last quarter of FHI 360’s blog on research and evaluation

    Written by
    Annette N. Brown, Editor-in-Chief, R&E Search for Evidence blog, and Director, Research and Evaluation Strategic Initiative

    The Research and Evaluation Strategic Initiative team published 14 posts during the last quarter in our blog, R&E Search for Evidence. For those not familiar with our blog, it features FHI 360 thought leaders who write about research and evaluation methodology and practice, compelling evidence for development programming and new findings from recent journal publications. We have published 31 original posts to date.

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  • August 16, 2017

    A conservative perspective on the U.S. international leadership, foreign assistance and the SDGs

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360

    In many parts of the world, countries are aligning their national development plans around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In other nations, the global goals don’t have the same moral authority.

    In this podcast, I speak to Dan Runde, a prominent conservative voice in the development community. Dan is the director of the project on prosperity and development at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

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  • July 12, 2017

    Innovation and scalable solutions to meet the SDGs

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360

    What drives innovation, beyond the good idea that begins it? What are the obstacles keeping nonprofits from moving from experimentation to application of scalable ideas? What lessons can we learn from Silicon Valley? And how might artificial intelligence affect our strategies for meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?

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  • June 7, 2017

    The changing face of U.S. foreign aid

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360

    The proposed cuts to the U.S. development and diplomacy budget may signal a new era in international development. But what’s behind the numbers and what does it mean for U.S. global leadership and for the Sustainable Development Goals?

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  • January 31, 2017

    Aid agencies can learn from other industries to advance integrated development approaches

    Written by
    Tricia Petruney, Technical Advisor, Research Utilization, FHI 360

    The years leading up to the 2015 benchmark for global goals saw enthusiastic calls for doing development differently, reaching a crescendo as the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted to guide our work through 2030.

    Specifically, the new SDG era’s focus on integration among previously siloed social, economic and environmental aims has aid agencies wondering how to better address complex, 21st-century development challenges through meaningful cross-sector collaboration. In this industry, we like staying in our lane: doing what is familiar, what we are good at, and what we can count. As a result, we’ve become so focused on a plethora of micro-targets in isolation that we’ve lost sight of how families, communities, and societies actually work. How can we start moving beyond the long-entrenched, single-issue programs run by highly specialized staff? What can we do differently to better respond to people’s multifaceted lives?

    To flip the script and make decisions based on actual problems (and their many root causes) rather than shaping them to fit the status quo development siloes, we designed a decisionmaking tool called the Development Sector Adjacency Map. The map offers insights about common relationships between development fields (called adjacencies) and strategic considerations to leverage those linkages through strategic adaptation and expansion.

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  • September 8, 2016

    A Deeper Look: Making development more relevant and effective

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360

    How can we make our work more relevant and effective?

    Earlier this summer, FHI 360 held its first summit on integrated development, Greater Than the Sum of its Parts. Ben Ramalingam, a researcher and the Leader of the Digital & Technology Cluster at the Institute of Development Studies, delivered our keynote address. While Ben was in town, we talked about how to maximize the effectiveness of international development and how we need a paradigm shift to generate real change.

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