S4 Ep4: Has development economics lost its way?

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1. 

   S4 · E7 · 6 Oct 2026 · 46 min

   S4 Ep7: Does Africa need development economics?

   If every development economist stopped their research tomorrow, would Africa's growth rate in 2040 look any different? Ken Opalo, associate professor at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service and author of the Substack An Africanist Perspective , joins Oliver Hanney to argue that the constraint on African growth is not knowing what to do but knowing how to get it done. He also explains why Kenya's evidence boom has coincided with declining policymaking, and what happens when policymakers outsource their ambitions. In this wide-ranging conversation we cover: Why the SDGs are the wrong goal…

2. 

   S4 · E6 · 22 Sep 2026 · 55 min

   S4 Ep6: GiveDirectly’s quest for scale

   GiveDirectly started out as a small nimble team founded by PhD economists, who had a novel approach to ending poverty – just give cash. But they are no longer the new kids on the block, and have been scaling their operations rapidly in recent years, a trend that could intensify if the third wave of American philanthropy materialises. That’s a huge opportunity, but the potential of operating across entire countries is a radically different proposition. So what does an evidence-driven organisation research when it's trying to go from moving millions a year to billions? Caitlin Tulloch, Senior…

3. 

   S4 · E5 · 8 Sep 2026 · 50 min

   S4 Ep5: How BRAC partners with governments to fight poverty

   The ultra-poor graduation approach has one of the strongest evidence bases in development. Almost all of that evidence comes from NGO delivery – but true scale typically requires government delivery. Stephanie Brockerhoff, Director for Programme Design and Impact at BRAC's Ultra-Poor Graduation Initiative, joins Oliver Hanney to explain why anti-poverty pilots often fall apart at handover, how BRAC partners with governments, and the bottlenecks to scale that remain. Ideas in Development is a VoxDev podcast on economic policy and research. Find us wherever you get your podcasts, and read the…

4. 

   18 Aug 2026 · 31 min

   How to start an export boom

   This interview was conducted by Exporters Without Borders (ESF), which incubates entrepreneurs to start new export industries in low and middle income countries. The video version of this podcast, an accompanying article, and their ongoing research are at exporterswithoutborders.com Thomas Kehler started his career teaching at a New England prep school, before he landed in Uganda, where he started guiding fishing tours of Lake Albert. Here he came to know a young Joseph Nye – later a key architect of US foreign policy – who got Thomas thinking about development economics, and how to have…

5. 

   30 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 4 min

   How global supply chains are built – and how to actually attract investment

   Bill McRaith spent his career building supply chains – from 1980s Britain, to a factory in Panyu, China in 1990, to Ethiopia three decades later. He joins Oliver Hanney to explain what really attracts manufacturing investment to a developing economy, and why the model most countries are targeting no longer exists. In this wide-ranging conversation we cover why China’s industry grew; why responsive local governments beat tax holidays; the collapse of the wage gap; how Ethiopia was chosen as a beachhead; and why apparel remains the right first-mover industry for countries not yet on the…

6. 

   23 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 25 min

   Stefan Dercon on elite bargains and kickstarting economic growth (via the AUL Podcast)

   Slightly different episode today. This is a repost of a recent episode on the Africa Urban Lab's podcast, in which Kurtis Lockhart (who co-hosted our Cities series) interviews Stefan Dercon - very much an episode I wish I'd recorded! You can watch this episode on the AUL's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGamGT2Z-RM&list=PL7c-FEmFCyL7z395iWUMlKNFzRyQTnLHH Stefan Dercon, Professor of Economic Policy at Oxford and former Chief Economist at the UK’s Department for International Development (now FCDO), joins Kurtis Lockhart to discuss what it takes for cities and countries to kickstart…

7. 

   S4 · E3 · 16 Jun 2026 · 51 min

   S4 Ep3: Moving billions towards evidence

   In 2022, Dean Karlan became Chief Economist at USAID, tasked with steering the world's largest bilateral aid agency towards evidence-backed approaches. He left in 2025, as the agency was being dismantled, having moved roughly $1.7 billion of funding in the process. In this episode of Ideas in Development, Dean joins Oliver Hanney to discuss what evidence-based policy actually looks like inside a government institution; how his team picked their battles; why collaboration beat prescription; and where the limits of taking goals as given lie. They also cover the rise of embedded evidence labs…

8. 

   S1 · E5 · 9 Jun 2026 · 52 min

   S1 Ep5: How Ethiopia reformed its economy

   Ethiopia is one of Africa's most ambitious bets on export-led manufacturing. It’s also the site of one of the continent's boldest recent macroeconomic reform programmes. In this episode of the Ideas in Development series on growth, Oliver Hanney and Kartik Akileswaran speak with Mamo Mihretu, the tenth Governor of the National Bank of Ethiopia and a former senior economic advisor to the prime minister. Having viewed Ethiopia’s economic change through various lenses, Mamo explains why Ethiopia's industrial parks succeeded where others stalled, what it took to attract anchor investors, and how…

9. 

   S4 · E2 · 2 Jun 2026 · 46 min

   S4 Ep2: Aggregating evidence

   The conversation about evidence-based policy usually asks why good evidence isn't shaping decisions. But we should also be asking, is the evidence base itself actually worthy of shaping policy? In this episode of Ideas in Development, Rafe Meager – Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales and one of the leading meta-analysts in economics – explains why a single paper is not a proof, why we should learn to respect statistical noise, and why a result that holds in Kenya may or may not hold in Ghana. We walk through Rafe’s work aggregating microcredit RCTs, and their research…