The Honesty Agenda: Effective Assistance, Women’s Empowerment, and the SDGs in a Post-Covid World

Harvard Center for International Development

Originally recorded on March 12, 2021 Alix Zwane, Chief Executive Officer of the Global Innovation Fund, continued the discussion after a virtual CID Speaker Series event held on March 12, 2021 exploring their work further with CID Student Ambassador Sama Kubba. Successfully meeting international development goals in the post pandemic era calls for a renewed commitment to honesty both on a micro level and a macro level about what development assistance can and should seek to achieve. The debate about official assistance is often bookended by, at best, misplaced good intent and, at worst, falsehoods told to reinforce the status quo. Supporting innovation and R&D is at the heart of both an honest development agenda and the clearest path toward pushing decision-making more locally while still being true to our values around environmental, social, and governance standards such as gender equity and climate resilience. Alix Peterson Zwane is Chief Executive Officer of the Global Innovation Fund. She has 20 years of experience advancing the agenda of evidence-based aid and international development as an investor, a social entrepreneur, and an innovator herself. Alix has worked at the intersection of the evidence and innovation agendas from a diverse set of posts. She was the first employee and Executive Director at Evidence Action, a non-profit that develops service delivery models to scale evidence-based programs. Under Alix's leadership, Evidence Action catalyzed school-based deworming for hundreds of millions of children around the world, and safe drinking water for millions of people in four countries. Alix launched Evidence Action Beta, an incubator for innovations in development. Alix has also advocated for evidence-based philanthropy at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google.org, where she set strategy and made investments to support new public service models that work for the poor and developed models for outcome-based grant-making. She began her career in management consulting and was a member of the faculty of the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department at University of California, Berkeley. Alix has published in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and elsewhere. She previously served on the board of directors of Innovations for Poverty Action, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation, and Evidence Action. She holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University and is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. Born and raised in Colorado, she divides her time between Washington, D.C. and London.