Ideas in Development

Are African cities a powder keg of restless youth – or the most promising place to build prosperity, peaceful politics and shared civic life?Leonard Wantchekon joins Ideas in Development to argue that African cities should be seen as a youth opportunity, not a youth problem.We discuss recent unrest in Kenya and Tanzania, his work showing that clientelism is overwhelmingly a rural phenomenon, and that deliberation and decentralisation are the institutional minimums African cities should be reaching for. Leonard then lays out what deliberation, decentralisation and a renewed urban culture could do for the next generation of African city dwellers.Read the show notes on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/Check out the Africa Urban Lab: https://www.aul.city/

Broken land markets are holding back cities across Africa. But not in Rwanda, which was able to register over 10 million land parcels, and issue over 7 million title deeds, in under five years. How did they do it, and what can other countries learn?Thierry Hoza Ngoga, one of this monumental programme's leading implementers, joins the Ideas in Development series on cities to walk through Rwanda's land reform journey, from consultation to rollout, and discuss why dysfunctional land markets may be the single biggest bottleneck to urban growth in Africa.Read the shownotes on our Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/Check out the Africa Urban Lab: https://www.aul.city/

There is a paradox at the heart of governing cities in Africa. Mayors are responsible for building the infrastructure their fast-growing cities need. But most don't control the money that this requires. In this episode, we ask how can that change?Astrid Haas joins the Ideas in Development series on cities to discuss why African cities are so fiscally constrained, what reforms in Mexico, the Philippines, and Freetown can teach us, and what national and city governments should prioritise to raise revenue and unlock finance.Note: The following question was accidentally cut at 16:41 “Thankfully, there are countries we can look to that found themselves in a similar spot, and managed to find their way out with effective reforms, such as Mexico which stabilised and leveraged fiscal transfers. What did Mexico do that mattered?” Read the shownotes on our Substack: Ideas in Development | Oliver Hanney | SubstackCheck out the Africa Urban Lab: Home

What actually changes when AI meets institutions, infrastructure, and the people inside them?Oliver Hanney and Deena Mousa recap the Ideas in Development series on AI, drawing on conversations with Raghuram Rajan, Umar Saif, Rose Mutiso, Josh Lerner, Anton Korinek, Bruno Caprettini, Niriksha Shetty, Claire Cullen and Utkarsh Saxena.They cover the key takeaways: why the binding constraint question matters more than the model question; what the data desert problem means for national AI strategies; why access and value capture are not the same thing; and what AI is doing to the growth escalators lower-income countries depend on. And conclude with the most important questions this series did not resolve.

What happens to a growth model built on services when AI can do some of those services itself?Raghuram Rajan joins the Ideas in Development series on AI to discuss how India's economy grew through services exports, why that model may be more resilient to AI than critics assume, and what policymakers need to get right on human capital, universities, and digital access to stay ahead.

India is already using AI to unlock its courts, classrooms and farms.In this episode of Ideas in Development, Utkarsh Saxena, Claire Cullen and Niriksha Shetty discuss how their organisations, Adalat AI, Youth Impact, and Precision Development, are deploying AI across India, and what they’ve learned during the process.

In this episode of Ideas in Development, we ask what needs to happen before AI can take off in Africa.Rose Mutiso talks us through the current state of energy and digital infrastructure in Africa, why leapfrogging is not guaranteed with AI, and what fundamental bottlenecks need to be addressed.

Today on Ideas in Development, we think through why economists sound so different to technologists when discussing AI.Listen to learn about the mismatch between the public discourse on the economic impacts of AI, and how economists tend to think through periods of rapid technological change.This is the first episode of our new series on AI. Joining us as co-host across the next ten episodes is Deena Mousa.

In this episode of Ideas in Development, we ask how Peru rapidly became a global leader in exporting high-value fruits and vegetables.To take us through this period of sectoral growth, we were joined by former Minister of Production, Piero Ghezzi, who discusses how the Peruvian government worked with the private sector to unlock bottlenecks, and the experimental industrial policy tool at the heart of that story: Mesas Ejecutivas.

In our first series of Ideas in Development, we are learning about growth success stories in Latin America, Africa and Asia, directly from the policymakers who helped to make them happen.Throughout these conversations, Oliver Hanney, VoxDev managing editor, be joined Kartik Akileswaran, co-founder of Growth Teams. In this episode we discuss why we are focusing on growth, and his experience working as advisor, funder, and practitioner in the growth ecosystem.