Digital Government: Foundations for Global Development and Democracy

This podcast was originally recorded on Friday, February 04, 2022, for the CID Speaker Series featuring Meagan Dooley, the Global Program Officer at Tetra Tech, and George Ingram, a Senior Fellow - Global Economy and Development, Center for Sustainable Development at Brookings. Dooley and Ingram continued the conversation with CID Student Ambassador, Daniella Ineza, after an appearance at the virtual CID Speaker Series event. Digital infrastructure and government services are no longer just nice to have, but essential elements of a 21st century nation. Yet digital capabilities are ideologically neutral and can thus serve authoritarian as well as democratic tendencies. Therefore, development donors must be wary of whom they partner with and how they deliver assistance for digital government. The speakers will present a new working paper identifying the key elements of digital government, presenting data on how developing countries are adopting digital government, and providing recommendations for donor support to help spur a digital transformation in developing countries.

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Incredible progress has been made throughout the world in recent years. However, globalization has failed to deliver on its promises. As problems like unequal access to education and healthcare, environmental degradation, and stretched finances persist, we must continue building on decades of transformative development work. The Center for International Development (CID) is a university-wide center based at the Harvard Kennedy School that seeks to solve these pressing development problems—and many more. At CID, we believe leveraging global talent is the key to enabling development for all. We teach to build capacity, conduct research that guides development policy, and convene talent to advance ideas for a thriving world. Addressing today’s challenges to international development also requires bridging academic expertise with practitioner experience. Through collaborative, in-country partnerships, CID’s research programs, faculty, and students deploy an analytical framework and context-dependent approaches to tackle development problems from all angles, in every region of the globe.