Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Evidence to Drive Poverty Alleviation

Originally recorded on Friday, October 1, 2021 for the CID Speaker Series, featuring Dianne Calvi, President and CEO of Village Enterprise. Calvi continued the conversation with our CID Student Ambassador, Maryam Guerrab, after an appearance at the virtual CID Speaker Series event where they shared insights on addressing extreme poverty and the Village Enterprise model. Great progress has been made in alleviating extreme poverty. According to the World Bank, the number of people living in extreme poverty dropped significantly from 1.9 billion people in 1990 to 689 million in 2017. But due to the COVID-19 pandemic, that progress has stalled for the first time in 25 years. What does the evidence point to as possible solutions to this problem? The evidence suggests that entrepreneurship and innovation play important roles in driving poverty alleviation. Identifying and scaling up the most cost-effective, evidence-based solutions has never been more urgent as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and conflict could push hundreds of millions of people into extreme poverty. Microloans, cash transfers, and poverty graduation are three different approaches to providing the extreme poor with a path out of extreme poverty.

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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.