Devex

According to a recent report by Devex Newswire, which covers the foreign aid and development financing ecosystem, conditions attached by the Trump administration to U.S. foreign aid have led to a number of longtime beneficiaries rejecting the funding, with potentially dire consequences for important projects in different parts of the world.

Our own government, which has demonstrated an eagerness to accept any U.S. assistance, or even non-binding promises of assistance, despite the inclusion of conditions that may be unfavorable to the Philippines, should pay attention to these developments, and consider whether the cost of sacrificing principles is fairly compensated by the supposed benefits of the aid.

As reported by DVEX last week, the non-governmental organization Norwegian People's Aid, which has spent over three decades clearing land mines and explosives around the world and has primarily relied on U.S. funding for its operations, recently rejected US$41 million in American aid, deeming the conditions attached to that money to be unacceptable, as well as largely irrelevant to its actual work of demining.

Another smaller but similar faith-based NGO in Denmark called Dan Church Aid also announced that it would reject US$4 million in US funding, if the Trump administration does not grant a waiver from the attached conditions.

Turning their backs on the conditional US assistance will come at a great cost to both organizations.

Welcome to Global Progress in the AI Era, a special edition series of DevEx's This Week in Global Development podcast, bringing together the varied actors shaping AI's future in low and middle income countries.

In this episode, recorded live at DevEx Impact House on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, I speak with next-generation philanthropist Shalina Wadhwani, who leads the Wadwani family office.

We discuss what her family has learned from building and funding AI for Good, and what those lessons could offer a new wave

of AI philanthropists.

Yeah.

So again, thank you, Catherine.

Thank you, DevEx, for having me.

So my personal story, my career started 13, 14 years ago.

We're focusing this entire season of the podcast on U.S. energy policy and climate policy in emerging markets, what the F is happening and what are some of the most exciting and creative ideas around where we go from here.

So last episode, I talked to DevEx journalist Advaz Seldinger about how the Trump administration is engaging with the U.S. Development Finance Corporation and the World Bank.

And today we're going to dig deep on another really important institution, which is the Millennium Challenge Corporation, or MCC.

The Millennium Challenge Corporation is a US development agency.

Well, welcome everybody.

I'm Margaret Richardson, the Chief of Staff and Senior Director of External Relations at Devex, and I am thrilled to be hosting this special episode of This Week in Global Development, recorded here at Devex Impact House in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meetings.

Today we're gonna be talking about Haiti.

Haiti has spent the better part of a decade as a headline, almost exclusively negative, negative headlines or about the negative situations in Haiti, including some of our, our own headlines.

They're o- often called the, um, poto mitan, the central pillars of Haiti, and we need to put a lot more focus on investing in them.

Well, I think, y- you know, looking at the headlines, and certainly if you were to be only paying attention to that during this week, it'd be easy to feel like the world is in a difficult place.

But at Devex Impact House, and certainly, um, you know, if you're looking closely, you hear a lot of hopeful stories, and this has certainly been part of this, um, the narrative of hope and, and just what is possible when we do things a little bit differently.

So I wanna thank the W.K. Kellogg Foundation for helping to bring this conversation to the stage, and to just say, you know, I think this is what, this is what happens when you ask different questions of the communities that you're trying to fund.

What you're about to hear is a live recording of our weekly podcast.

And this week, I come to you from Bangkok, Thailand, where I have been covering the World Bank IMF annual meetings, and I am here today at the Devex Impact House event with my colleague, Jesse Chase Lewitz, and we have been traipsing around Bangkok and making our way through the maze of the conference center where the main event is happening.

And so I wanted to just sit down with you and get some of your reflections of the week, and we can talk a little bit about what we're seeing.

And, you know, to start the week, we saw a big event that the bank did on AI.

I know one of the things you've been tracking closely is sort of climate and resilience has been a big theme, and how do we look at that.

So what are you hearing on climate? Not really on the agenda, but another one of these issues that is very much talked about a lot, despite not being sort of, uh, officially on the program.

Yeah, I mean, I, I started at Devex two years ago now, and the amount that the World Bank talks about climate has dropped dramatically since then.

Um, and it, yeah, I think there were four events on the agenda that had climate in the name, and two of them were civil society, and the other two were restricted.

My name is Tom Serap.

I'm an associate editor here at Devex, and I'm joined by our global health reporters, Andrew Green and Sarah Jervling.

We are recording live from our content studio at the World Health Summit here in Berlin.

Sarah, this is your very first time at the World Health Summit.