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Join us for a very special evening with author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Friday, October 30th. This event, co-hosted by Global Development Matters Meetup and the Young African Professionals (YAP) Network, will begin at 6:00pm with networking and light refreshments in the lobby-level conference center at 1800 Massachusetts Avenue, NW,* Washington, DC. Following a reading of her new novel, The Thing Around Your Neck, fellow author Uzodinma Iweala (Beasts of No Nation) will moderate a Q&A session with Adichie.

To register for this event, please click here.

*Please bring photo identification, per the building's security regulations.

Politics & Prose bookstore will have copies of the book(s) available for purchase.

About the author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba, in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka where she attended primary and secondary schools. She then moved to the U.S. to attend college, graduating summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State. She holds Masters degrees in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins and in African Studies from Yale. Her work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The O. Henry Prize Stories, 2003; The New Yorker; Granta; the Financial Times; and Zoetrope. Her novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the Orange Broadbank Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. A recipient of the 2009 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Adichie divides her time between the U.S. and Nigeria.

Please join us for our Global Development Matters August Meetup on Tuesday, August 25th at 6:30pm, as we welcome Jenny Aker, Visiting Fellow at the Center for Global Development and Assistant Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Economics Department, Tufts University, to discuss her work with mobile phones in sub-Saharan Africa (see full event summary below).

We'll begin with networking and snacks at 6:30pm, with the "official" program beginning around 6:45pm. Please note our new address and that you will need photo identification to enter the building.

Hope you can join us!

Summary: Mobile phones are transforming lives in low-income countries faster than ever imagined. The effect is particularly dramatic in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa, where mobile phones have often represented the first modern infrastructure of any kind. The iconic image of cell phones in Africa is the market woman, surrounding by her goods while making calls to potential clients in the capital city. Equally common are the slogans of mobile phone companies promising a better life for those who use it.

Yet do these images and slogans reflect the reality of what cell phones can do? Cell phones are being adopted by the rural and urban poor at a surprising rate, far exceeding cell phone companies’ projections. An emerging body of research suggests that mobile phones are improving households’ access to information and reducing costs, thereby making markets more efficient and increasing incomes. These impacts have occurred without NGOs or donor investments – but as a positive externality from the IT sector.

Governments, donors and NGOs have noticed the potential of information technology in achieving development goals in a variety of sectors, including agriculture, education, health, financial services and governance. Mobile phones can greatly facilitate the effectiveness of development programs, but are needed in partnership with the private sector. And the potential “dark side” of improved communications, as was evident in the Kenyan elections, should not be ignored. Finally, with coverage reaching over 60% of the population in most African countries, other constraints to cell phone adoption – namely pricing and handset cost – should be addressed.

Over $100 billion crosses the planet each year in efforts to improve life for the world's poorest, yet poverty remains a serious concern year after year, decade after decade. Is aid working? How can it work better? What can regular people do to help out, and to make sure our donations are doing as much good as possible? These questions about foreign assistance are posed in the recent OneWorld online publication, Perspectives.

We will be joined for a discussion on foreign aid by the author of the Perspectives Q&A Aid Is Working, Just Not As Well As It Should: Paul O'Brien, Director of the Aid Effectiveness Team with Oxfam America, along with Sarah Jane Staats, Deputy Director for Outreach and Policy at Center for Global Development.

Please join us at 6:30pm for snacks and informal networking. We'll get started with the program around 6:45pm. We hope to see you there!

In their new book Economic Gangsters, Raymond Fisman and co-author Edward Miguel take readers into the secretive, chaotic, and brutal worlds inhabited by these lawless and violent thugs. These two sleuthing economists follow the foreign aid money trail into the grasping hands of corrupt governments and shady underworld characters. Spend time with ingenious black marketeers as they game the international system. Follow the steep rise and fall of stock prices of companies with unseemly connections to Indonesia’s former dictator. See for yourself what rainfall has to do with witch killings in Tanzania—and more.

On Thursday, October 16th, please join us for a special Meetup beginning at 4:30pm, as we welcome Dr. Raymond Fisman, Lambert Family Professor of Social Enterprise and Research Director of the Social Enterprise Program at Columbia Business School. CGD research fellow, Michael Clemens, will serve as moderator.

We anticipate a lively discussion with Raymond Fisman, who along with co-author Miguel, uses economics to get inside the heads of these gangsters, and propose solutions that can make a difference to the world’s poor, including cash infusions to defuse violence in times of drought and steering the World Bank away from aid programs most susceptible to corruption.

“Economic Gangsters is a fascinating exploration into the dark side of economic development… Subjected to their genius, seemingly inconsequential events (like New York City parking tickets and Suharto catching a cold) become potent tools in understanding how the world really works. Rarely has a book on economics been this fun and this important.”— Steven D. Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics

On Tuesday, September 16th, we will be joined by John D. Shilling, Chair of the Millennium Institute, a NGO whose goal is to assist countries achieve more sustainable development. Dr. Shilling will discuss Millennium Institute's primary tool, a dynamic model called Threshold 21 (T21).

Threshold 21 integrates economic, social, and environmental factors into a single coherent framework and generates scenarios over 20-30 years to illustrate the likely impacts of different policies and assumptions across the board. The model has been applied in over twenty five countries, ranging from the US (focused on energy) to Mali and Mozambique (focused on national strategies and PRSPs), to Papua, Indonesia (focused on environmental strategies). Threshold 21 has received support from the Carter Center, World Bank, UNDP, and bilateral donors in various countries. The model helps better understand the cross-sector linkages and feedbacks that occur in the real world, and which are increasingly being recognized as critical as we face energy and food security challenges. It is important for those concerned with development to understand these cross-sector linkages and to know there are tools well adapted to addressing them.

Join us at 6:30pm for conversation and snacks -- and we'll begin the presentation around 6:45. Discussion and Q&A to follow.

Hope you can join us!

Warm regards,
Heather Haines