Foreign Aid to Africa

Dr. John W. McArthur
CEO and Executive Director, Millenium Promise

John W. McArthur is the Chief Executive Officer of Millennium Promise, the United States’ only international non-profit organization solely committed to supporting the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals to halve extreme poverty by 2015. In this capacity he oversees the Millennium Villages project, which supports integrated social and business development services for more than 400,000 people in rural communities across 10 countries in Africa. Dr. McArthur is also a Research Associate at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, where he previously served as Policy Director, and teaches at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.

In 2007 and 2008 he co-chaired the International Commission on Education for Sustainable Development Practice, an initiative sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation to identify the cross-disciplinary training requirements for the next generation of sustainable development practitioners. He now co-chairs the International Advisory Board of the ongoing effort to launch a new global network of graduate degree programs.

Previously, Dr. McArthur served as Deputy Director and Manager of the UN Millennium Project. In that role he coordinated a global network of nearly 300 experts who served on ten thematic Task Forces, oversaw a policy team that provided integrated technical advice to governments in low-income countries around the world, and served as lead editor of the Project's final report to the UN Secretary-General, Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

Prior to that he was a Research Fellow at the Center for International Development at Harvard University, where he co-authored the Global Competitiveness Report with Michael Porter and Jeffrey Sachs. He completed a Masters and Doctorate in Economics at Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar; a Masters in Public Policy at Harvard University's John F Kennedy School of Government; and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) at the University of British Columbia. He was recently recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader.

Kamilla Gumede is a Research Fellow at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT where she heads up the lab’s policy outreach work in sub-Saharan Africa. J-PAL works to make development strategies more effective by running randomized evaluations to generate evidence on what works in development and helping decision makers worldwide integrate emerging evidence into national policies. Kamilla has a Masters degree in economics from the University of Copenhagen, a MPP degree from Princeton University and has previously worked as a Director for Policy in the South African National Treasury.

Charles ‘Diji Akinola is Founder/CEO of Enterprise for Development International (EfDI), a development sector market leader based in Lagos, Nigeria. EfDI evolved from the Nigeria country program of TechnoServe, a US-based international development agency that focuses on providing technical assistance for building profitable businesses in disadvantaged communities of Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. He was Country Director of TechnoServe between 1993 and 1998 when TechnoServe ceded its Nigeria portfolio to Enterprise for Development International (EfDI) – a flagship development organization that he has continued to lead. Before moving into the non-profit sector, he taught Agricultural Extension and Social Change at Nigeria’s leading college, the University of Ibadan from which he also received his Ph.D. in 1984. He was on the training and research faculty of the Pan African Institute for Development (PAID) in Buea, Cameroon in 1990.

 

At EfDI, his current work focuses primarily on building community capacities for wealth creation. This, in a broad context, involves leveraging collaborative initiatives that creatively pool the best resources and thinking that could promote development, foster competitiveness, support the market economy, and strengthen civil society’s role in securing democracy in Africa’s most populous country. He had served as the National Coordinator of the Sustainable Tree Crop Program (STCP), an innovative multi-agency, public-private sector effort involving USAID and the Chocolate Industry Worldwide in facilitating the improvement of small holder agricultural systems focusing on cocoa and cashews in West Africa.

 

A familiar presence in the Nigerian development sector, serving on several non-profit boards, networks and NGO umbrellas, he was a member of the Nigerian government’s Inter-ministerial Committee on Government collaboration with NGOs and has represented the Nigerian development sector at major national and international meetings and conferences. He has advised State and Federal Governments in Nigeria regarding the design and structure of International Development Cooperation agreements and protocols as well as the management of a wide range of International aid programs. He has participated in the deliberations of the US Government’s Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid (ACVFA).

 

Dr Akinola is currently a Mason Fellow and in the Mid-career program at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Lant Pritchett is currently Professor of the Practice of International Development and Faculty Chair of the Masters in Public Policy in International Development (MPA/ID) program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

In addition, he works as a consultant to Google.org, is a non-resident fellow of the Center for Global Development, and is a senior fellow of BREAD. He is also co-editor of the Journal of Development Economics.

He graduated from Brigham Young University in 1983 with a B.S. in Economics and in 1988 from MIT with a PhD in Economics.

After finishing at MIT, Lant joined the World Bank, where he held a number of positions in the Bank's research complex between 1988 and 1998, including as an adviser to Lawrence Summers when he was Vice President from 1991-1993. From 1998 to 2000, he worked in Indonesia. From 2000 to 2004, Lant was on leave from the World Bank as a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In 2004, he returned to the World Bank, where he was the lead Socio-Economist in the Social Development group of the South Asia region, resident in Delhi, 2004-2007.