The international development community isn’t adapting fast enough to official aid cuts. That’s a big problem.

On the urgent need for a pivot to spending more time trying to supporting specific countries interested in boosting their state capacity; and catalyzing commercial revolutions in low-income countries.

Jan 27, 2026

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Cross-posted by An Africanist Perspective

""Agree that ignorance is not a viable strategy: To reiterate, academic research and policy research are two completely different things. With this in mind, knowledge production and management should focus on policymaking and implementation in specific contexts. A direct implication of this shift is that we should see more investments in localized knowledge production. Let a thousand think tanks bloom in developing countries. Deliberately choosing ignorance about specific contexts, and then hiding behind scalability of individual studies across contexts is a doomed strategy. This is not to say that countries cannot learn from each other. Far from it. The point is that policy research necessarily has to mirror the iterative nature of policymaking and implementation.""

- Philemon Nwigwe

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