Global Affairs Expert Webinar: The Future of U.S. International Development Strategy
Fatema Z. Sumar, adjunct lecturer in public policy and executive director of the Center for International Development at Harvard University, leads the conversation on the future of U.S. international development strategy.
These webinars provide an opportunity for college and university educators and students to discuss global issues with CFR fellows, Foreign Affairs authors, and other leading experts. To register for future invitations, please complete this form or email [email protected] with your name, title, and academic affiliation.
Speaker
Fatema Z. Sumar
Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy and Executive Director, Harvard Center for International Development
Harvard University
Presider
Irina A. Faskianos
Vice President, National Program and Outreach
Council on Foreign Relations
Transcript
FASKIANOS: Thank you. Welcome to the first session of the Winter/Spring 2026 Global Affairs Expert Webinar series. I am Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR.
Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on education.CFR.org. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.
We are delighted to have Fatema Sumar with us to discuss the future of U.S. international development strategy. Ms. Sumar is an adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the executive director of the Center for International Development at Harvard University. She has held senior roles across four Democratic and Republican administrations, including serving as vice president of compact operations at the Millennium Challenge Corporation, deputy assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, and senior professional staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Ms. Sumar is the author of The Development Diplomat: Working Across Borders, Boardrooms, and Bureaucracies to End Poverty, and she is working on a new book called From Poverty to Potential that she’s coauthoring with Dr. Asim Khwaja.
So, Fatema, it’s great to have you with us. Thank you so much. I thought we could begin by having you give us a brief historical overview of U.S. international development strategy and where it’s come from.
SUMAR: Great. Well, first, Irina, it’s so great to see you. Happy new year. And thanks to all of you joining from near and far, especially across time zones. Thanks to the Council on Foreign Relations for putting this series together and having me on it today.
Look, I want to just start, Irina, maybe by acknowledging where we are today in this moment. It’s been—yesterday marked one year since the Trump administration announced a pause on U.S. foreign assistance, a moment that feels both so far away and so, I know, near and dear to home for so many of us working in the international development sector. And in many ways, this past year has kicked off a period of such rapid change in global development. So what I thought I’d do is use this anniversary as an opportunity for us to kind of step back, kind of take stock again about where we came from both historically but of course over the past year, and then talk a little bit about ideas that we’re starting to put together about where the system—where international development could be headed.
So let me start historically a little bit. You know, when I started my career, like perhaps many people on our call right now, you know, I started in undergraduate studying political science, international relations, deepened my studies in graduate school, and got really interested in the Foreign Service/Civil Service serving in the State Department, and then over time in—with international development agencies. But when I started my career and throughout the fifteen years I served across U.S. government, and civil society, and the NGO sector, I didn’t really always appreciate where we were coming from, right, like what is this history that our institutions inherited, and how much that history still really guides our current day and our future choices.
So I just want to step back for a moment. I know we’re in 2026 now, but let’s go back a little bit to 1944, right? And just for all of us to remember, back in summer 1944, bombs are falling across the Atlantic. We have the Battle of Normandy, D-Day, right, in full swing across the Atlantic. And as that’s happening, forty-four allied countries plus Denmark as an observer, are gathering far, far away from where the bombs are falling across Europe. And they’re gathering not far from where I am right now, up in New Hampshire at what is now a famous ski resort, Bretton Woods. And Bretton Woods had been really one of these places that during the gilded age the rich elite of the United States would go to during the summer months to take a break, and at one of the most beautiful settings on Earth. But it was repurposed back in July 1944 to really start planning for a postwar future and what was that going to look like.
You know, just remember the context here. I mean, the world had been destroyed now by two world wars, a Great Depression. You had recessions throughout many, many parts of the world, including here in the United States, of course in Europe. And we know economic historians have reconstructed that back in 1944 about two-thirds of the world lived in what we would now call extreme poverty, right? So that’s about more than 1.5 billion people back then. But the concept of what we call global poverty today just didn’t exist. That was not something we would use in nomenclature and the terminology that we used.
Bretton Woods was not a conference about solving global poverty, to be very clear, but it was a turning point in international economic policy, and really setting the scene and the foundation for this idea that international economic policy, monetary policy, and international institutions could come together to stabilize what really felt like economic freefall back then, and what was affecting, again, over two-thirds of the world that lived in what we would now call extreme poverty. So it start setting the scene.
And what you start seeing in the decades that come post-World War II—in the 1950s, in the 1960s—is out of those two institutions that were then created, which is of course now what we call the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the IMF—many other institutions start to evolve. You start seeing the rise of bilateral aid agencies, including the founding in the 1960s of USAID (United States Agency for International Development) and counterpart bilateral agencies coming in Europe from the UK, from France, from other countries. You see the rise of civil society organizations, organizations like where I worked at Oxfam, founded in Oxford to address famine in then Greece in the 1940s—Oxfam—and the rise of many other INGOs and NGOs, including CARE, which came out of the care packages post-World War II, and others.
So, you know, coming out of World War II you start seeing this groundwork for the modern development framework that we have today. And it starts really saying intellectually we’re going to link economic growth, institutional capacity, and international cooperation as tools to prevent conflict and instability.
You know, look, as we go back and recreate history, it was not all done for altruism, right? I mean, of course we’re trying to—you know, there’s a huge push here to stabilize Europe, to stabilize Japan. But this is all also happening in the wake of tremendous Cold War politics, where development—what then becomes what we know call development and as that emerges is really used as a political tool of statecraft from the very, very beginning, right? And it—of course, coming out of the Cold War, it’s one of the primary tools used by U.S. economic statecraft along with trade/lending diplomacy on how to really advance stability and broaden foreign policy objectives.
So, you know, if we fast-forward from the 1950s and 1960s, where you had very large-scale, top-down five-year planning programs and large-scale infrastructure investments—think, remember, like, the dams, like Aswan Dam; you have major roads, like the Latin American—Pan-American Highways; you have the Green Revolution of agricultural schemes that are supported by major institutions—philanthropic institutions like Rockefeller and Ford; and many others. In the 1970s, this starts switching to really look at basic human needs, population control being a huge part of that, hunger, education. In the 1980s, you start seeing these massive ways to stabilize macroeconomies, structural adjustment programs, which are very, very controversial and in many cases deepened poverty instead of eliminating it. All the way to the 1990s, where you are really looking at a post-Soviet Union how to stabilize and bring democracy to so many countries that were still transitioning from authoritarian or other types of rule. All the way into the 2000s, where development policy really becomes a tool of military statecraft, right? Think about the post-9/11 era, the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan, and then modern-day Syria in the 2010s and beyond, where so much of the development funding becomes attached to military purposes of what that looks like.
So over these eighty-plus years, over these last few decades, and in less than a century, what all of these different trendlines over the century start doing, Irina, is that they help give rise to what is really a global aid industry, right? Sometimes it’s called the aid-industrial complex, the development-industrial complex. And it starts having its own norms, career paths, professionalization, operating models. Heavily, heavily shaped by geopolitics, by governance structures, capital lending rules, and other rules of the road that we all know today, including how to chase the money—how to get the funding, how to make sure that the programs that people care about are actually funded and prioritized.
So we’ve seen so many different trends across every decade over the last eighty years of what this looks like, culminating, as we know, in 2015 with—probably, maybe was the height of this moment that we had globally where we could come together and agree on the SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals, and this idea that once and for all we weren’t just going to fight poverty; we were going to end it, because we knew we had the tools, we had the strategies, and we had the ability politically to do that. And it laid out a very ambitious, as we know, roadmap leading to 2030, which now is in severe jeopardy, right?
And so where I think—just to catch us up now; and, sorry, because I think I did eighty years in five minutes—but just to catch us up to where we are today, right, in 2026, you know, we’re fundamentally—and we’ll talk a little bit in a moment, I know, about what just happened this past year—but all that to say we’re fundamentally at another historic crossroads moment, right? If in less than a century the world came together for the first time in human history to say that there are collective norms, and ways, and institutions, politicized with all of their many, many flaws, with their many consequences, but if that was a collective political commitment globally that today is now under assault. And it is being severely questioned not just here in the United States, which we will get to, but many other countries are—have also re-questioned or, you know, are questioning that maybe for their own political reasons different than what the Americans are doing as well.
So that’s where we are today. But the sector as we know it, the work that many of us do or the careers that we’ve had, hasn’t happened in a vacuum. And I think it is really important for us to understand how this sector was created, where it evolved, where we came from, the—you know, the incredible gains it has made, but also the challenges that it’s had, and the own problems it has created. We’re in a fundamentally different place today, right? So if you go back to 1944, where you had two-thirds of the world living in extreme poverty, today we’re at a roughly around 10 percent, give or take, depending on the crises that are affecting different populations. But we have rising inequality and so many other changes that we’ll talk about in a moment.
FASKIANOS: Great. That is an amazing review of the past eighty years. So let’s talk about the current landscape, the past year, the current landscape of where we are and the opportunities that lie ahead.
SUMAR: Yeah. So, you know, it seems so hard to believe, right? So this time a year ago, January 20, one of the first actions that the Trump administration took upon taking office and the White House was to announce what we all now know as this ninety-day pause on U.S. foreign assistance. And in theory, this pause was going to launch this government-wide review of development and humanitarian assistance programs and really make sure that they’re aligned with U.S. foreign policy priorities. Now, I just want to say, I didn’t serve—I was not in government when this happened. But I was in government serving when the transition from the Obama to the Trump—first Trump administration happened. And even similarly then, there wasn’t a formal ninety-day pause or that review, but we were all under notice, right, that every time that there’s a political change in leadership, a new administration wants to make sure that the programs, the money, the funding is in line with the new administration’s priorities.
So, look, and that in itself is perhaps not a shock or a change to make sure that things are aligned. But, you know, what we quickly realized and learned was that this was not business as usual. This was not just a simple and the common kind of handover of political administrations to make sure that money was being spent well, in fact, there were already political calculations underway that this was not going to be a priority of the Trump administration. So we now know that this pause quickly turned into stop work orders across all active programs, money accounts were frozen, new obligations were put on hold, ongoing contracts were suspended. And often, and this is the change, Irina, right, often with little notice to partners or host governments. Which really threw, you know, so many things in turmoil.
By early February, the pause—we went beyond the pause to actually see a structural dismantling. So USAID, which is the world’s largest bilateral development aid agency, both in terms of funding, scope, and size, was, in essence, dismantled. About 86 percent of USAID programs were terminated. Nearly 10,000 staff and contractors were laid off or placed on leave. The headquarters were shuttered. Many people will remember the logo physically coming down off the walls of the Ronald Reagan Building. The websites went dark. Core oversight program management capacity eliminated. And nonsecurity development programs, those that were remaining, the very few that were remaining, were folded, in theory, into the State Department, right, without most people understanding how that was actually going to happen.
I do want to make clear, because there’s been a lot of attention on USAID, but in fact we have over twenty—in the United States context—over twenty different aid agencies, USAID, of course, being the largest. But many of them were affected beyond USAID. So I want to also just acknowledge that there was huge changes and dismantling of budgets, of staff, of programs at agencies like the U.S. African Development Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, Peace Corps, U.S. Institute of Peace, and others. Federal agencies like the State Department; the Department of Health and Human Services, which has offices tied, right, to global health; the Department of Agriculture, which supports food security and international nutrition programs; even the Environmental Protection Agency, which affects international climate and environmental cooperation; all of these agencies faced significant turmoil, whether staff were furloughed, dismissed, going on leave, programs shuttered.
So in total, what you saw very quickly, by spring 2025, is tens of thousands of federal workers across agencies connected to international development affected, and really shrinking the U.S. government’s global operational footprint. Over $8 to $9 billion or so of international assistance was rescinded. And that is both bilateral assistance, but that’s also the major multilateral assistance. Think, the World Health Organization and other UN agencies, for instance. So, you know, let me just—so that’s the immediate thing. You know, quick summary immediately of what took place. We are starting now to analyze the impacts of that. So I’d love to just quickly share what we are now starting. And the numbers keep changing. And, you know, I suspect they’ll just get worse, right, as they go.
But just to give our audience a sense of scale of how quickly those impacts are felt already in the aid community, so far in 2025, about twenty-five million fewer people will receive humanitarian assistance even though we are facing some of the greatest humanitarian shocks on planet Earth right now, whether that’s conflict, climate shocks, or displacement. You know, I think the estimates right now are—we’re already seeing roughly 600,000 deaths, so people that have died that otherwise would not have died because we would have provided the humanitarian assistance. And two-thirds of them—I mean, this is so heartbreaking—two-thirds, about 400,000 of them, are children, right? And this is programs that they would have received around food security, nutrition, health services, especially for pregnant women, refugee displacement response. All of these programs ending really overnight with no planning, no handoffs. In some cases, camps, personnel at camps, just, you know, disappeared overnight for their own security and safety.
On the workforce—and I know many of our people on this call, for instance, may be interested in working in the development sector, or were working in this sector. You know, we saw huge hits on these numbers. So as of September 19, 2025, the estimates are that roughly 238,433—so, let’s say about 238,000 jobs, global jobs, were lost, and about 20,500 U.S. jobs were lost as part of that. So, you know, that’s, Irina, what, like, we’re looking at around a quarter million jobs lost here globally, including a sizable impact here in the United States as well. And again, remember, this is not a planned—you know, an economic shock that countries, companies, families, could plan for. In many cases, these are jobs literally just lost overnight, children having to get pulled from schools, people not being able to pay their bills, you know, things like that. So really kind of devastating and traumatic impacts all around that will take time for people to heal.
So there are—you know, just to kind of fast-forward a little bit—there are many effects here, including in developing and low-income settings, where these aid-funded programs—it’s not just about the money coming in, or the programs coming in, right? Those are first-order effects. But there are these second- and third-order effects, because oftentimes, those programs were the catalyst for local economic impact and the local economic engines that were creating cascading ripple effects for economic growth, for community engagement, for active voice and participation, and the enabling environment, in many ways, for local communities. And so all of that has been disrupted, right? Again, without any kind of handoff or without any kind of planning.
So we already know, and we’re already seeing signs, that in addition to kind of the large aid infrastructure that Americans particularly may have been close to because they worked for those agencies, we also know that dozens of smaller and mid-size NGOs at the national level have closed entirely. Many were unable to survive the sudden withdrawal. Country offices were shut down. And a lot of longstanding programs, particularly in public health, those have been eliminated. We also know multilateral organizations were especially hard hit. Again, this is several UN agencies that rely on the U.S. for about 20 to 40 percent of their budget. They’re now being forced into rapid downsizing, hiring freezes, program cancelations. Other long-term consequences have been universities, like mine, have lost development-related research funding. The training pipelines, we have students going in to get trained in undergraduate, master’s degrees, executive education, certificate programming in global health, humanitarian response, development. All of those industries—all of those pipelines have now been shuttered or significantly scaled back.
And finally, I just want to say, institutional memory, right? So how programs are designed, monitored, evaluated. The very people—like when I served in the civil service in the State Department, the civil servants were the institutional memory of the State Department, right? So all of that, whether it’s formal reports, documents, websites, or people, that has been erased overnight, with many heroic efforts ad hoc to try to save some of that and try to move it very quickly to other places to retain what we can. But just to say this has all been in a year. We’ve seen, you know, just a huge shock, the trauma from the shock, but then also really try to figure out not just the first order, but the second- and third-order effects. And it’s going to take time for us to really see that play out, but then also to understand where do we go from here.
FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you. I guess one final question then we’ll go to all the group. Given all the job displacement and whatnot, I mean, what would you advise for students who are looking to go into international development? Or is this not a period to do that?
SUMAR: Yeah. So, OK, before I—before I get right to your question, let me just pause for a moment. Because I want to say, you know, one of the things that I have been thinking about, and many other colleagues like me, is even before 2025, right, you know, there were many of us that have been critical of how the sector has been evolving, a lot of the trend lines. This obsession over foreign aid, over donors, over setting up and chasing grants and money, the power dynamics that have really gotten entrenched in governance structures or wherever the largest capital shareholders come from, right? On the banks, on boards, et cetera.
So there has been—I mean, it’s important for us to remember we’re not just starting to talk about the sector, about our careers, about jobs today in 2025 and 2026. We have been really trying to think through where do we go from here anyway? What 2025 did is it forced us, by default, to accelerate our thinking, because the whole system feels so fragile and up in the air right now. So I just want to emphasize and say that we have been pushing—so many of us have been thinking and pushing about a systemic change when it comes to international development, regardless. We have now had to speed up because the vacuum is so large and so big.
So to the extent that the sector is under assault and needs to change, I think that’s a true statement. I think it’s under assault and I think it needs to change. But have the problems gone away? Do we still—are we still needed? Is there still a supply side to the demand that exists? I think there is. I think there is. So we all know, and I’m not going to go through all the facts because many of you work in the space and you know it, but we know we have new problems today that we did not have in 1944, right? Let me show a couple of these, because Oxfam where I used to work, so I’m very proud of this, every Davos—it’s the week of Davos, I know—but while, you know, all of these jet setters are going to Davos to debate in elite circles what is going to come out of this, Oxfam every year puts on its inequality report, right? And so I just want to share with you a little bit. I’m going to pull up the statistics really fast here about what this looks like, because the problems have changed so significantly.
So, you know, first, we have a situation here where billionaire wealth again, this is from Oxfam’s new report. Billionaire wealth has grown by more than 16 percent in 2025, reaching a record of $18.3 trillion, right? That’s enough money, Irina, right, to—and with the wealth increasing just in one year by about $2.5 trillion—that’s enough to eradicate extreme poverty twenty-six times over—twenty-six times over. But meanwhile, we live in a world where one in four people are hungry. They face food insecurity. And we are going to be facing probably another fourteen million additional deaths by 2030 if we can’t figure out how to deal with some of these issues around extreme poverty and decisions to slash aid budgets. OK.
So I say all of that because when we have a new world order that we now live in, where you don’t have the type of predictable global, economic, and political cooperation that we have largely taken for granted in the last couple of decades, right? You have a new world order. I think Prime Minister Carney’s speech yesterday at Davos from Canada something really worth watching for our listeners here on this call. But we’ve an emerging new world order that seems to be very transactional, very country first, really looking at each country, like the United States, individual needs versus the collective good, right? And that is juxtaposed across increasing inequality, not just in poor countries. I want to make that note. Right here at home. Rich countries as well, including in the United States, many other countries, Latin America, Asia, et cetera. Climate change we know. We also have one of the largest and leading demographic changes coming with youth explosions in only—in only Africa, and Afghanistan, Pakistan, and otherwise shrinking populations everywhere else in the world.
So all of that to say that for those of you interested in careers of how to tackle some of these challenges that I just talked about, we need you more than ever. We need you more than ever, right? There are such great cross-cutting, intersectional challenges that we’re going to be facing for our lifetimes, going forward for our next eighty years. How we organize careers around that is going to change. It will not look like what it did five years ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago. When I was growing up in the system you had pathways in that were formalized through college and graduate programs, like the Presidential Management Fellowship, for instance, to get into U.S. government service, or the YPP program (Young Professionals Program) at the World Bank, and many other programs like this. These are all shrinking or getting eliminated completely.
So the challenge, if you’re right now in the job market or you’re in school and you’re trying to think about what to do. First, let me say, we need you more than ever. So keep studying what you’re studying. Get savvy about the things that you’re interested in. And go deep. But maybe your entry point is going to look different. Your entry point now may not be international NGOs or international institutions. They may start more domestic. They may start working for national governments in West Africa, for instance, which are hiring and which are looking for amazing Francophone speakers to come in and help their ministers and help their policy teams plan. I know because I send my students to some of those governments. Those governments are not just in West Africa. They’re all around the world.
They may be national NGOs. NGOs that are working in lots of country contexts. They increasingly are helping the agenda setters for how what policy and inclusive policy development should look like. You know, there are huge opportunities there. The INGO market is changing rapidly because of funding cuts, because of funding pressures, but it’s not just a budgetary move. It’s also changing its face of what it looks like with organizations’ headquarters moving away from Geneva, and Brussels, and New York, to places like Nairobi. So this is the time, I think, in your career, get closer to the problem. Go more directly to work. Get embedded with local communities, with local actors.
Think more local and national right now, maybe less international. I think the time will come again, as we reshape some of these global institutions—both the ones that we have today, but I think the ones that we’re going to be creating tomorrow as well. And there will be opportunities again that won’t seem so hard. But if they’re feeling really hard right now, I would shake up some of that strategy, including looking at state governments, local governments, and also private sector actors and philanthropists, that are increasingly entering this space as well.
FASKIANOS: Wonderful. Thank you for that great overview and context. And we’re going to go now to all of you for your questions.
(Gives queuing instructions.)
So I’m going to first go to Tom Novotny with a raised hand at San Diego State University. Hi, Tom.
Q: Hi. Can you hear me now?
FASKIANOS: We can.
Q: Oh, good. I’m out walking the dog, actually. I really appreciate that review. It’s really incredible to hear the degree of change, but also to hear your positive outlook for the future, or at least the encouragement.
I’ve been the director of a global health PhD program. And I don’t know what to tell people in terms of career going forward. And I think the important thing is we’ve lost the international cooperative opportunities provided through WHO and other multinational organizations. And I just wonder what can be done politically to resecure the relationships and the leadership that we’ve had in those organizations? Because, you know, I think people still look to the United States for leadership, even though we’re not in a position now to be able to provide it as readily. What can we do to repair that? Thanks.
SUMAR: Yeah. Well, Tom, first, great to meet you. I hope it’s warmer where you’re walking your dog than it is here in Boston, where it was three degrees Fahrenheit this morning when I dropped my kids to school.
Look, I really appreciate, especially in the programs that you’re running with PhD students and others, and global health and public health, how fragile this seems right now. I was just in Cairo. I just returned, you know, a couple—yesterday, I think, twenty-four hours ago. And, you know, let me—I just want to share a couple impressions. You know, I think we’re very U.S.-centric here sometimes in the U.S. And we’re on our own little island. And there’s a lot of great things happening in so many parts of the world. Now, the impressions I got from my trip to Cairo just now were, can the U.S. be trusted? That trust feels very broken for certain communities and partners. If the trust is broken, what does that mean for them? And there is this real opportunity that many organizations that I talk to see where they want to step up. They want to reclaim their sovereignty, their voice, and their own leadership in developing how their countries should work.
There are new—you know, with this new billionaire class that’s being created all around the world, you are seeing new institutions, new philanthropists coming online, not just here in the United States. I know we have the ones like MacKenzie Scott and others that we’re tracking here, but this is happening in many countries. I mean, this is happening in Egypt, where I was, where new money is pouring into NGOs, to government actors, and others to think about how to actually develop countries like Cairo, which has an exploding population, and infrastructure problems, and public health challenges. They are hiring. Now, they want people who speak Arabic, right? They want people who are interested in being embedded in local communities. They don’t want people that are going to sit at an arm’s length away in Geneva or in Brussels, in New York or London, telling them what they want to—what they, you know, need to do. So the model is changing. There is money in the system.
I just want to say, this foreign aid money we’ve been chasing, we need to stop chasing it because there is—there’s tons of money in the world. It’s going to have to get reorganized for the things we collectively care about. But it is already happening in many parts of the world. The Middle East is a good example. Asia is a great example, where you see this coming together, and other spaces as well. So, you know, just to summarize, to say, I do think for your students, for instance, those that are interested, especially language—I think, you know, speaking languages and being spending more time abroad is going to matter more than ever. I don’t know that it’s going to be international institutions funded by Americans that is going to be what the saving grace is going to be for a lot of these strategies going forward. A, because the money may not be there. And, B, because trust is broken right now. And that is going to be hard to repair. And I think that’s a huge collateral damage in just a year of something we’re all going to have to really kind of sit with and figure out what does that mean for us as Americans going forward.
FASKIANOS: Wonderful. I’m going to take a written question from Fordham’s IPED class: Can you comment on the $50 billion foreign aid funding bill that recently passed in the House?
SUMAR: Yeah. So I’m curious. I’m just watching the news like all of you are. I’m so glad you’re following the news, Fordham, about what’s going on there. So we’ll have to see if it passes, of course, Congress writ large, if it gets signed by the White House. And then, you know, I’m curious who is going to have the capacity within the State Department, within the agencies that still remain in the executive branch, to be able to implement the funding. So getting the funding passed, I think, would be a really positive sign forward that it’s not zeroed out, which is something that many people have been advocating for.
And then it will raise some really interesting questions on implementation itself. Does the executive branch have the capacity now that so many people have been furloughed, so many of those jobs have been lost, so much of that expertise is lost—do they have the capacity to implement the money? How will the money be implemented through—will it be the same kind of partners as it was before? Are there new actors going to come online that we’re not prepared for that we’re going to be surprised for? So those are the things I’m looking for as I watch the news coming out of Congress.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
Let’s go next to Jack Galligan.
Q: Can you hear me?
FASKIANOS: Yes, we can. If you can give us—identify yourself.
Q: Yeah. So my name is John Galligan. I am a graduate student studying international relations at Vistula University in Poland, but I am originally from the U.S. And, just as an aside, I like what you—as somebody whose background is initially in linguistics, where you’re saying about the languages is good to hear for me personally.
But so I had a couple questions. One was with—and they’re similar to some of the other questions that have been written in the chat as well. You mentioned how it seems like countries, specifically the big powers, are looking more inward towards the future rather than being more globally oriented. So the first question I would have is do you think this has anything to do with a calculation potentially by these powers that there will be a point in the coming decades where resources will be scarce? And if not, do you think this is a viewpoint that will shift at some point? Or do you think that this sort of inward, more nation-focused concentration from, for example, the United States and China, will stick around for the near future?
SUMAR: Well, Jack, if I had a crystal ball I’d be so much richer than I am today. I just want to say. So I don’t really know. I’m not a good futures predictor right now. But let me just say from what we are seeing, the trendlines we’re seeing today, right? I mean, we are living in a moment where countries—of course, we’re seeing this played out, you know, the most in the United States right now, are following a highly nationalistic agenda. I don’t think the U.S. is alone. I think other countries are following this—like the Russians, the Indians, and others as well. But you’re really seeing this being played out by the United States that is having huge global effects, because the U.S. leads so many of the multilateral security, political, economic institutions, both in terms of leadership, moral and political, but also the funding sources. So there is, I think, a scrambling of the world order that’s happening right now. And countries—and you heard this from Prime Minister Carney’s speech yesterday—countries like Canada and others, that are the midsized countries that have largely been paying into a global collective order, are wondering what is going to come next.
Now, do they go and do they—do they also turn inward and just fight for their own nationalism and their own interests? Or do they continue to fight the global fight, right? Those are the types of questions that, if you’re not a country that is already on that cusp, are starting to ask, their citizens are starting to ask to make sense of what comes next. I don’t know how it’s going to break. I hope that we can still follow some global collective norms in the world order, and what that looks like. Is this a temporary abyss from the Americans right now during a four-year Republican term, and then things go back to the way they were? Or is this the new trend that’s a fundamental historic break, I think is an open question. And I’m not the person best placed to answer that question. But I think those are the questions countries are asking right now. And for other countries that have not been a large-sized or mid-sized power, but have been on the recipient end where they’re often the ones as a beneficiary of the aid or really at the tail end of the bargaining, getting the short end of the stick, so to speak, you know, they may be recalculating to say this is the moment where they’re going to reclaim some of their own political and economic sovereignty and not be so over-reliant on whether that’s the United States, Europe, or others from making their decisions going forward.
So I think a lot of leaders, I think a lot of countries, and I think a lot of citizens are asking these types of hard questions. And it fundamentally, right, for all of us, begs the question, what kind of world order do we want to live in, right? Do we want to go back to a hundred years ago? Think about where we were in the 1920s, very isolated here in the United States, very much an island. And, you know, the golden years, only to be hit a couple years down the line by the Great Recession, the Great Depression, and the world war to come. Or do we want to be part of a larger political security and moral order that leads to more global collective stability and potential for everybody? So, you know, I can’t answer those questions. I’m not a politician. But I think that’s, Jack, what—or, sorry—John, what we are dealing with. And love that you’re doubling down on languages. Keep doing that.
FASKIANOS: There’s a written question from Lisette Cortes at Minnesota State University, Mankato: Is there any chance or possibility that once the Trump administration is done the budgets or help to national and international NGOs would go back to normal?
SUMAR: Well, so, hello, Minnesota. Maybe it’s colder there than it is here in Boston, but great to hear from you.
Look, I don’t know that we’re ever just going to go back to the way it was. That feels hard to me right now. Even if there was a change of administrations, even if there was a Democratic administration in three years, will things just go back to the way they were? That seems unlikely to me. I do think there are going to be some massive structural shifts that have taken place, that will take place. And we’re going to have to ask some really hard questions about what do we want to design in its place? And it may look similar to what we had, but I do hope we’re also innovative about new ways of thinking, designing, and building institutions, including for NGO and INGO budgets to come.
FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you.
I’m going to go next to Alyssa Ayres, who has a raised hand.
Q: Can you hear me now?
FASKIANOS: We can.
Q: OK. Fatema, thanks so much for that overview. That was really helpful to hear you lay that out in the broad span of history.
I wonder, just given your experience at MCC, the surviving U.S. development agencies that we have include MCC (Millennium Challenge Corporation) and DFC (Development Finance Corporation). And they do different things than USAID does. I mean, what do you think about a future of a U.S. foreign assistance program that may be more infrastructure focused, but on a smaller scale? Is that the direction that we may be headed?
SUMAR: Yeah. Well, first, Alyssa, great to see you.
FASKIANOS: And just to—Alyssa is the dean of the George Washington University’s Elliott School. So, sorry. Just wanted to put that in.
SUMAR: And I had the pleasure of serving with Alyssa when we were at the State Department in the Bureau of South and Central Asia. So it’s great to see you.
So, you know, it is interesting, right, that the agencies that have survived so far are the agencies like MCC and DFC. They focus more on infrastructure. They focus—and DFC, of course, on the lending portfolio. You know, and, you know, we are—there have been conversations that we’ve certainly heard about their future direction, really to prioritize things that the Trump administration cares about, including partnerships with countries around minerals, for instance, or around economic growth strategies that align much more with an America first strategy. It’s interesting that, you know, if you go back, even this historic thing from a hundred years ago, this idea of fighting poverty really started with large-scale infrastructure. Because, of course, that’s—the world lacked all of it back in the, you know, 1950s and 1960s, absent what colonial movements had built—things like rail—you know, the rail lines and other infrastructure that was built for largely then imperial extraction.
But, you know, the large-scale infrastructure of the 1950s, and the 1960s, and a little bit into the 1970s as well, that has largely tapered off from the donor community, for lots of different reasons. Including it’s very expensive. These are multibillion dollar investments. It’s hard to foot the bill indefinitely for them. MCC, as you know, I worked there in two different capacities overseeing the program and compact operations, about 60 percent of its portfolio or so is on infrastructure, 40 percent is human capital development and policy reforms. But it’s a small bucket compared to what the needs are. The title annual—at the height of it, MCC’s annual budget was less than a billion dollars, right, for all of that. DFC doesn’t put in grant equity. It’s more on the concessional lending and other kinds of terms for U.S. companies and others to make investments and to buy off some of the risk in riskier places.
But the infrastructure needs that we see in developing country contexts are in the trillions—in the trillions. So I think it’s right to say that today the trendline seems to be prioritizing more infrastructure, but the rates at which the U.S. is prioritizing that is a drop in the bucket. I mean, it’s nothing to really brag home about, especially compared to the infrastructure investments that the Chinese, as you know, have been making through Belt and Road Initiative and others. So, you know, if that’s the direction that the Americans want to fundamentally move in it’s going to take a massive capital influx from the Hill. And I don’t know that there’s any political appetite to really do that.
FASKIANOS: Great. Thank you.
I’m going to take a written question from Mallika Yadwad, who’s a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon: What is the future of the SDGs post 2030? And how do you see academic institutions playing a role in their implementation and localization? And she says, tuning in from Carnegie Mellon University’s Sustainable Futures Initiative.
SUMAR: Great. Well, hi, Carnegie Mellon. So great for you to join the call today.
Look, like, let’s go back to September 2024, Mallika, right? So back in September 2024, pre the Trump administration, pre this entire conversation about 2025, the SDGs were less than 15 percent on track. So, you know, they were fundamentally in dire trouble even before the crises we faced over the past year. It’s hard to see a world where we actually—they succeed by 2030, which, again, to remind our audience, this was a global collective commitment to end poverty once and for all, measured through seventeen different indicators collated by the United Nations with a global collective political commitment to do this by 2030. So I think the SDGs are fundamentally off track. But they were off track before this entire crisis.
I would wager—I have not seen the analysis of where they stand today. I would love to see that analysis. If anyone has it, please send my way. My guess is that they’re even worse off than they were eighteen months ago. And so I think it raises real questions of is that still the metric we’re going to be using? And if not, what would the new global commitments look like? And I think that’s still very much an open question.
FASKIANOS: Thank you.
I’m going to take the next question from Edoh Agbehonou, who is an assistant professor at Bethune-Cookman University. There we go.
Q: Yeah. Thank you so much for this wonderful and insightful presentation. And I’m glad that you discuss—you talk about the history and where you come here.
I’m also glad that to how you link international cooperation to prevent future conflict. And knowing that since the launching of the trade war we know that WHO has been in trouble. And how can international cooperation, international development be effective if countries cannot trade with each other in good faith? And we also know that Global North, basically the Western countries and Australia and so on and so forth, they have advantage, at least when it comes to the means of transformation. And the Global South overwhelmingly have natural resources, including the primary commodity that is very needed for the development of advanced countries.
But now that we are in this kind of war, and recently we have seventy-five countries also were issued visa restriction in order to move around the country, you know, to United States and so on and so forth. And we also witnessed kind of regime change in Venezuela, and coupled with the Russia and Ukrainian war. Don’t you see that this is a—and now you also have a—Venezuela was also taken. The leader was taken and tried to take the country. The United States now threatened to take over Greenland. This is a signal the beginning of the second wave of colonization. How can we really talk about international development if an event like that is occurring and in a very rapid way? What is your take on it?
SUMAR: Great. Well, Edoh, thank you so much. And you’re right that there’s so much happening right now it’s almost hard to keep track of the so many different foreign policy and geopolitical movements that are taking place right now. Let me go back to one of your—where your questions started around trade. You know, I wanted—I wanted to share that, you know, earlier in my career one of the things I worked a lot on, especially in the Asia context—and I worked on South Asia and Central Asia issues—was the issue of trade. And there’s been a lot of consternation with how difficult the trade regime has been. Obviously, there’s been, you know, nonstop talk about what has happened with tariffs, because we have a separate webinar, Irina, on the tariff side, right, of what has happened this past year, and the implications, and the consequences of that.
But I want to step back a little bit outside of, again, of the last eight—the last twelve months, to say that, you know, one of the ways that we know that countries could help move their economies is trade not just with countries far away in Europe and the United States and North America, but right in their own neighborhood. And it’s really stunning to me that, you know, a hundred years post the—you know, at least two—you know, almost a hundred years post two world wars and the breakup of colonial empires in the twenty-first century, we’re still living in a world where most regional neighborhoods have the least integrated numbers of trade with each other. So South Asia is a very good example. It’s one of the least economically integrated regions on Earth. And that’s, of course, because of political conflicts between India and Pakistan, and many other dynamics taking place in the region. But you see this in Central Asia. You see this in West Africa. You see this in many parts of the world.
And so, you know, there are exogenous factors that some countries cannot control for, like right now including where Washington is going to be going on issues like trade. But there are things in countries’ control, including trying to figure out new trade policies and relationships right in their own neighborhood. And I know there’s been a huge momentum, of course, in Africa, looking at new trade pacts and trade agreements in Africa. Also in APEC, I would say, with Asia, and looking at what that could look like in the ASEAN space as well. And those are the types of regional blocs that you’re starting to see emerge. Opportunities that you start to see emerge, where there’s enormous resource and talent within developing countries. This idea that resource rich only sits in the so-called Global North is something that I think we are going to have to really seriously tackle and change.
If we can figure out the right institutional arrangements, if we can figure out what good leadership looks like, if we can figure out what smart policy design looks like, both regionally and nationally, there’s just tremendous resources and talent that sit across Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, Africa. And there’s tremendous opportunity to think differently and not be so reliant on global exogenous shocks led by Washington or other players. So I know this is, like, a time of tremendous upheaval. I get scared reading the headlines every day, like maybe some of you do as well. But I also fundamentally believe that we are now in the mix of a new historic crossroads. And we have the power, with communities we care about, to figure out how do we want to design differently, how do we want to control for differently, and how do we want to take some of that power back?
And when you think about—when you think about all of that, that’s so much of what the international development sector and field, where those opportunities lie, right? How do you design programs that crowd in inclusive growth and opportunities? How do you design programs that not just get people to survive and live and not die, but how do you design programs that get people to thrive in communities? I do fundamentally believe there’s resources we have to be able to do that. They may look different than what we’ve depended on in the foreign aid community. I think there’s new national relationships, new trade relationships, new intellectual relationships that can and will be forged in the years to come. And the world is changing rapidly, faster than we can absorb. So that, I think, Edoh and others, is where we are headed. And I think, for all the crises out there, I will just say for each of you studying international development, interested in this field, there’s lots of opportunities to step in and help us figure this out.
FASKIANOS: Great.
I’m going to take a question from Fernando Reimers, who’s a professor of international education at Harvard University.
Q: Thank you, Irina. Thank you, Fatema, for a great presentation.
So the institutions, the Bretton Woods institutions and many others that gave us global governance, had their origins in universities, both in ideas that emerged from universities and in people who were in universities that collaborated with government. Is there anything universities could have done to prevent the collapse that you’re describing? What did we fail to do, to the extent we bear some responsibility?
SUMAR: Well, hi, Fernando. It’s great to hear from you. And thank you for joining.
I love your question. You know, and one of the things that I’ve been thinking a lot about, and I’m sure maybe you and many others as well, is, you know, universities at their best—at their best are places where we crowd in different ideas, different people, different methodologies, and different debates. And when we can do that at our best, that—you know, those ideas, those people then go back out into their own communities and are able to disseminate those very ideas and debates. When we stifle those, or when we kind of close our gates intellectually to only certain types of people, or certain types of ideas, or certain types of areas where we’re not able to really get into those conversations, I think people struggle to understand what is our value-add and how to influence. So I just want to say that, you know, I’m at Harvard now for the last four years, but I’m not an academic. And for most of my career I was in the policy space.
And one of the things I struggled with as a policymaker in increasingly senior roles in first the diplomacy side and then the development side is we didn’t really have good conversations with universities. So I may have had people on my teams, the economists in particular, that maybe had relationships back with economists sitting in universities, but the broader structures, the broader institutions, we did not really have such a great exchange of ideas and flow. I hope we can break down some of those silos. I think there’s reasons for them, including the art of translation is difficult. We speak different languages in the policy world than in the academic worlds. We think differently. Our timelines are different. The way we approach problem identification and solution is very different.
These are the types of conversations, at the Harvard Center for International Development, for instance, that we’re trying to have differently, by crowdsourcing in both academics, researchers, practitioners, policymakers, fellows, students, both young and old, to be able to make sure we’re all speaking the same language and creating the platforms to be able to do that. So I struggled with that when I was in the policy space. I think—I hope that if I go back into the policy space following my stint here in academia that I would be able to do better. But I think there are some institutional barriers that we really have to kind of tackle. And the cultures have to change on both sides to value and appreciate what each both—the policy and the research side—bring to each other.
FASKIANOS: I think that’s a great note to end on. And we have so many questions, both written and raised hands. My apologies for not being able to get to all of them. The hour went by really much too quickly. (Laughs.) So, Fatema Sumar, this is great. Thank you so much. We really appreciate your bringing your policy expertise, your practitioner, and you’re thinking now that you’re in the academic context, and how we bridge all of these different communities. So thank you for being with us. Really appreciate it.
SUMAR: Well, Irina, thanks to you. Thanks to CFR. And just to all of you who were able to join, first, I love—and I’m so sorry we didn’t get to all your questions in the chat, which I had a quick glance at. Keep asking the hard questions. Keep probing. And you know, in some ways, even if things seem bleak, I do think this is your moment. This is our moment. Push the envelope of thinking, of design, and imagine a different type of world that you want to live in, and help us get there. So I think, you know, that’s my half glass full to start 2026.
FASKIANOS: And it is a wonderful way to start 2026. So thank you.
Our next Global Affairs Expert Webinar will be on Wednesday, January 28, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Michelle Gavin, the Ralph Bunche senior fellow for Africa policy studies at CFR, will actually be talking about youth movements in Africa, which you talked about the growth there, Fatema. So that will be a timely discussion.
I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/careers. And please go to CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues, and education.CFR.org for free, expert-informed teaching and learning resources. So thank you all, again. Thank you, Fatema. And we look forward to continuing the discussion.
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