GDI Digest: Forget the hype – how is AI really changing the world?
by Louisa Hann If today’s Silicon Valley billionaires are to be believed, AI is about to supercharge your quality of life, boost your productivity, and provide access to “wildly abundant” intelligence. As Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI puts it, the future “can be vastly...
Empowering Human Potential: Rethinking Employability in the New Collar Era
By Lujia Feng, Programme Director: MSc Human Resource Management (International Development) On Thursday, 12 February 2026, we were delighted to welcome Kashif Taj, Apprenticeships Leader at IBM UK, to speak with our MSc Human Resource Management (International...
Call for Workshop Contributions: Resilient Amazon Futures: Strengthening Food, Water, Forest, and Land Governance for Sustainable Development
Workshop Title: Resilient Amazon Futures: Strengthening Food, Water, Forest, and Land Governance for Sustainable Development UK Principal Instructor: José A. Puppim de Oliveira, University of Manchester Brazil Principal Instructor: Claudio Szlafsztein, Federal...
Looking for the AI in inclusive AI
by Anuradha Ganapathy, PhD Researcher at the Global Development Institute Can you write about AI without ever once referring to it? These were my first thoughts when I came back from the field, learning from and with communities in rural India who were experimenting...
What an Urban Lens Can Tell Us About Venezuela
by Dr Erika Garcia Fermin, Honorary Research Fellow at the Global Development Institute Last week I had a really energising conversation with Tom Goodfellow and Beth Perry on Urban Radar, a podcast by Sheffield Urbanism that discuss current events through the lens of...
Communities of Practice: How are different kinds of resilience connected?
On Tuesday, 27th January, we held our final community of practice in a series exploring the role of resilience in maintaining a thriving and impactful development sector. Over the past few months, we’ve been bringing together development practitioners, academics, and...
Call for Papers: Services and the Global South: Structural Transformation, Inequality and Development
Call for Workshop Papers Services have become the dominant source of employment and value added across most low‑ and middle‑income countries. Unlike the historical pattern of agriculture to manufacturing to services, the contemporary trajectory of many countries in...
What do GDI academics make of January 2026?
by Louisa Hann As you’ve probably noticed, 2026 is off to an eventful start – and it’s not promising to slow down any time soon. Donald Trump threatened to invade Greenland, Mark Carney delivered a speech asserting the end of the rules-based international order at the...