In Development is "a new magazine dedicated to exploring how progress happens — or doesn’t happen — in the developing world".  This week (May 11-17), the EA Forum is collaborating with the magazine to bring you their first batch of articles[1], along with their authors[2], ready to answer your questions. Lauren Gilbert, the magazine's editor-in-chief, will also be present in this thread to answer questions about the magazine itself.  You can ask questions here in the thread, or on the individual posts.  Read all the articles Thanks to In Development for working with us to make this happen! You can subscribe to their Substack on the link below: Subscribe to In Development Participants in this thread: @Lauren Gilbert  is the Editor in Chief of In Development, as well as a non-resident fellow at the Centre for British Progress, the Energy for Growth Hub, and the Roots of Progress Institute. Her writing has appeared in The Economist, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Works in Progress, and Asterisk. She has previously been a program manager at Renaissance Philanthropy, a research fellow at Open Philanthropy, as well as a theoretical neutrino astrophysicist. @Charles Kenny  is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, and the author of Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding and Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Utility: Happiness in Philosophical and Economic Thought. Nithin Coca (@ncoca) is an award-winning, Asia-focused freelance journalist who covers politics, technology, human rights, and environment, across the region, with a focus on cross-border, collaborative reporting. He is currently based in Japan, but was previously based in Jakarta, Indonesia. Daniel Yu (@danielyu) is the founder of Wasoko, one of Africa's largest e-commerce companies, and now the founding partner of the Africa Jobs Fund, a new program under Renaissance Philanthropy to finance and build African export manufacturing and labor mobility pathways. Enlli McA

This is a crosspost of the full text of Exporters Without Borders: Why You Should Start a Company Instead of Working in Aid from In Development, made for the EA Forum's In Development Highlight Week.  If you enjoy the article, you can subscribe to In Development's substack here.  ---------------------------------------- June Jambiha was a quintessential hustler. Like many in Kenya’s capital of Nairobi, she sold clothing as an informal entrepreneur, her income in 2018 swinging wildly, from $400 one month to $60 the next. This uncertainty made it nearly impossible to plan: hard to save, borrow, or commit to anything beyond the next week. But in Kenya, where over 80% of jobs are informal, hustling was less a choice than the only option available. June joined my company, Wasoko, a B2B e-commerce platform linking small shops to large manufacturers, as a telesales agent. Her starting pay was lower than her best month selling clothing, but, for the first time, it was predictable. She knew what would land in her account the following month and the month after that. More than the money, though, there was an upward trajectory: her career could grow. Joining Wasoko didn’t just give June a paycheck; it gave her a career. Entrepreneurship by Default In developing countries, many people become entrepreneurs by default. Most have informal, cash-in-hand jobs. There is no certainty in entrepreneurship. At any given time, there could be a glut of opportunities, or income could completely dry up, and individuals have little control over this. When your income can differ markedly from month to month, it is hard to plot a path forward. Should you take out a loan to grow your hustle when your income could disappear the following month? People in wealthier countries rarely stop to think about what a regular paycheck actually provides. A few prefer the adrenaline rush of building something of their own, but most, given the choice, prefer a steady job, since housing payments, credit

This is a crosspost of the full text of Money for nothing: the roles of evidence in GiveDirectly’s journey to $1 billion delivered from In Development, made for the EA Forum's In Development Highlight Week. GiveDirectly will be taking part in the discussion thread, but the author, Paul Niehaus, may not see your comments here.  If you enjoy the article, you can subscribe to In Development's substack here.  ---------------------------------------- Is it nuts to give cash to the poor without strings attached? That’s not a rhetorical question; it’s the headline the New York Times ran the first time they covered GiveDirectly. My co-founders and I had a mild panic. We had been hoping, I suppose, for something benign and puffy along the lines of “New Charity Founded by Thoughtful Econ PhDs Is a Great Idea.” The truth is of course that that piece did what it needed to do, which was to speak to its audience where they were at. At the time (i.e., in 2011) most New York Times readers probably did think it was nuts—or, at best, naive—to give out money for nothing. And one can hardly blame them. They had been fed a steady diet of data-free, mantra-heavy messaging implying, if not stating outright, that people living in extreme poverty were not capable of sound financial choices. One must teach a man to fish, the inane aphorism goes.[1] Photo from GiveDirectly; photo of Liberia (Maryland Country) field office ---------------------------------------- Since then, opinions—professional opinions, at least—have swung. Giving away money without strings attached is seen as a good option, often the best. A 2024 position paper by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)—prior to its untimely demise in 2025, the largest of the bilateral donors—said that the agency “should include direct monetary transfers as a core element of its development toolkit.”[2] The stated policy of the UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is a “‘why-not cash approach,’ whereby operations mu

This is a crosspost of the full text of Jakarta’s Remarkable Urban Transit Transformation from In Development, made for the EA Forum's In Development Highlight Week.  If you enjoy the article, you can subscribe to In Development's substack here.  ---------------------------------------- For many years, the first word most foreign visitors learned upon moving to Jakarta was macet, traffic jam. Traffic was so bad that transport experts warned in 2013 that if nothing was done, the city could achieve total gridlock, with every part of the city experiencing a traffic jam. In 2014, Jakarta was crowned the world’s most congested city by the Stop-Start Index and a year later was ranked far below other Asian cities on livability by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Ten years later, Jakarta has the world’s largest and one of the most used bus rapid transit (BRT) systems. The old, crowded diesel commuter trains, famous for allowing passengers to ride on the roofs, are now electrified, air conditioned, and run on regular schedules linking the suburbs to the city center. There are multiple subway and light rail lines crisscrossing the city. The transformation has been remarkable: in 2015, less than 20% of residents were within walking distance of transit. Now, nearly 90% of the city has access to BRT or trains. (A photo of a morning commute in Jakarta, with a dedicated Bus Rapid Transit lane. Image: UN Women, CC-BY-NC-ND) How did Jakarta go from the world’s most congested city to one that other rapidly growing cities seek to emulate? International investment, political will, and a bit of luck. Fixing the World’s Most Congested City It’s hard to overstate how challenging getting around Jakarta used to be. Back in the early 2000s, expats in Jakarta used to joke about taking trips to “more peaceful” cities — like New Delhi, Cairo, or Bangkok. After all, those cities had urban transit systems. In Jakarta, the only certainty was traffic. During peak hours, it would often take

This is a crosspost of the full text of Where’s My Ministry For Emigration? from In Development, made for the EA Forum's In Development Highlight Week.  If you enjoy the article, you can subscribe to In Development's substack here.  ---------------------------------------- Leaving Genoa in northwest Italy, Luigi Pastene arrived in Boston in 1848, and began selling produce from a pushcart in the city’s North End neighborhood. By the 1870s, permanently settled in the United States, he had been joined in business by his son Pietro, and the pair specialized in selling Italian imports including olive oil and tomato sauce from Naples in southern Italy. In the same decade, Luigi Vitelli arrived in New York from Naples. First selling lace and handicrafts, he later began importing and marketing canned San Marzo tomatoes. In 1919, he returned to Italy and built his own processing plant for canned tomato exports to the US business, the origin of a firm that expanded into the multinational Vitelli Foods. Pastene and Vitelli were just two of the millions of Italians and tens of millions of Europeans that emigrated to the New World—many permanently, some temporarily—in the second half of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century, the age of mass migration. Migrants on a boat to the United States in 1890; image from the Library of Congress. This migration was not just a boon for the United States. Many migrants sent money home, adding $4 million to $30 million a year to the Italian economy, a US government commission estimated in 1896. Herman Stump, US Commissioner-General of Immigration in the mid 1890s, reported that “the marked increase in the wealth of certain sections of Italy can be traced directly to the money earned in the United States.” But it was not simply about the money; emigration soaked up excess labor, returned migrants brought back new skills and contacts, and migration links drove stronger trade and investment relationships. Indeed, the age of m