← This Week in Global Development
This Week in Global Development
The impact of aid cuts: UN reform and the role of philanthropy
00:32:46
This week, we explore the ins and outs of UN80, https://www.devex.com/news/un80-and-the-incredible-shrinking-united-nations-110714 to cut costs and boost efficiency. We outline what this initiative, drafted as a result of...
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- [00:04]
A
My name is David Ainsworth, and you're listening to this Week in Global Development, hosted by myself, Dumitri Kamba and Adva Saldingham. I'm joined by my colleagues, Colm Lynch, a senior global reporter, and Catherine Chaney. Catherine is in charge of all our events here at devex. What's your official job title, Catherine?
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B
Senior editor for special coverage. So I help to figure out how we cover big moments in global development, whether it's newsletters, podcasts, or, or often, live journalism on the sidelines.
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A
Lovely. Well, it's great to have you along. Katherine knows a hell of a lot about development, everybody, so I don't know why we haven't had her on here before. I also have to apologize to all of our audience. You already complained that it's hard to understand my British accent, and I'm doing it this week with a cold. So I'm going to be even harder to understand because I'm doing this without the benefit of my nose. So if you don't understand me, my apologies. Anyway, moving on as usual. This week we're talking about the impact of the Donald Trump administration and all the changes in the United States or different institutions in the development sphere. And we're going to look at a couple of different kind of angles to this. We're going to talk a little bit about what's happening in the United nations, and we're going to also talk about the fallout from the UN General assembly and the World bank annual meetings, which Catherine spearheaded all our coverage of, and kind of pick out some of the key themes of that, which are, again, all about how different institutions are changing to respond to a changing environment. So, Colm, let's stand to you, first of all. So you wrote what I thought was a fascinating article about the internal politics of the United nations, which I certainly personally learned a lot from, about how Antonio Gutierrez has made a series of recommendations, what reform should take place. And essentially the response from certain parts of the UN was that this is a set of guidelines, not a set of rules, and that they will be taking it under advisement and thinking about whether they will pay any attention to it. So do you want to kind of run us through what's happening there with the UN80 process? I think it's not particularly easy for people who are outside the United nations to understand kind of how all that fits together.
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C
So I think, I mean, what's happening is, in response to the financial cuts, UN has sort of undertaken a reform process called UN 80 to sort of demonstrate that they can do more with less and also that they can lower costs as the US Is cutting funds. So essentially the Secretary General has come up with two things. Both the UNAD reform, trying to renegotiate or eliminate a lot of the kind of overlapping mandates, restructuring, potentially merging the agencies, doing all these other kind of ambitious kind of reform efforts, and also just trying to cut back on costs, sort of an austerity plan. And so the Secretary General's been, all the focus has been on what the Secretary General is proposing. And I thought that it would be interesting to do a piece on, you know, how much power, how much influence does you have over the organization to implement these cuts. And what you find is that it's not really as much as you might imagine. Let's, for instance, UNAIDS was, was highlighted in a recent proposal. The Secretary General has to sort of eliminate the organization by the end of 2026. UNAIDS the leadership. The Secretary General plays a role in appointing the leader of unaids. But you know, after he does that, he doesn't have a lot of power to instruct them on what they're doing. They, on the basis of their own mandate, they respond and answer to donors to their executive board, which is usually member states. And they have already been engaged in their own reform process separate from the unad. And their proposal doesn't involve eliminating themselves by the end of 2026. It has like a sort of five year kind of mandate and recludes cuts and all that sort of things. But they basically sent like, sent out a press release after the Secretary General introduced his proposal, basically saying, yes, we, you know, we're very much involved in the UN AD initiative, we support the Secretary General, but we're going to do it our way. And so what that kind of demonstrates to a certain degree I don't think people realize is that, you know, the Secretary General was not really the executive authority in a whole number of UN agencies. He often plays a role in appointing the leadership, often, you know, on, on the basis of proposals or recommendations by government. So for instance, the World Fruit Program, unicef, usually informally the Americans tell them who they want in that role and then he appoints under that role and then the General assembly signs off on it. So what you see is that even though the Secretary General does that, they have their own sort of board of, of, you know, they have their own executive board, they have their own donors that they have to respond to. And frankly, the World Food Program has more on the line in terms of its relationship with its major donor, the United States than it does the Secretary General. So everyone has to kind of create this sense that they're all in it together, but it's a very decentralized system. And I think that that's coming out in the process of this reform, you know. You know, in this sense, I'm only talking about the UN agencies, then, you know, we can get into it, but then the UN Member states have to approve any major reforms that the Secretary General wants to impose or wants to recommend, and they can just say, you know, no, thank you. We're going to go our own way.
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A
Yeah. And in all of this, there's a number of kind of different factors pushing at this. To what extent do the. To the people within these agencies have the power to kind of resist what they're being asked to do?
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C
So, I mean, I think that, that, you know, the trick is that they can resist without seeming to resist. And that seemed to be the approach that UNAIDS was taking. I think that, you know, I mean, that's one way to look at it. Another way to look at this is that the UN Secretariat, which is the area where the Secretary General really does have some administrative authority, they are all funded largely by assessed funding. That means governments are obligated to fund. And the negotiations on the budget really aren't playing out till the end of the year. They're starting to really go into play right now. The agencies are mostly dependent on voluntary funds. So once the Trump administration started saying, we're freezing all of our funding for existing programs and future programs, they had to act immediately. So they're, in a sense, ahead of the game in terms of overseeing their own austerity measures. I mean, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Office has already let go thousands of employees. The International Organization for Migration, because they were funded largely by the United States, and the US Cut that funding. So they already are in the process of undertaking these kinds of reforms the Secretary General's talking about. And in some case, they're more severe than what the Secretary General is recommending. So, you know, in a way, some of this stuff is taking place in parallel. Another organization like the Unpopulation Fund. One of the things that's sort of in play is this idea of moving staff to less expensive countries. So there's been a lot of moves to Nairobi by unicef, by unfpa, by others. Not clear that Nairobi is so inexpensive. But part of that effort began even before the budget crunch, where organizations like UNAPA were moving people to Nairobi not because of the financial pressures, but because they wanted them to be closer to the operations they conduct in the field. And that's another way of looking at this issue. It's not just about funding. It's about a push to take things away from headquarters and closer to the scene of action.
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A
So it really sounds to me as if there's a lot of conflicting forces here pushing in different directions. You have the member states. China obviously has its own views on what it wants to see happen at the United nations, and that's very different from that of the United States. Each individual organization has its board of member states who are going to, to negotiate with the leader of that organization. Each organization has its own funding mix, a mixture of voluntary and paid for stuff. And the staff, the nationals, are kind of able to push back against this to some extent. There seems to be quite a lot of independent thinking among the staff of United Nations. They don't necessarily always listen to their leadership. So it's going to be a very complex and long and difficult sort of fight as to exactly where the cuts fall and how much falls on who, although presumably at the end they have to make the cuts because they don't have the budget anymore.
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C
Well, yeah, I don't know, but I mean, you've already seen this sort of jockeying for influence in the negotiation. The Chinese. I mean, there's just one interesting sort of piece of this that the big five powers, the five countries with veto power on the Security Council, the U.S. britain, France, China and Russia, they've already been sort of jockeying for the kinds of cuts that they prefer. So China has been trying to expand the influence of the Department of Economic and Social affairs, which has been run by a Chinese national, usually a former Foreign Ministry official, over the last 20 years or so. Initially there were some proposals internally about merging the peacekeeping operations operations with the Political affairs operations. But, you know, Political affairs is the senior cabinet official controlled by the US and has been for many years. Peacekeeping has been run by the French for over 20 years. So these are very powerful countries and they're not willing to give up those key cabinet positions they have. So it makes it difficult to, you know, to carry out the reforms on areas where these big powers have influence. And then as you go down the sort of pecking order, you have other member states really pushing this line that, you know, we need to have geographic distribution of jobs which is, you know, included, embedded in the UN charter. The group of 77 is very much, you know, using this as an opportunity to push for more jobs for, for countries in the global South. You have some of The Northern European countries, the Benelux countries, who are pushing for preserving some of the work that the UN does on sexual reproductive health and rights. There's a lot of concern that an emerging of these agencies like the UN Population Fund, UN Women, that's one of the proposals the Secretary General made that, that might dilute some of these hard fought initiatives that the UN has kind of embraced over the last couple of years. So it's going to be a total mud fight. You know, when you get down to it in terms of the negotiations over the last couple of months and they're going to, they're going to pick this thing apart.
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A
Yeah. Fascinating to see the battle between the different countries before this already we were seeing countries in the global south really pushing for big reforms, trying to get greater control, all sorts of things. This is only going to add fuel to the fight.
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Are you interested in the intersection of business and social impact? Do you want to know how corporate sustainability, ESG impact investing and more can contribute to development finance? My name is Advaah Saldinger. I'm a senior reporter at devex and I've been reporting on these issues for nearly a decade. I'm the author of Devex Invested, our free weekly newsletter dedicated to development finance. Every Tuesday, we explore how companies, investors and market mechanisms are reshaping the world of development finance. Visit devex.com newsletters and join us on Tuesdays.
- [11:43]
A
Katherine, let me bring you in on this. You spearheaded our coverage of the United Nations General Assembly. You were there the whole time. You watched all this unfolding and then you did the same again straight afterwards at the World bank, which is, I think, a slightly masochistic approach to work. But both events went off startlingly well, so I guess it worked. What big themes did you see emerging from the UN General assembly and then afterwards at the World Bank?
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B
Thank you. Well, at all of our events, I say that I try to include perspectives you expect to hear from institutions you know, but also names you may not know, but you should. And that's especially important in this moment because there are calls for new actors to step up for obvious reasons, because there aren't the same resources that were on the table before. And so we try to feature who are those new actors? And you know, you mentioned at the outset of this conversation, Dave, that we're looking at how institutions are responding to a changing environment. Philanthropy is definitely being called upon to make changes. That was a huge takeaway from UNGA and World Bank. We featured several conversations on philanthropy's role in this moment. And column mentioned that the UN 80 reform process is about doing more with less. I would say for philanthropy, the main message right now is do more and do better. Because for those who aren't familiar with some of the rules around giving, at least in the US context, there's this 5% required giving rule. So that's the minimum annual distribution requirement for private foundations. So in this moment, many funders are saying, you know, 5% should be a minimum, not a maximum. Many funders treat it as a maximum, and, you know, they give that amount each year, nothing above it. There was a really powerful moment at UNGA where Kara Wise from the CRI foundation, which does a lot of grant making in areas including global health, she mentioned, sometimes you just need to act. And in order to do that, we needed some basic information from some trusted sources, which I'll tell you more about. But she said we need to treat that 5% as a minimum, the minimum, not as a maximum, and we need to move cash. And then while there were some things to be celebrated on stage, which I can mention again in a second, she said, I think this has been a really important learning for me in terms of what I thought was true about donors. There were definitely people who stepped up, and there are people who are continuing to step up, and yet there are a lot of institutions who have been sitting on their money. These are people who call themselves global health donors. So if you're not moving your money now, I don't know what you're waiting for. Cue audience applause. I mean, everyone in the room agreed. So I will just say philanthropy has a role to play. And, you know, there are many demands for philanthropy to step up, and we see some exciting examples of that, which I'll talk about. But again, while the UN is looking to do more with less, the message for philanthropy is do more. And I did just want to clarify the fact that while we see many acts of, you know, generosity, I suppose some may say there are also many critiques of philanthropy that ultimately they're sitting on a lot of wealth at a moment when resources are needed now more than ever. And, Dave, let me just quickly reference the example I was talking about, that conversation that Kara was a part of, because I do think it's one of the trends I'm seeing. So this year, with the unprecedented funding cuts, especially here in the US we are seeing philanthropists step up. And I do think an exciting example of that which we talked about at UNGA is this effort called Project Resource Optimization. So we had a story on this, essentially Some leaders within usaid, especially folks like Sasha Gallant, who led their Development Innovation Ventures portfolio, which looked at the most highly cost effective giving opportunities, how donors can do the most with every dollar they donate. They were trying to figure out how do we keep these programs alive? At the same time, donors like Kara were trying to figure out, what do we do? In this moment, folks within USAID literally took a spreadsheet from foreign assistance.gov of the most highly cost effective programs, downloaded it and started matching donors with causes. And they have since, in six months mobilized 110 million for what they describe as their urgent embedded list. Now, there's a lot to be celebrated there, but there's also many programs that didn't make that list and a lot of questions about, you know, what do we do from here and how do we continue to identify cost effective programs versus just doing kind of crisis response for those that have already been identified. So I guess I'll pause there because there's more to say from the World Bank. But I do think one trend we're seeing is donors are stepping up. The Project Resource Optimization example is an interesting example. Actually, part of why I featured it on stage at UNGA is sort of like, we need more of this. Like, if you aren't giving now, what are you doing? Kind of like Kara said. So I expect to see more momentum in this space. But I guess what I'd quickly add, and I can expand more on how this came up at the World bank meetings, when I say philanthropy is being asked to do more and do better, they are really grappling with their role in this moment sort of beyond charity. Right? Because another limitation of philanthropy is just the resources they have pale in comparison to official development assistance and government dollars. So they really have to leverage that money in a smart way. They cannot just fill the gap. But how can they deploy their capital in smart ways? I'll give one quick example that actually emerged at World Bank. So we featured a conversation with the Gates foundation and Open Philanthropy, which some of our listeners may know. That's a foundation started by Dustin Moskovitz and Carrie Tuna. Pretty significant giving in this space. In fact, on a recent story I wrote, I mentioned I just kind of wanted to quickly look up, like, how much have they given to their global health and development portfolio so far? The answer is 1.23 billion. So we're talking significant dollars. But Gates and Open Philanthropy also realize their limitations, that their funding is not going to match the need with the retreat of many official donors. So one interesting space that they have both entered into is trying to stimulate economic growth in low and middle income countries. The idea being that for a number of factors including shrinking aid budgets, but also trade disruptions and automation, this traditional economic growth path that has made a massive contribution to alleviating poverty, many countries are not able to get on that growth path. And so the question is, what can we do about that? What are ways to get countries back on the growth path? And so Open Phil and Gates are doing some interesting work to try and test that out. Not all of it is just about the amount of money put in. It's being catalytic with that money. And I can get further into kind of what they, what they look for in those smart investments. But I do think it's an interesting example. Too often in philanthropy, I think the coverage is just about like dollar amount, like you know, this $500 million effort to tackle this challenge versus what are the kind of smart strategies that funders are using to try and make their capital do more because ultimately there's not enough of it.
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A
I think that's fascinating. I mean, I find the whole concept of growth fascinating. It's fascinating because actually when you talk to experts in growth, they don't know what it is. This is what I find totally fascinating. I'm drifting away a little bit from our pre approved development topics here because I think this is so interesting. But when you read the world's leading experts on growth and reading a book on it just now as it goes, like firstly, the stuff that we use to measure growth, GDP was designed to help the Americans win the Second World War. And when we calculated almost 30% of the stuff that's in that bucket is stuff that we would actually rather didn't actually do. And that number's getting larger.
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B
Quick comment. When you mentioned that there isn't really consensus on how we define growth, I did want to just mention something interesting and it connects to something happening this week that I find pretty fascinating and hope we can follow @devex. So in the conversation with Justin Sandefer from Open Phil and Megan o' Donnell from Gates, Megan mentioned exactly that, that GDP is typically the way we measure growth. And that when GDP was initially developed, unpaid domestic work was excluded partly because it was considered too difficult to measure. And now we have ways to measure that and we still use the same metrics for growth. And so Megan had this powerful line. We actually included a newswire today where she said none of those excuses are true anymore. And this is a good example. When I talk about philanthropy, trying to be Catalytic. So this week, Gates, the Gates Foundation, Megan, specifically Megan, is in Kenya for some meetings around time use and how to sort of integrate time use data that we now have into ways that we measure economic growth. And Kenya has really been a leader in this, in kind of calculating the unpaid work that goes on behind the scenes, mostly by women. The Gates foundation is supporting a convening where leaders from Kenya are coming together with other leaders from the region to figure out how to, how can they replicate what Kenya is doing. So I actually think this is a really great example of a role philanthropy can play is to identify these outliers, these, you know, best practices, people who are doing something right and then trying to share those learnings with others. And that's what Gates is doing this week when it comes to rethinking the way we measure growth.
- [20:15]
A
Okay, that's pretty cool. I didn't know any of that. I've just tried to remember the name of the book I'm reading right now, which is Growth by Daniel Susskind. I also recommend the Growth Delusion by Daniel Pilling. If you're interested in the idea of growth what it is. Nobody. Like I say, the whole nature of the economy is entirely illusory. There's no such thing as money. Really. We just made it up. All money is. If everybody paid everybody else the debts that they owed each other, there'd be no money left in the world. It's a fascinating idea when you start getting into the nature of the thing. So anyway, all of that kind of economic and philosophical stuff aside, I think what we're seeing here is a really disruptive moment in the whole state of development. Lots and lots of things are changing. One thing that really struck me is how many philanthropies are not stepping up. We are seeing some notable organizations that really are stepping up. We're seeing Gates spending down the endowment. It's a massive amount of money flowing out of Gates into the community. We saw a big commitment from the McAster foundation earlier this year. We definitely are seeing more philanthropic leaders saying we're a spend down foundation, which is, I think, great. But then there are lots and lots and lots of foundations out there where the job is spend the 5% and hang on to the capital forever. Like the way the model works is if you hold an endowment largely in shares in the, in the United States, in United States equities, you get 8%. Here you pay 1% in fees to your investment manager. Inflation is 3%. You have 5% or so left to, to spend on your charitable activities, which means that typically the average foundation spends 19 times as much each year on the stock market as it does on its charitable objectives. And a lot of those foundations are not even. We had a really interesting article about this recently. A lot of those foundations don't even have a strategy for what to do with that 95%. It could be invested in oil majors. It could be invested in people who are using AI that's pumping tons of heat into the environment. They could be employing people who are blowing up holy mountains in India. They just don't know what the endowment is doing right. And maybe it's time to start spending the whole of your money on doing good, not 5% of it. More broadly, what I think we're seeing is a real disruption in kind of the international bargain that's existed for a long time. Colombia, like that sounds like what you're seeing in the United nations as well. That was what you were describing earlier. Yeah. That the people are negotiating very. For a long time, there's been a very fixed relationship. The European powers and the United States kind of set the rules, and they were all on the same side, and they were very much able to direct how development took place, and they were able to direct kind of the wider geopolitical position as well. But then the recent disruption, and it is only this year, has created a very different environment in which people are really radically rethinking that. I don't know whether that would be your perception as well.
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C
Yeah. We're entering an extremely fragmented geopolitical world. And you're finding that, like, let's say, as you mentioned, the Europeans and the Americans, like, if you take the UN Security Council, traditionally there's been something called the P3, the permanent three, and that's the US France and Britain. And they carried out most of the legislation in the Council, oversaw peacekeeping missions, sanctions, all of these other things, and they drove the agenda. And you need nine votes on the Security Council to pass a resolution. Historically, those three have been able to drive the agenda because they had alliances with countries that would generally back them. So they always had the nine votes, and they would generally negotiate issues before it even came to the Security council. You'd have P3 meetings, and they would go to the P5, which includes China and Russia, to try and avoid a veto. And that's the way things were. The P3 has been totally blown up. The Europeans and the Americans are at odds more than they're in agreement at the un. You see, the Americans aligned with the Chinese on Certain issues like, you know, the budget, the Chinese, who now account for almost as much as the UN budget as the United States. That's like 20% of the regular budget, 23% of peacekeeping. Now, when you go into budget negotiations, as, you know, hawkish in terms of, you know, pursuing cuts in UN funding as the United States is. So you have that sort of alignment. You have the US Aligned with the Russians more increasingly on family values, conservative issues that, you know, anti abortion, those kinds of issues that you see at the UN and then you have outside the un you have recent meetings involving the leaders of India, China and Russia sending a signal to the Americans that they're not the only game in town. You have the brics, you know, coalition of countries trying to pursue economic outlet, outlets that are not completely dominated by the US and the dollar. You've got all these different various groupings that are coming together to try and, you know, pursue their interests. You know, in a sense, when American sort of leadership is not what it was. So I think that you're, you know, you're seeing things going in a lot of directions, and it's not clear where we're going to end up at the end of this. And also you have a sense of vacuums that are developing in the UN with the withdrawal of US Funding. There had been, on the one hand, concerns, on the other hand, hopes that China would step in and produce, you know, increase and deliver increased voluntary funding to projects that really hasn't happened outside of the World Health Organization, where they have stepped in. Waltz, the US Ambassador to the UN has been raising concerns about China's efforts to, you know, to extend their influence in the un and that, in a sense, provides a strong argument for the Trump administration to stay engaged on some issues. But at the same time, you have a lot of the UN kind of just moving ahead as if nothing happened. So we, you know, we were present at the Financing for Development conference in Seville. The Americans didn't participate, and the member states came up with agreements on financing for development. So the idea is, you know, if the Americans are not going to engage, we're going to keep moving ahead. And frankly, it's going to be easier to get deals without the Americans there because they're approaching a lot of these negotiations in such a sort of a negative sort of stance, trying to reverse gains that have been made at the UN over the last couple of decades, pushing back on things like the Sustainable Development Goals, pushing back on other issues. Yeah, so it's a bit of a mess.
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A
It's an interesting question to me here, the extent to which the development sector should really be engaging with systemic geopolitical challenges, because that's not really in the sector's wheelhouse. The sector's job is to deliver development activities. Its job is health, education, food, that sort of thing. But then the development sector has always been very much about democracy, civic space, freedom as well. And I think the idea has been that we're going to export it from the United States to the rest of the world. And this in the last couple of days, I've been at the Trust conference in London, which was fascinating discussion, particularly focused around two things, civic freedom and the impact of AI and how those are changing the environment here. And one of the messages, one of the core messages from that conference was that it was full of investigative journalists, people who campaigned on civic freedoms. And the journalists from South America and Africa were talking to their American colleagues and they were saying, if somebody interferes with the office operation, this is what you do. This is the playbook that they're going to use. This is the playbook that you're going to use. Right here is the stuff. And the Americans were sitting there going, you've never had to know this before. That's a little bit of an aside, but fascinating, really fascinating.
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B
It reminds me of a session we featured at UNGA with Nancy Lindborg from the Packard Foundation. And you may recall you actually wrote that session up. But part of why I was so intrigued to feature her is her background is at what was formerly the US Institute of Peace as well as Mercy Corps. And now we are grappling in the US with many of the same challenges that she has navigated globally that she never thought she would have to confront in a US context and figuring out her role as a grant maker in that environment. So I think that is another big trend in philanthropy right now, organizations figuring out just how to prove, prioritize their resources. Yes, they could be giving more, but ultimately those resources are limited in the grand scheme when there's so much international need as well as domestic need here in the U.S. so I'm talking about U.S. funders specifically, and I also wanted to mention, when you were talking, Dave, about how organizations are sort of grappling with very systemic challenges they've not taken on before. I think philanthropy is certainly doing that as well. So when it comes to AI, when it comes to threats to democracy, these are very complicated realms to do smart grant making, to measure the impact you're having, and then something that is also increasingly important to funders is to attribute your own role in the success of that thing. It's very hard to do that when you're taking on things like democracy, AI. And I actually think economic growth is an interesting example of this. So I just want to quickly mention something that kind of came up with some of our reporting. So open philanthropy, which I mentioned before before, is known for giving to causes that are frankly easier to measure and attribute. So they're really associated with the effective altruism community which we've talked about at devex before. These are donors who again want to do the most good for their dollar. And ways to know that you are doing that is by giving to things like insecticide treated bed nets. Like, you know, for this much money you can save as many lives if you give to something like countering threats to democracy or safeguarding against AI risk. It's a lot harder to measure and attribute your own philanthropic contribution to impact there. But open philanthropy is in the midst of a pretty interesting shift and they're moving into realms that are more difficult to measure or attribute, like economic growth. And one of the things Justin Sandifer mentioned in this conversation we had on stage is that what they are looking for is mega transformational hits. And what he means by that is there will be many failures, many zeros, many things they try that will not pan out. That's the kind of risk that a private funder can take, that a government donor using taxpayer dollars can't necessarily take. But the expectation is that these mega transformational hits, these successes, will more than compensate for all those losses. And they think economic growth is is an example of that, that they can leverage their capital in such a way that, you know, there may be lots of failures, but there will be some successes that One other quick example I wanted to give. Again, I was really intrigued to see Open Phil moving into this space. So earlier this month, the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network announced that it had received a big grant from OpenPhill and they do work on bipartisan solutions for US aid effectiveness. Certainly something needed right now. Although the question may be what aid? But M fan got this huge grant from Open Phil and again, people who associate Open Phil with effective altruism causes might find that super surprising. But when you. Justin, I asked him about this on stage at the World bank and he basically put it in that same bucket as economic growth that this is an area where we can take risk. Yes, these are causes that are more difficult to measure or attribute, but we expect it's a space where philanthropy can be leveraged and we can have these mega transformational hits that make up for failures that will inevitably occur. So I think that's been an interesting trend to watch and will be an interesting trend to watch.
- [31:50]
A
Okay. I think there's a lot of interesting trends to watch. I think there's a huge amount to talk about here. I think maybe we've drawn a slightly long bow here, but that there are, I guess these are interesting times for development. Like, there are a lot of challenges out there, well beyond those which development organizations, multilateral, bilateral, independent ingos you've had to cope with before. Kind of think about what they want the world to look like. And I feel like the, the recent work that the two of you have done have kind of highlighted how difficult that is going to be. Okay. Yep. Well, I think we'll have to wrap that up there. Thank you very much to, to both of you for coming along. Thank you very much to, to everybody for, for listening. And we'll see you next week. Take care.
- [32:28]
B
Thank you.
- [32:37]
A
Sat.