Hunger Project Executive Vice President John Coonrod recently spoke with Let’s Talk (a blog hosted by the World Bank’s Chief Economist) team as part of the launch of the World Bank’s upcoming World Development Report on “mind and culture.”
The World Bank annually releases its World Development Report, which provides in-depth analysis of a specific aspect of economic development. The 2015 report has two main goals:
- To change the way we think about development problems by integrating knowledge that is now scattered across many disciplines, including behavioral economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience and political science.
- To help development practitioners use the richer understanding of the human actor that emerges from the behavioral sciences in program design, implementation and evaluation.
Below is an excerpt from John’s interview.
“In India, for example, we have trained more than a hundred thousand elected women representatives of the Gram Panchayats to develop their own leadership, to build federations, and to really stand up to the bureaucracy, frankly, to get the resources that their villages are entitled to.
Every one of these hundred thousand women, at least the ones that I have met, has success stories. I know of women who have come together, even with threats against their lives, to get a school built. When people discover their voices are working together, the changes that then come about in the rural communities are something beyond imagination!”
Engage with the full interview on the Let’s Talk blog.
