Three authorities on progress in the developing world joined us for lunch yesterday to discuss views on foreign assistance and promote ideas about how it can be improved in the future. Sam Worthington, the President and CEO of InterAction, Gayle Smith, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and Steve Radelet, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, spoke to the Power 100 Summit delegates and allowed us to ask questions about the efficacy of foreign assistance.

It was especially amusing to have the opportunity to meet Steve Radelet so I could complain to him about the suffering he has personally caused me (he wrote the Economics of Development textbook I used last semester). In all honesty, it is a brilliant book and my economics professor at Duke was actually a classmate of Mr. Radelet at Harvard years ago.

Innovative ideas that the session speakers are pushing include a cabinet level agency for international development, greater flexibility in the field with regard to funding expenditures, and an independent evaluation entity for monitoring and evaluation of development projects globally.

Pictured here is Power 100 Summit delegate Shawn Selleck from Duke University with Steve Radelet, Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development after the Future of Foreign Assistance session.

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