Rethinking Development Aid with Kevin Watkins

In this episode of Policy Pod, Nawaz Khan and Cristian Iftodii sit down with Kevin Watkins, visiting professor at LSE's Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa and former chief executive of Save the Children UK. Having spent three decades moving through Oxfam, the United Nations, the Overseas Development Institute, and the top of the international aid sector, Kevin Watkins has become one of its sharpest internal critics, unafraid to challenge the assumptions his own field runs on.

Together, they explore the unravelling of UK aid as budgets shrink and priorities tilt toward bilateral spending, the flaws he sees in the "growth first" consensus that now dominates development policy, and what years leading UNDP's Human Development Report and UNESCO's Global Education Monitoring Report taught him about the numbers that actually move governments to act.

Kevin Watkins also reflects on where the aid sector has lost its way, and what a serious reset of development policy would need to look like.