The 6 big thinkers reshaping foreign aid, masculinity, and development

The roots of the world’s most stubborn global health problems don’t yield to vibes-based solutions. They surrender to data, rigor, and the surprisingly radical idea of actually trying to figure out what works. 

Governments and nonprofit organizations depend on the economists, activists, policymakers, and writers who are reshaping how we understand poverty, health, and progress. They’re the ones making sure that every dollar saves the maximum number of lives, that foreign aid is steered by evidence instead of dogma.

They’re also the ones who are open to trying something new, such as giving the simplest solutions — like a plate of beans or a clear-eyed approach to masculinity — the platform they deserve. Because when it comes to making the world better, good intentions are just the starting line. — Izzie Ramirez, deputy editor

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Dean Karlan

When the Trump administration sicced its newly minted “Department of Government Efficiency” on the US Agency for International Development earlier this year, for just a moment, Dean Karlan offered to help.

After all, as USAID’s first chief economist, Karlan’s life’s work revolved around efficiency. His job was to help the agency stretch its dollars more effectively, save more lives, and propel US goals around the world. He has preached against waste, fraud, and abuse for longer than some of the DOGE bros have been alive. 

“I’m not a political appointee,” he told me earlier this year. “I’m just a dorky wonk who was on detail and who cares about the evidence of impact.” 

But it quickly became clear to Karlan that DOGE’s wrecking crew couldn’t care less about evaluating programs or prioritizing cost-effectiveness. His overtures to help went unanswered. Eventually, as he watched Elon Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio take a sledgehammer to relatively cheap, lifesaving initiatives like PEPFAR, as longstanding colleagues were sacked, and the agency denigrated as a “ball of worms” and a “criminal organization” that needs “to die,” Karlan did the only honorable thing left to do: He quit. 

And, like thousands of other morally indignant ex-USAID employees, he can’t stop talking about what’s been left behind. While Karlan is the first to say the status quo wasn’t perfect, the Trump administration’s dismantling of the agency has been absolutely catastrophic for vulnerable people around the world.

Karlan, who’s also a professor of economics and finance at Northwestern University, has kept busy since quitting USAID. He is the founder of Innovations for Poverty Action, a nonprofit studying solutions to global poverty, and ImpactMatters, a nonprofit that rates charities and was later acquired by Charity Navigator. He has spoken far and wide about what the future may hold, and he is currently working on a bipartisan plan to restore a semblance of American foreign aid the morning after the Trump era comes to a close.

Karlan is still hopeful that the US can one day rebuild the architecture behind its global aid strategy. And when that time comes, he’ll be ready to talk efficiency — with anyone who actually wants to listen. —Sara Herschander, Future Perfect fellow

Gary Barker

Concerns around the modern “masculinity crisis” — a catch-all term for worsening mental health among boys and men — has reached a fever pitch in recent years. And for good reason: Male suicide rates have been on the rise, men are working less, and boys are falling behind in education, among other troubling indicators.

As former Vox fellow Celia Ford has written, the crisis is “driving many young men toward the far-right ‘manosphere’ — where anachronistic attitudes about women, society, and gender roles are resurging.” 

Gary Barker, co-founder and CEO of Equimundo, a global research nonprofit working to “shift norms, narratives, and policies” around gender equality in the US and beyond, has been working for decades to build a counter to the manosphere attitude; it’s what he calls “positive masculinity.” His vision replaces the increasingly regressive view of manhood, based on ruthless competition, aggression, and emotional detachment, with one based on vulnerability, kindness, and warmth.

That vision is being realized through Equimundo’s innovative initiatives: The organization’s educational and activities-based MenCare+ program reduced violence by men against their partners in Rwanda by over 40 percent in a randomized control trial. Similar trials in other countries that used Program H — the organization’s program for young boys and girls — demonstrated positive effects, too. 

Equimundo also operates the IMAGES survey to understand men and women’s attitudes about gender equality, which since 2008 has interviewed 67,000 people in over 30 countries.

“We need to create space for more young men to be curious, to ask questions,” Barker wrote in a 2023 op-ed co-authored with Shaunna Thomas of the feminist nonprofit Ultraviolet. We need space for men, Barker and Thomas wrote, to “be unafraid and to explore a new, healthier model of identity.” — Kenny Torrella, senior reporter

Ken Opalo

Ken Opalo speaks about African politics the way some people talk about family: with affection, frustration, and an understanding of how hard it can be sometimes to make things work. At Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, where he teaches political science, he’s made a study of Africa’s legislatures, tracing how power actually travels through them and how, despite the obstacles, it sometimes finds its way to the people it’s meant to serve.

Born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, and then educated at Yale and Stanford, Opalo established himself with his 2019 book, Legislative Development in Africa, as a gentle challenger to the easy clichés about Africa. The text is academic, but it reads more like a diagnosis (or even a love letter). It provides an account of how governments across the continent have grown not just from colonial scaffolds but from the chaos, ingenuity, and sheer persistence that followed independence. Institutions, he reminds us, aren’t dropped from the sky. They’re built, brick by imperfect brick, through struggle, compromise, and — truly — luck.

These days, Opalo is wrestling with what he calls “the growth question.” To him, development isn’t a glossy summit or a well-phrased aid campaign. It’s about building states that work, schools that teach, tax systems that function, and putting in place leaders who answer to the people who elect them. “Without growth,” he says, “everything else is noise.”

Beyond academia, Opalo writes An Africanist Perspective, a Substack newsletter where he translates political economy into stories that feel as lived-in as they are smart. There’s wit there, and weariness too. But Opalo is no doubt an optimist. He refuses to romanticize but insists that progress in the Global South will come because people refuse to give up on the hard, unglamorous work of democracy.

In both his scholarship and his storytelling, Opalo clearly believes the future is still being written by those who refuse to settle for dysfunction. —Paige Vega, senior climate and Future Perfect editor 

Pascaline Dupas  

Pascaline Dupas is one of the more prolific and accomplished economists dedicated to reducing global poverty.

An economics professor at Princeton University, Dupas has published novel, highly cited papers on how access to banking affects small business development in Kenya, the effects of separating students into groups by achievement levels, and the power of distributing free bednets to prevent malaria, to name just a few. Her research has influenced British foreign aid, government policy in several African countries, the World Health Organization, large NGOs, and global health practitioners.

An avid collaborator, Dupas is also the co-chair of J-PAL — a network of hundreds of researchers conducting randomized control trials (the gold standard in research design) to figure out what policy interventions can best lift households out of poverty. In 2019, J-PAL’s founders were awarded the Nobel prize in economics.

Dupas herself has been directly recognized for her contributions to the field; in 2015, she was named the Best Young French Economist by the French newspaper Le Monde, and years later, was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship. — Kenny Torrella, senior reporter 

Paul Newnham

Paul Newnham wants to make beans sexy. 

If that sounds weird to you, consider that beans are the healthiest, most sustainable (by far), most affordable protein source on Earth. Their richness in vitamins, minerals, and fiber make them an ideal solution to malnutrition in low-income countries, as well as to chronic diet-related diseases in wealthy countries. And they’re diverse and versatile enough to be enjoyed in cuisines from every part of the world, from a garlicky Egyptian ful medames to an indulgent South Asian rajma. 

But beans suffer from a PR problem. They’re so cheap and they’ve long been so foundational to human diets that they aren’t aspirational, generally falling by the wayside as soon as a country becomes rich enough to eat large quantities of meat. Newnham leads Beans Is How — a campaign founded at the COP27 climate conference in 2022, aiming to double global bean consumption by 2028 — to change that. With a coalition of more than 120 partners globally, the initiative has secured commitments to get more beans onto menus around the world, from school meals to high-end, culturally influential restaurants. Partner organization AGRA (formerly the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa), for example, has helped serve high-iron beans, or beans bred to have extra-high iron content, to tens of thousands of schoolchildren in Kenya.   

Creative, ambitious work on beans has already been happening in siloes, from agricultural research to elite gastronomy. Newnham is unifying those efforts into an overhaul of the reputation of the humble bean, repositioning it as a sophisticated, modern solution for both people and the planet. —Marina Bolotnikova, deputy editor

Oliver Kim

The best case for why development economics still matters is being made on Substack. In his Global Developments newsletter, Oliver Kim — an Open Philanthropy research fellow — does something rare. He takes big, messy arguments about poverty, growth, and aid and rebuilds them from the data up. 

That means puncturing zombie “facts,” as he did in a viral post explaining why South Korea was not actually poorer than Kenya in 1960. It’s re-examining foreign aid’s track record with fresh historical series, and writing crisp explainers on workhorse development concepts like exchange rates that answer all the questions you were afraid to ask. 

Kim’s work is approachable without being glib, and rigorous without disappearing into mathiness. It’s also of the moment, focusing on how to direct scarce dollars and political capital toward what actually improves lives. That blend of clarity and empiricism is exactly what’s needed at a time when the competition for every dollar of aid is so intense. Kim’s writing is a compass you can actually steer by. —Bryan Walsh, senior editorial director