When Emma Sky and I sat against the relaxing and picturesque background of the Lagos lagoon in January this year to record my first podcast, we could not have imagined the global storm that was brewing. While we pontificated about the future of development and global politics, little did we know that the world was about to be simultaneously gripped by the twin tragedies of a devastating global pandemic, as well as global civil unrest in protest of racial discrimination in the US.  However, in retrospect, our conversation seems to have clairvoyantly delved into a lot of the issues and drivers that have fueled the status quo and will continue to shape how the world evolves post-Covid. In my maiden edition of the Policy & Development Podcast, Dr. Emma Sky - Director of the Yale Greenberg World Fellows Program and a Senior Fellow at the Jackson Institute of Global Affairs at Yale University - provides a tour-de-force, informed by her boots-on-the-ground experience as Political Adviser to two US Commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, her work in international development and through her scholarship at Yale and Oxford. With calm and crystal clear thinking she speaks on topics from Brexit to the future of the EU; from the role of the US and UK in global leadership to the fusion of DFID into the FCO; from the future of aid and international development to issues of Africa's governance and development challenges to  safeguarding the sovereignty, dignity and fiscal sanctity of African countries in trade and political relations with other nations, such as China and other Western countries. She is the author of the highly acclaimed The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq (2015) and In a Time of Monsters: Travelling in a Middle East in Revolt (2019). To learn more about Dr. Sky please click here. Interview recorded January 2020 in Lagos Nigeria. #africandevelopment #publicpolicy #globalaffairs #internationaldevelopment #futureofaid #developmentasdignity