In this week’s special edition of the This Week in Global Development podcast, we explore how investing in women’s health is not just a health issue — it’s about power, agency, and opportunity. 

Women spend 25% more of their lives in poor health than men, due to underfunded research, diagnostic biases, and policies that fail to prioritize their needs. The result: Llimits on women’s ability to lead, work, and participate fully in society.

Hosted in partnership with Pivotal Ventures, Devex Executive Editor Kate Warren speaks with Haven Ley, chief strategy officer at Pivotal Ventures, and Cecilia Conrad, CEO of Lever for Change, about how reimagining women’s health care can reshape opportunity for entire communities.
Their conversation highlights Action for Women’s Health — a $250 million global open call launched by Pivotal Ventures and Lever for Change to identify and fund community-driven solutions that improve women’s mental and physical health. The initiative drew over 4,000 applications from 119 countries, surfacing innovations in areas from maternal and mental health to menopause and caregiving.

As global aid declines and funding for women’s health remains scarce, Ley and Conrad argue that this bottom-up, participatory funding model offers a more equitable way to center women’s voices and needs. Their message: the ideas and solutions already exist — what’s needed now is more capital and commitment to bring them to scale.

In this week’s special edition of the This Week in Global Development podcast, we spotlight the Mines Advisory Group, or MAG, recipient of the 2025 Hilton Humanitarian Prize — the world’s largest annual humanitarian award. MAG’s work clearing land mines and unexploded ordnance has saved lives and restored livelihoods in post-conflict communities for more than three decades.

In a special episode sponsored by the Hilton Foundation, Devex President and Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar speaks with MAG CEO Darren Cormack about what the $3 million unrestricted prize means for the organization, the growing risks civilians face from land mines in conflicts such as Ukraine, Syria, and Sudan, and how new technologies —from drones to artificial intelligence — are helping speed up mine clearance.

Cormack reflects on rising global conflict levels, threats to international humanitarian law, and why mine action remains both a moral and developmental imperative — enabling farmers to work safely, children to return to school, and displaced people to rebuild their lives.

To hear more, listen to this conversation with Darren Cormack on This Week in Global Development.

For decades, Africa's malaria strategy has focused almost exclusively on disease control through indoor mosquito management and personal protection — bed nets, indoor spraying, and individual-level interventions. But this approach alone isn’t working. Progress against malaria in the African region has slowed significantly, with cases declining by just 5% since 2015 and mortality by 16%, according to the World Health Organization.

Experts now argue it’s time to shift from disease-centric, indoor mosquito management to more robust integrated mosquito management strategies. That means taking a tiered approach, starting with reducing mosquito breeding sites, treating water sources with larvicides, and then targeting adult mosquitoes. “The tendency will probably be to think about controlling mosquitoes when they are flying only. But they are actually more vulnerable when they are not flying, usually when they are in the water,” explained Silas Majambere, EMEA Health Business Manager at Valent BioSciences.

This approach, known as larval source management, has proven both cost-effective and sustainable. "The conversation is shifting away from just talking about a disease and saying, how do we take those limited public health dollars and manage the mosquito so that we can manage multiple diseases for those dollars?" said Jason Clark, Managing Director for global public health and forest health at Valent BioSciences.Some countries are already moving in this direction.

In Benin, the government is framing mosquito control not just as a health issue but as an economic one. The government is focusing on tourism as one of the key pillars of growth for the country, and the presence of mosquito-borne diseases is a direct threat to that, explained Sinde Chekete, advisor to the President of Benin. “We believe that investing in mosquito control will ultimately bring resources, will bring revenue, because we'll be able to welcome more tourists… and reduce the overall cost of malaria,” he said.

Chekete, Majambere, and Clark joined Devex executive editor Kate Warren to discuss the shift toward integrated mosquito management in a special Devex podcast episode sponsored by Valent BioSciences.

With the U.S. Agency for International Development officially ceasing operations as the main U.S. foreign aid agency on July 1, the State Department now faces the daunting task of spending an estimated $20 billion before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30 — without the 10,000 staff members who previously managed such distributions. The administration is legally required to spend money appropriated by Congress, or find legal justification for not spending it, as seen in earlier rescission efforts that returned $9 billion to the U.S. Treasury.

Meanwhile, USAID Deputy Administrator for Management and Resources Ken Jackson's recent tour of nine countries — including Belgium, Kenya, and the Philippines — to oversee mission closures, has drawn criticism from displaced staff who view the visits as poorly timed during their difficult transitions.

With many NGOs forced to restructure or face closure, some organizations are exploring mergers and partnerships to survive, with a new initiative led by Accountability Lab helping them pivot.

Devex Business Editor David Ainsworth discusses the latest developments in these stories with reporters Michael Igoe and Elissa Miolene.

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