Michael Kremer: belief

Transcript context

…What’s the first organization you founded or cofounded? The first organization was an organization called WorldTeach, which placed volunteers. I spent a year teaching a secondary school in Kenya. After teaching in Kenya, when I was living in Kenya, I’d be asked to teach in schools frequently. At that particular time — I think the situation’s really changed — there was a lot of demand for teachers, and there were lots of people in the US who were interested in volunteering. It seemed there was a role for something to match them together. That was one organization. More recently, I guess a lot of people who found NGOs or found organizations sometimes go on to be funders or go from being founders of for-profit tech firms to being VCs. One organization I’ve been involved in for 10 years now is Development Innovation Ventures, which is part of the US Agency for International Development. What Development Innovation Ventures does is, it helps invest in innovations for development. Sometimes those are nonprofit organizations; sometimes they’re for-profits. Sometimes they’re started by development economics researchers; sometimes they’re started by others. One of the reasons why I was saying I don’t think this is something unique to me, is that when we’ve looked at our track record, we see a really strong record of success, and a lot of that is development economics researchers. Now, your current work on advance market commitment — why do you think that advance market commitment is more politically popular than patent buyouts?…

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