The fourth webinar in an eleven-part series focused on various aspects of sustainable development in Africa.

Please register for this Zoom event at http://bit.ly/MIT-TAU

Renewable energy resources, the impact of climate change, new transcontinental partnerships

Featuring:

Jeffrey Sachs is a world-renowned economics professor, bestselling author, innovative educator, and global leader in sustainable development.  

He is widely recognized for bold and effective strategies to address complex challenges including debt crises, hyperinflations, the transition from central planning to market economies, the control of AIDS, malaria, and other diseases, the escape from extreme poverty, and the battle against human-induced climate change.  

Sachs serves as the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he holds the rank of University Professor, the university’s highest academic rank. Sachs held the position of Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University from 2002 to 2016. He is President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development, and an SDG Advocate for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. From 2001-18, Sachs served as Special Advisor to UN Secretaries-General Kofi Annan (2001-7), Ban Ki-moon (2008-16), and António Guterres (2017-18). 

Sachs has authored and edited numerous books, including three New York Times bestsellers: The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011).  Other books include To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace (2013), The Age of Sustainable Development (2015), Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair & Sustainable (2017),  A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2018), and most recently, The Ages of Globalization: Geography, Technology, and Institutions (2020).

Sachs was the co-recipient of the 2015 Blue Planet Prize, the leading global prize for environmental leadership. He was twice named among Time magazine’s 100 most influential world leaders and has received 34 honorary degrees. The New York Times called Sachs “probably the most important economist in the world,” and Time magazine called Sachs “the world’s best-known economist.” A survey by The Economist ranked Sachs as among the three most influential living economists.

Prior to joining Columbia, Sachs spent over twenty years as a professor at Harvard University, most recently as the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade. Sachs received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard. Sachs is a native of Detroit, Michigan, and currently resides in New York City.

Watch the event | Read the transcript

Co-sponsors:  MIT Center for International Studies (CIS), TRUE Africa University (TAU)

About the MIT X TAU webinar series: 

The Center for International Studies (CIS) has partnered with the newly launched TRUE Africa University (TAU) to host a webinar series focused on various aspects of sustainable development in Africa. Thursdays at noon EST, starting on March 4, TAU founder, MIT alumnus, and CIS research affiliate Claude Grunitzky, will interview the thinkers, shapers and doers who he sees as the inventors of the future of Africa. Each of the eleven webinars promises to be a genre-defining look into the opportunities and challenges facing the African continent and its people over the coming century. The CIS-TAU webinar series will be an opportunity for the MIT community and beyond to engage with luminaries such as Taiye Selasi, the Ghanaian-Nigerian author; Jeffrey Sachs, the American economist; and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, the Nigerian serial entrepreneur behind some of Africa’s most valuable startups.

MIT-TAU Webinar Series | TRUE Africa University | View All Events

Free & open to the public 
Also watch it on YouTube.
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