 There is no simple one-way road to development, you need a road network. WIDER has got such strong linkages with the African Economic Research Consortium in Africa, it's got strong ties with policymakers in Southeast Asia, also in Latin America. It's just kind of a great network for not just having the exposure to high quality researchers but also to policymakers in different regions of the world. UNWIDER to me is an interface between the world of research and the world of policy. Both have a propensity to give short shift to the other. In the area in which I work in equality, you need to be in contact with researchers and the stakeholders in developing countries all over the world. Show up for an UNWIDER event, you will be in that right. Just as much as I see them once or twice, the next days they send you an email, we're coming to Tanzania, like, oh yes, yes, I remember you and I would be more than happy to help and that's how it works. WIDER brings together in a very distinctive way those from developed and developing countries. UNWIDER helps develop and transfer ideas across this network between policymakers and researchers to promote action for development. You get a variety of perspectives and on development I think you need to have that kind of open-mindedness. Sometimes economics conferences are very male dominated but if you see, you know, just the room around here, you'll find a lot of different age groups, men and women. I think it translates into more diversity into their perspectives. Go to a country where there's very little research, find those three people who are smart and who are wanting to do more, link them up with people who are sitting at Harvard or Cornell or wherever and get them to work together. WIDER has done that marvelously. Because that's where the best ideas are coming from and it will hear the research and the voices etc. from those that you wouldn't normally hear. It has no hidden agenda to push. As far as I can tell, its interests are only to generate good research, to understand what are good practices and bad practices. It's a trusted partner in many developing country governments. We've been able to work closely with ministries of finance providing advice and assistance. This partnership is extremely important and it will bring some kind of credibility of what we are doing in Mozambique. The UNU WIDER network has given me an opportunity to interact with policymakers in countries such as Vietnam, which I don't think I would have had otherwise. Under our work on the extractive industries, we brought together a very large team of people from not only researchers, but also from the extractive industries itself. And we had the ability and also the credibility as a UN organisation to do that. Very often in the policy environment, these type of research collaborations do not succeed because people try to be territorial. WIDER has given us the space to work with them, to take credit for the research and it has been a very different experience to what we have had with other international institutions. Ownership is very important when the managers of developing countries, especially Sub-Saharan African countries, are part of the discussion and part of the solution. They own the solution and that has more impact on these countries than having a group of people coming to to to provide ideas and leave. The interaction between researchers from all parts of the world makes for a richer dialogue, makes it less likely that you'll get trapped into what might be called groupthink, that you'll be trapped into ideologically driven perspectives that do not correspond to the world we live in. It's only when I went into the world of policymaking in India that I realised that actually John Maynard Keynes had got it bang right. That the biggest tumbling block against change is not vested interest but set ideas. The bureaucracy, the politicians who have been in this game for a very long time have very set ideas. So to bring new ideas from the outside world into the world of policy is the big challenge where a lot can be achieved. Because your new wider is a global network of thousands of researchers and policy makers across all regions of the world working together, we're greater than the sum of our parts.