Panagora is proud to be a sponsor of this year’s SID-Washington Annual Conference, which brings together stakeholders across the global development field for a day of important conversations and networking.

This year, we were thrilled to sponsor five students who focus on gender issues within the international development context, providing them a unique opportunity to attend the conference.

Panagora’s team has a long and vibrant history with SID-Washington: In addition to being an institutional member, Panagora’s President and CEO, Betsy Bassan, was Program Vice President and then Chair of the association, and our own Katie Cheney is a current co-chair of the Gender and Inclusion Work Group.

The SID Conference was first initiated nearly 15 years ago with the purpose of bringing people in the international development world together to discuss trends and exchange information. The Conference has grown both in size and impact since then; in this year’s conference, nearly 900 development practitioners attended the event and shared their ideas on the future of international development.

The Conference broke out into morning and afternoon sessions, a networking opportunity and a closing plenary where the winner of the Innovation Showcase — a competition to pitch innovative products and/or services that can provide better access to information, increase engagement, improve decision making or more — was awarded. There were exciting discussions during the breakout sessions led by notable players in the sector including Bonnie Glick, Deputy Administrator of USAID, who highlighted the importance of partnership saying, “Business needs development and development needs business. We all need to realize we can’t do it alone.”

Opening the event as the keynote speaker, Tara Nathan, Executive Vice President of MasterCard, reiterated the importance of leveraging digital technology for social impact. Also engaging in talks were Wade Warren, SID-Washington Board, and world-renowned author, Azar Nafisi.

The conference closed with a panel featuring George Ingram of the Brookings Institution, Kristin Lord of IREX, and Raj Kumar of Devex, who had a lively discussion that focused on the importance of promoting innovation and using new technologies to strengthen local economies and ensure self-reliance.