Linking the Worlds of Religion and Global Development

An enduring priority of the Berkley Center has been connections between the worlds of religion and development.

Read more about this work on the Faith in Action blog, where Berkley Center Senior Fellow Katherine Marshall tracks the faith-inspired activities of people and institutions across the globe and across religious traditions, with a focus on development and humanitarian issues.

The center has a long-term partnership with the World Faiths Development Dialogue (WFDD) and has convened a series of multistakeholder global meetings across regions and topics in issues ranging from health and gender to education and the environment. The center has also hosted the Opus Prize, generated systematic mapping of the activities of faith-inspired organizations across a range of topics and countries, and produced an interview series of almost 400 activists, religious leaders, and policy specialists to examine best practices in development work.

In more recent years, the center and WFDD have shifted to more in-depth country engagement on faith and development dynamics, notably in Bangladesh, Senegal, Indonesia, and Nigeria. An influential project on religion and COVID-19 has explored the role of faith-inspired actors in grappling with the pandemic and its legacies. Another current focus of the center’s scholarly and outreach work is the crisis of displaced persons worldwide and its humanitarian impact.