17 in-depth flagship courses for development practice

A comprehensive, free course exploring poverty, growth, and economic transformation in developing nations — with deep focus on South Asia and rigorous academic foundations.

How policy gets made, implemented, and why it often doesn’t work — covering fiscal federalism, regulatory governance, budgeting, taxation, and Indian development.

The mechanics of collective decision-making — voting rules, rent-seeking, bureaucracy, commons governance and institutional design, with deep South Asian case material.

A comprehensive flagship on Indian livelihoods — rural (NRLM, SHGs, agriculture), urban (informal work, gig economy, vendors), and skills (Skill India, FLFPR). Evidence-driven and practitioner-oriented.

A comprehensive course on MEL systems for development professionals — from theory of change to adaptive management, with South Asia case studies and academic rigour.

A free, design-based course in causal inference — potential outcomes, the estimator toolkit from randomisation to synthetic control and causal machine learning, with R and Stata and Indian programme cases.

A flagship course on data visualization for development professionals — principles, design and tools to communicate data effectively for social impact, from visual encoding to M&E dashboards.

A free, hands-on Power BI flagship for South Asian development practitioners — build honest dashboards from real survey data: Power Query, star schemas, DAX and visualisation ethics, free-tier friendly.

Learn when and how to use AI tools in development M&E — from data collection and computer vision to algorithmic targeting and ethical frameworks. Evidence-based, with South Asian and African case studies.

A flagship course on feminist theory, gender & power, care work, law, movements, and development practice — with a deep South Asian focus.

How social-emotional competencies shape effective development practice — drawing on CASEL, SEE Learning, WHO Life Skills, Delhi’s Happiness Curriculum, Indian indigenous traditions and NEP 2020.

A practitioner’s guide to constitutional law and rights-based frameworks across South Asia — from basic structure doctrine to PIL, Article 21, digital rights and climate justice, grounded in real case law.

How India’s rights-based architecture — RTI, NREGA, Food Security, Forest Rights — creates enabling conditions for poor households to imagine and pursue better futures.

A rigorous course on development communication, ethical storytelling, and media impact — from exploitative imagery to participatory media, with a deep focus on Indian models.

A comprehensive journey through Gandhi’s political thought — from Swaraj and Satyagraha to Gram Swaraj and Trusteeship — with an interactive lexicon of 55+ annotated terms.

The missing craft between policy and evaluation — how to design a development intervention that works and survives scale. Dissects the models proven at population scale (graduation, cash transfers, ASHA, SHGs, teaching at the right level), the principles behind them, and why proven pilots collapse when multiplied. Grounded in NRLM, DBT, Pratham and BRAC.

Three canonical traditions of applied nonviolence taught at depth — Nonviolent Communication (Rosenberg), Non-Violent Resistance / New Authority (Omer), and Restorative Justice (Zehr) — with their indigenous and South Asian roots, feminist and decolonial critiques, and facilitation fieldcraft.