PKU’s South-South Institute Celebrates a Transformative Decade

A Milestone Moment for Global Education

BEIJING, May 3, 2026 — When Ismail Zabeeh made the decision to return to academia, it wasn’t because he lacked real-world credentials. The former state minister of the Maldives had already navigated the corridors of power, tackled policy challenges, and shaped his nation’s trajectory. Yet he found himself drawn to a classroom at Peking University’s Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development, recognizing something increasingly rare in today’s fragmented world: an institution genuinely committed to fostering peer-to-peer learning among the world’s developing nations.

Zabeeh’s choice to pursue doctoral studies at ISSCAD reflects a broader transformation taking place across the institute as it celebrates its tenth anniversary. What began as an ambitious experiment in 2016 has matured into one of Asia’s most influential platforms for knowledge exchange between emerging markets and developing economies.

Breaking the Traditional Learning Model

The Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development emerged from a simple but powerful premise: countries facing similar developmental challenges possess invaluable insights for one another. This philosophy directly challenges the conventional wisdom that development wisdom flows primarily from wealthy Western institutions to the Global South. Instead, ISSCAD has positioned itself as a horizontal network where experience, innovation, and hard-won lessons travel freely among peers.

Over the past decade, the institute has attracted an impressive roster of policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, and development professionals. These aren’t students seeking abstract theoretical knowledge. They’re practitioners seeking applicable models, proven strategies, and authentic case studies drawn from countries navigating comparable economic and social terrain.

Education with Purpose and Practicality

The curriculum at ISSCAD reflects this pragmatic orientation. Rather than focusing exclusively on economic theory or development economics as traditionally taught, the institute emphasizes comparative development strategies. Students examine how Vietnam accelerated poverty reduction, how Rwanda rebuilt institutional capacity, how Indonesia managed demographic transitions, and how Bangladesh advanced manufacturing capabilities. Each case study isn’t merely historical; it’s immediately relevant to students working within similar contexts back home.

This problem-focused approach has resonated powerfully with its students. Many return to positions of significant responsibility, implementing insights gained during their time at the institute. Some become ambassadors for South-South cooperation themselves, advocating for deeper partnerships between their home nations and other emerging economies.

Impact Beyond Beijing’s Walls

The ripple effects of ISSCAD’s work extend far beyond the institute’s campus. Alumni networks have sparked bilateral cooperation initiatives, research collaborations, and policy exchanges. Government officials who studied together have gone on to negotiate trade agreements, coordinate development projects, and align their nations’ strategic interests around shared developmental goals.

The institute has also become a research hub, producing rigorous analysis on South-South cooperation mechanisms, development financing alternatives, technology transfer arrangements, and institutional capacity building. This scholarship informs both academic discourse and practical policy implementation across dozens of countries.

A Decade of Conviction and Results

The ten-year milestone arrives at a particularly significant moment. As geopolitical tensions complicate traditional development partnerships and as emerging economies assert greater agency in determining their own futures, platforms like ISSCAD become increasingly valuable. The institute stands as evidence that meaningful cooperation among developing nations isn’t merely aspirational—it works, creates measurable value, and builds stronger institutional foundations for shared prosperity.

For Zabeeh and thousands of other accomplished professionals who have chosen to study at ISSCAD, the institute represents something increasingly rare: a place where development expertise is recognized as genuinely distributed, where peers teach peers, and where the solutions to tomorrow’s challenges are understood to reside within the Global South itself.

As ISSCAD looks toward its next decade, it does so with the conviction that it has proven its model. The question is no longer whether South-South learning works—it clearly does. The challenge ahead involves scaling these approaches, deepening institutional integration, and expanding the circle of nations and professionals who recognize that humanity’s most pressing development challenges will ultimately be solved through cooperation among equals.