There’s a tension that anyone who has worked in international development eventually runs into. The research says one thing. The ground says another. Frameworks built in universities meet communities that don’t behave the way the models assumed, and something has to give.
Jacob Korenblum’s career is interesting precisely because he didn’t treat these two worlds as separate. He moved between them deliberately, and the results of that back-and-forth are still showing up in his work today.
Building a Foundation Before the Field
Korenblum finished his degree in International Relations at the University of Toronto in 2004 and didn’t waste much time getting into the field. He joined the Education Development Center in Washington, D.C. — a nonprofit with programs running across eighty countries — and moved up fast, eventually running monitoring, evaluation, and communications for a project in the Middle East. He wasn’t managing it from a desk back home either. He was there, on the ground, for several years..
That early stretch mattered more than a line on a resume. He wasn’t reading about development constraints — he was inside them, managing programs under real budget pressures and political complications that no textbook had fully prepared him for. When he later walked into a graduate program at Harvard, he already knew what the gap between theory and practice actually felt like, not as a concept, but as a daily reality.
After wrapping up with the Education Development Center, he went on to work with Oxfam across Malawi, India, Haiti, and Kenya between 2008 and 2010, adding more field layers before returning to formal research. Each country and each posting added something useful to the questions he wanted to eventually bring into a formal academic setting.
A Fellowship Grounded in Field Experience
In 2005, the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation awarded Korenblum a Fellowship in Social Enterprise at Harvard, and in 2006 he completed his Master of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, focused on social enterprise and international education policy.
The difference between arriving at that program with years of field experience versus without it is hard to overstate. Most students in development-focused graduate programs are encountering these frameworks for the first time, evaluating them on their internal logic. Korenblum was stress-testing them against things he had already seen break down in real conditions. That changes how you read the research. It also changes what you actually take away from it once the program ends.
That same year, he co-founded Souktel, an SMS-based job matching platform built specifically for communities where mobile phones were common but internet access was not — a gap he had identified directly through years of field work in Palestine and across the wider region. The idea didn’t come from a classroom exercise or a case study. It came from paying close attention to what people actually had access to and what they were still missing.
Research That Keeps Working After the Degree
What’s notable about Korenblum’s post-Harvard trajectory is that the academic work didn’t stop at the diploma. He went on to advise the UNESCO Pearson Digital Literacy Initiative, publish research for UNICEF, serve on the advisory board for the Global Youth Economic Opportunities Summit from 2016 to 2018, and spend more than four years as a strategic advisor to The Global Citizens’ Initiative, a global organization whose members work on human rights, sustainability, climate protection, and conflict resolution.
Across each of these roles, the frameworks developed at Harvard kept showing up — not as credentials to mention in a biography, but as active working tools applied to new problems in new contexts, more than a decade after graduation.
That’s the part worth paying attention to. A lot of graduate research gets quietly filed away once the degree is granted. Korenblum’s has continued to generate real value across organizations and decades because it was built on top of genuine field experience, not in place of it.
For anyone working in development or adjacent fields who is weighing whether to pursue formal study or field work first, his path makes a quiet but consistent argument. Field experience gives you something real and concrete to test new ideas against. Academic study gives you a language and structure to carry those ideas further than any single project could on its own. The two don’t compete. They build on each other — and when handled well, the combination tends to produce work that lasts well beyond any single role or project.
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