Bono appeared at the TED event this week to discuss ending global poverty. He suggested that it was possible to imagine eradicating $1.25 a day poverty by around 2030. And I believe him –at least in my more optimistic moments. The U2 frontman noted one of the benefits if that happened: “you won’t have to listen to an insufferable jumped-u
Last week saw the High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Agenda meeting in Liberia. Apparently various panel members used the occasion to lay out their vision for goals and targets for 2030. And according to Save the Children’s Brendan Cox, there was a lot of discussion around the “fact that we can get to zero on so many issues.” Save the Children’s very interesting report on post-2015 is heavy on
I thought I would take a look to see if the recently released National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2030 report had anything of interest to say on development-related issues.
Harping on about holiday decorations before the Thanksgiving Turkey is even stuffed should be the preserve of Macy’s design teams and tinsel factories. But a recent event at CGD had me thinking about Christmas trees.
One of the Rio Summit’s all-to-few accomplishments was language in the outcome declaration about an intergovernmental process to develop Sustainable Development Goals. An "open working group" of 30 nations nominated by the five regional UN groups will come up with a list by September 2013.
A while ago, I blogged about the government of Colombia’s proposal for next year’s Rio + 20 Summit –that it should agree a set of “Sustainable Development Goals,” or SDGs for short. That blog raised the concern that having a set of SDGs agreed only three years before a new round of MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) might be a little confusing to… well... everyone.
As we enter the annual list season, I’m thrilled to see four of my CGD colleagues make Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers:
CGD hosted a meeting yesterday with Ambassador Brice Lalonde, UN Executive Coordinator of Rio +20 as well as representatives from the US Government, NGOs and the private sector. It was an opportunity for Lalonde to give an update and ask for feedback on preparations for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development to take place in Rio next June.
Andy Sumner and I recently wrote about the fact that the number of low income countries in the world is rapidly shrinking –which is great news because it suggests poor countries are getting richer. But how much does graduating to ‘middle income’ mean? Here’s how the original income classification came about, according to the World Bank’s website:
Five years ago, probably the most positive you could be about global development was to argue that, despite a sluggish performance in reducing global income poverty connected to slow-changing institutions, broader quality of life in areas like education and health had improved everywhere. That’s pretty much the story I told in Getting Better. But since then, what we have learned about development progress suggests su