CGD organizes working groups and commissions for a set period of time around a common effort to identify a practical solution to a specific problem. The groups draw strength from diverse experts who share a common interest yet typically lack the opportunity to engage in problem-solving conversations and forge joint solutions. Members serve voluntarily and, except in special circumstances, in their individual capacity. Group members encourage one another’s commitment to address a specific problem, for example, through changes in funding, policies, or program implementation.
CGD working groups and commissions usually produce a report outlining the group’s findings and recommendations, and members often continue to collaborate afterward to push for implementation.
Active Working Groups
Value for Money: An Agenda for Global Health Funding Agencies
As international commitments become more ambitious and aid resources become increasingly constrained, global health funding agencies are seeking ways to improve the efficiency and impact of their investments. CGD’s Value for Money working group, led by Amanda Glassman, will provide targeted recommendations for global health funding agencies to increase impact per dollar spent and create conditions for sustainable investments in health.
Aid Priorities amid Declining Resources Working Group
The working group is a joint CAP-CGD project comprised of a diverse group of experts and practitioners who have come together to offer independent policy proposals on priority-setting in U.S. foreign assistance. The group will make recommendations on crafting a budget that maximizes the most beneficial U.S. programs and maintains core operational capabilities while identifying areas of inefficiency where cuts should be made. The proposals that emerge will help produce a final report and will be based on consultative meetings, one-on-one interviews, literature reviews, and working group deliberations.
Advancing Africa's Private Sector Working Group Series
The Advancing Africa’s Private Sector Working Group Series is an effort to propose practical new ways of encouraging business growth on the continent. The working groups focus on the major constraints facing African businesses, including regulatory reforms and energy technology.
Clinical Trials and Regulatory Pathways for Neglected Diseases Working Group
The working group will produce a final policy report identifying practical and feasible actions to address the persistent challenges of late stage clinical development for neglected disease products. It will outline the responsibilities these different global actors should bear, while pointing out opportunities and needs at the local, national, and intra-institutional levels. The report will include case studies that model and test the recommended approaches against existing clinical trial data to demonstrate the feasibility and potential time, money, and lives saved.
Drug Resistance Working Group
Drug resistance is a global challenge, affecting multiple diseases and recognizing no borders. Resistance to medicines to treat AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases is rising and threatens progress in global health. The working group will recommend ways for the donor community and decision-makers in key development institutions to address this problem. Final report expected in 2009.
The Future of IDA Working Group
The Future of IDA Working Group is an effort to bring together serious scholars, practitioners, and policy makers to think through specific options for World Bank management and shareholders to consider in the face of a changing client-base. The group has been tasked with thinking through the implications for the business model of IDA as it faces a rapidly approaching wave of graduates, including some of its largest and best-performing clients.
Preventing Odious Debt Working Group
Illegitimate regimes frequently saddle their countries with odious debt, burdening successor governments with repayment. A CGD working group is investigating whether ex ante loan sanctions could be employed to discourage this type of lending from happening in the first place. The group's final report is expected in 2010.
Priority-Setting Institutions for Global Health
If you have $200 to spend on health in a developing country, would you vaccinate 10 children against deadly childhood diseases or provide AIDS treatment to one woman to prevent transmission of HIV to her unborn child? Policy makers routinely face such tough budgetary dilemmas with little expert guidance. The working group is investigating practical means to assist priority-setting efforts in low- and middle-income countries.
UN Population Policy Working Group
The working group will consider major population and development topics including the pressing unfinished agenda in family planning and maternal health—now largely centered on South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa—the needs of a growing number of countries to address changing age structures (including the challenges of aging and shrinking populations), internal and international migration trends and environmental linkages.
Previous Working Groups
2011
Private Sector Advisory Facility Working Group (Health)
Poor people in developing countries often receive health care from private providers yet donors and developing-country policymakers often overlook the sector, missing opportunities to improve care. The group is looking for ways to address this problem. The goal is to design an advisory facility that would provide technical support to developing-country policymakers who want to engage the private sector to improve health outcomes.
2010
Global Trade Preference Reform Working Group
High-income countries and emerging powers can reform their trade preference programs to better serve development objectives in the world’s poorest countries. The groups final report, Open Markets for the Poorest Countries: Trade Preferences That Work, tells how.
Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network
The Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) is a bipartisan reform coalition dedicated to building U.S. leadership in achieving economic growth and reducing poverty around the world. Steven Radelet, former CGD senior fellow, was one of the first co-chairs of the coalition upon its inception in 2008. CGD’s Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance initiative continues to inform the work of MFAN through analysis of U.S. foreign assistance innovations and reform.
2009
Performance-Based Incentives Working Group (Feb 2006-June 2009)
Some performance incentives aim to improve provider behavior, promoting delivery of more and better services; others focus on household or patient behavior, to increase health service utilization or affect health-related lifestyle choices. How well do they work? The group’s final report, Performance Incentives for Global Health: Potential and Pitfalls, offers recommendations for donors and policymakers in developing countries seeking to broaden the menu of ways to improve health systems.
Policy Principles for Expanding Financial Access Task Force
The task force final report, Policy Principles for Expanding Financial Access, proposes 10 principles for financial-sector policy makers to expand access to financial services to low-income households and small firms in developing countries
Migration Data Commission (May 2008-May 2009)
Low quality and inadequate statistics on global migration make it tough to craft policies that help poor people. Yet better data could be gathered relatively easily. The commission’s final report, Migrants Count: Five Steps Toward Better Migration Data, tells how.
UNAIDS Leadership Transition Working Group (July 2008-March 2009)
The UNAIDS Leadership Transition Working Group used the first leadership transition at UNAIDS as an opportunity to take stock of an unusual organization. The group’s report, UNAIDS: Preparing for the Future, argues that it should press governments to uphold existing commitments and take on new commitments for prevention, care and treatment of HIV/AIDS that are grounded in scientific evidence and respect for human rights.
2007
IMF Programs and Health Spending Working Group (Oct 2006–June 2007)
The working group investigated the effects of IMF-supported programs on the health sector, with an emphasis on poor countries. The group’s final report offered recommendations for the IMF to ensure that national spending on health care is not constrained by IMF programs.
Global Health Resource Tracking Working Group (July 2004–May 2007)
The group developed recommendations about how to generate and report timely, accurate information about spending on health services and public health programs, within countries and by donor. The group’s final report is called Followingthe Money: Toward Better Tracking of Global Health Resources.
2006
African Development Bank Working Group (July—Sept 2006)
The African Development Bank Working Group prepared recommendations to help put the AfDB back on the road to success, at a moment of leadership transition. Recommendations included advising the president to identify and focus on a few key priorities on which the bank has a strong comparative advantage, such as regional infrastructure. Final report: Building Africa's Development Bank: Six Recommendations for the AfDB and its Shareholders.
Global Health Indicators (Feb–Aug 2006)
The Global Health Indicators Working Group assessed the utility of a range of available data to construct indicators of health policies; the primary purpose was to inform decisions about eligibility criteria by the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation. Final report: Measuring Commitment to Health (PDF)
Evaluation Gap Working Group (Sept 2004-May 2006)
The group developed practical recommendations to increase the quality and quantity of impact evaluations, with a focus on health and education. The final report, When Will We Ever Learn? Improving Lives through Impact Evaluation recommended the creation of an independent entity to coordinate and support high-quality impact evaluations. This led to the creation of the International Initiative on Impact Evaluation (3IE).
2005
World Bank Leadership Transition Working Group (Jan-June 2005)
The World Bank Leadership Transition Working Group was convened toward the end of the term of James Wolfensohn to identify key priorities for his successor, Paul Wolfowitz. The final report was titled The Hardest Job in the World: Five Crucial Tasks for the New President of the World Bank.The tasks continue to be relevant.
Advance Market Commitment Working Group (March 2003–April 2005)
The Advance Market Commitment Working Group was convened to examine the real-world feasibility of one type of market-based incentive, an advance commitment to purchase a future vaccine product. The Group assessed whether a mechanism to increase incentives could be designed, and how it might work in practice. The group’s report laid the groundwork for a $1.5 billion pilot for a vaccine to prevent pneumococcal disease, which annually kills some 3 million children in developing countries.
2004
Commission on Weak States and U.S. National Security (Jan—June 2004)
The Commission on Weak States and U.S. National Security recognized that weak and failed states matter to U.S. national security, American values, and the prospects for global economic growth. The commission outlined a framework for action that seeks to mobilize key actors and instruments in U.S. foreign policy to the task of meeting the threat of weak states.
What Works Working Group? (Feb 2003 – Dec 2004)
The central objective of the What Works Working Group was to document a series of programs in international health that were judged to be successful using a high standard of evidence. The working group closely examined possible international public health "success stories," assessed the quality of evidence about them, identified common factors that contributed to the successes, and documented the cases in a book, Millions Saved: Proven Successes in Global Health, which was later reissued by Jones & Bartlett as a textbook, Case Studies in Global Health: Millions Saved.
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