Ideas to Action:

Independent research for global prosperity

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CGD's weekly Global Prosperity Wonkcast, event videos, whiteboard talks, slides, and more.

Turning the Tide in the War on Tobacco: Bill Savedoff

8/15/11

Most people understand the personal risks associated with smoking, but surprisingly few understand its impact globally. Every year, more people die form tobacco related illnesses than from HIV/Aids, TB and malaria combined. Nevertheless, governments and international aid agencies have yet ot pay serious attention to what some believe to be one of hte most needless disease burdens in human history.

Here to breathe some fresh air into the fight to curb smoking is senior fellow Bill Savedoff, who joins me this week to discuss his latest blog post, Death by Tobacco: A Big Problem Needs Bigger Action. Upon returning from a meeting on tobacco control in New York City last month. Bill set out to raise the alarm about something he found to be shockingly little-known: the shockingly low cost of highly effective tobacco controls.

Impact Evaluations and the 3ie: William Savedoff

5/2/11

Efforts to design better aid programs often are hampered by the failure to evaluate what works—and what doesn’t—in existing programs. Today, the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation and other important efforts are helping fill the evaluation gap.

My guest this week is senior fellow Bill Savedoff. He was a member of the Center for Global Development’s 2004 Evaluation Gap Working Group, led by Ruth Levine, that urged and helped create a new institution for impact evaluation: the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation, or 3ie (“Triple I E”). Following a recent CGD speech by Esther Duflo on the importance of impact evaluation, I sat down with Bill to talk about how new impact evaluations are shaping development projects and policy.

Nancy Birdsall on Cash on Delivery Aid

2/17/10

Nancy Birdsall

Can aid donors find a better way to deliver aid? My guest this week is Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development. Along with William Savedoff and Ayah Mahgoub, Nancy is working on a potential new way of disbursing foreign assistance called Cash on Delivery Aid. COD Aid seeks to devise simple, results-based contracts that reward developing countries for making progress towards previously agreed goals—such as increased primary school completion rates, vaccination coverage, or access to clean water.

In the podcast, Nancy explains that the traditional mode of giving aid, in which donors often take an active role in prescribing which actions recipient governments should take, can undermine incentives for governments to identify problems and design and implement locally appropriate solutions. "We have to create a system in which outside resources actually help the developing country governments find out what works in their particular setting," says Nancy.

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