CGD's weekly Global Prosperity Wonkcast, event videos, whiteboard talks, slides, and more.
Tony Blair today set out his vision for a new partnership with Africa, in which the international community supports committed African leaders to transform their countries by making government work better.
G-20 leaders gathering in Seoul this week face a full plate of issues, most prominently the effort to stave off beggar-thy-neighbors currency devaluations. This week on the Global Prosperity Wonkcast, we've distilled highlights from a private briefing I organized where five CGD experts shared their views on key issues facing the G-20, and their implications for poor people not represented at the table. Snippets below—listen to the full 30-minute Wonkcast for the rest of the story or scroll to the bottom of this page for full event video. If you'd like a bit of historical background on the G-20 and how it came into its current role, listen to my introductory remarks (they're about 6 minutes long) that give some context for the rest of the discussion.
QuODA is an assessment of the Quality of Official Development Assistance provided by 23 countries and more than 150 aid agencies. It uses 30 indicators in four dimension that reflect the international consensus of what constitutes high-quality aid: Maximizing efficiency, Fostering institutions, Reducing Burden, Transparency and Learning
Donors, academics, and development advocates have long recognized that not all aid is created equal. Often, the impacts of aid are blunted because it’s spent in the wrong places or isn’t coordinated with recipient government programs. How can we know which donors give aid well, and which donors need to improve? My guests on this week’s Wonkcast are Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development, and Homi Kharas, deputy director of the Brookings Institution’s Global Economy and Development program. They are the co-creators of the Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA) assessment, a new tool that tracks and compares donor programs against four dimensions of aid quality.
As the Toronto G-20 Summit approaches, wealthy countries remain preoccupied with their slow economic recovery and the crisis spilling out of Greece. These important issues risk distracting leaders from the urgent problems of global poverty and inequality. In response to this concern, CGD recently hosted a press briefing to inform journalists about the development issues likely to arise at the summit. CGD president Nancy Birdsall, who has recently discussed the Toronto Summit agenda with senior U.S. and Canadian officials, delivered a brief opening statement on trade, financial inclusion, aid effectiveness, and the multilateral development banks. CGD experts briefly elaborated.
On Wednesday, April 14, 2010 Center for Global Development hosted a conversation with The Acting President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria Goodluck Jonathan, who offered his perspective on several of the key issues that his country faces, including electoral reform, consolidation of the gains of the Niger Delta Amnesty, the fight against corruption, and improvement to the power and energy sectors.
Click here to listen to audio from a conversation with Acting President of Nigeria Goodluck Jonathan on several of the key issues that his country faces, including electoral reform, consolidation of the gains of the Niger Delta Amnesty, the fight against corruption, and improvement to the power and energy sectors.
Click here to listen to audio from Kenneth Rogoff's lecture, "The Perils of Financial Globalization and the IMF."
This video includes highlights from the Center for Global Development's trade preference report launch, Open Markets for the Poorest Countries: Trade Preferences That Work. Working group chair and CGD senior fellow Kimberly Elliott presented the reports recommendations, and CGD president Nancy Birdsall moderated a panel discussion with working group members William Lane and Gawain Kripke on how trade policies can better support development objectives.
At the March 23, 2010 launch of their new book, Cash on Delivery: A new approach to foreign aid with an application to primary schooling, authors Nancy Birdsall, President, Center for Global Development; William Savedoff, Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development; and Ayah Mahgoub, Program Coordinator to the President, Center for Global Development, presented an approach that links aid directly to outcomes in ways that promote accountability and strengthen local institutions. Cash on Delivery builds on existing initiatives that strive to disburse aid against results, but it takes the idea further by linking payments more directly to a single specific outcome; giving the recipient country full authority to achieve progress however it sees fit and without interference of any kind from donors; and assuring that the recipient country's progress is transparent and visible to its own citizens.
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.