Howard White, executive director of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation or 3ie, told participants in the tenth annual conference of the Global Development Network here in Kuwait that he looks forward to researchers in developing countries playing a major role in 3ie impact evaluations of development interventions.
Amidst the profound concerns about a lengthy economic downturn (or worse), public officials are taking measures to improve the effectiveness of public dollars -- or public rupees, as the case may be.
Here in the United States, President-elect Obama has stated that he'll look for ways to offset the cost of a proposed second stimulus package by cutting wasteful government programs. That same spirit is being felt in India.
A new GAO Report on international food security (International Food Security: Insufficient Efforts by Host Governments and Donors Threaten Progress to Halve Hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2015) gets it almost completely right when it points to the feeble, self-defeating, and confused U.S. policies on world hunger. The report diplomatically states:
Our efforts toward more and better impact evaluation of development programs made a major advance this week with the announcement that Howard White, who has dedicated his career to building evidence about development effectiveness, has accepted the position as the first director of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (see the CGD initiative: Closing the Evaluation Gap).
CGD yesterday hosted a lively book chat with Gregory Clark, author of a provocative new book, A Farewell To Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World.
"Countries know where they want to be, but they may not know the best way of getting there. We would like to see the development of a new institution which can help us generate and use impact evaluation findings and help build capacity within our country to develop evidence and answer some of our enduring questions." --Margaret Kakande, Ugandan Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development
When New York City Mayor Bloomberg’s anti-poverty commission recommended this week that the city pay poor people to send their kids to school and keep up-to-date on immunizations, the idea had an oddly familiar ring to it.
The New York Review of Books' Aid: Can it Work? is a wide-ranging review of Bill Easterly's recent book The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Easterly discussed his book at a CGD event last March, transcrip