CGD Policy Blogs

This is a joint post with Sarah Rose.

It's not your father's USAID. That's the big message in USAID's first progress report on how the agency, under Administrator Rajiv Shah's leadership, is trying to be smarter about where and how it delivers aid around the world. There's a lot to like in the report: better evaluation, more developing-country partners, mobile technology and an end to some programs. This is all good news for revamping USAID, but our enthusiasm is tempered by the constraints USAID can’t fix alone. 

The first three pilots under the AgResults initiative announced at the G20 meeting in Los Cabos, Mexico, last year are about to become operational.

After months of planning and preparation, we at CGD launched a newly revamped website yesterday. I’m feeling pretty pleased and hope that you and other friends and followers of CGD will like it, too. Merriam-Webster defines “togs” as:

a set of clothes and accessories for a specified use <riding togs>

I think new togs is fitting term for our freshly revamped website because we are offering much more than a fresh coat of paint.

There's a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about Westerners' perceptions of Africa, and how poorly they align with Africans' own views of the challenges their societies face.

This week I'm in Oxford, for the annual conference on "Economic Development in Africa" at the Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE) .  The CSAE conference is unique among top-tier development econ conferences in that it brings together a huge number of scholars based in African universities and research institutes  -- as well as people like me, non-Africans working on the economics of Africa.