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Blog Post
December 20, 2021
As the year draws to a close, the temptation to claim wisdom from adversity and experience becomes irresistible. We did it last year, by exploring what we learnt while the world burned around us. 2021 was perhaps a marginal improvement: not quite the best of times, but not quite the worst of times, ...
Blog Post
November 10, 2021
COP26, like previous UN climate change conferences, has seen no shortage of “big round number” announcements aimed at making a splash in the press and signaling virtuous intent. Such announcements—be they promising $100 billion a year, demanding $1 trillion, or finding an additional £1 billion from ...
Blog Post
October 29, 2021
The UK government has announced that it anticipates a return to spending 0.7 percent of gross national income (GNI) on official development assistance (ODA) in three years’ time. It is confident enough in this that the just-published Spending Review, which sets departmental budgets up to the 2024/25...
Blog Post
October 21, 2021
After buying up the World’s vaccine supply to ensure they can protect their own populations, rich countries have found themselves struggling to use the vaccine surpluses they accumulated. One response has been to donate the spare doses to countries who need them more. This is laudable, and countries...
Blog Post
September 27, 2021
Changing organizational culture to embrace evidence and its use in decision-making is a long, hard slog. Over the last decade, USAID has made progress in that journey and—in many ways—has outperformed many federal agencies on fulfilling certain evidence requirements. But room for improvement remains...
Blog Post
September 27, 2021
There are a plausible set of circumstances under which the UK’s status as a serious bilateral donor would be under existential threat. They would take the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) from having slightly more than £8 billion in 2019 over which it has full flexibility to spe...
Blog Post
August 26, 2021
Our series on the big challenges and opportunities for developing countries over the next couple of decades has so far largely focused on specific sectors: agriculture, health and finance. The fourth took a different tack, considering instead what we should—and should not—learn from the most dramati...