Subscribe
Subscribe today to receive CGD’s latest newsletters and topic updates.
All Commentary
Filters:
Topics
Facet Toggle
Content Type
Facet Toggle
Blog Type
Facet Toggle
Time Frame
Facet Toggle
Blog Post
December 06, 2021
Researchers want their work to have an impact in the real world. For this to happen, policymakers need to be able to access their research and to be convinced that it is sufficiently credible and relevant to change their minds and inform policy. Understanding what kind of research and evidence convi...
Blog Post
December 03, 2021
Last year we conducted a survey of over 900 senior officials (mostly Directors) in Ministries of Education or related government agencies, from 35 low- and middle-income countries. We surveyed them to get their opinions on the state of education aid, as well as their perceptions of and priorities fo...
Blog Post
December 01, 2021
With half of kids in low- and middle-income countries unable to read a simple story by the end of primary school, international organizations and foreign aid donors have declared a “global learning crisis.”
The crisis framing has coincided with a shift in policy messaging from many big internatio...
Blog Post
October 07, 2021
As the annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund kick off next week, the Bretton Woods institutions are mired in scandal. I want to set aside the broader political calculations and focus on the case at hand: the Doing Business scandal. Facts matter, and the credibili...
Blog Post
October 01, 2021
We are mourning the loss of our colleague and friend, Girin Beeharry. Girin was an intellectual force and a true impatient optimist, in the spirit of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation where he spent much of his career. He was outraged by the poor quality of schooling available to children...
Blog Post
September 01, 2021
When schools in Sierra Leone closed last March, the government was more ready than many to respond. We designed a randomised control trial which assigned 4,399 students from 25 government primary schools to receive—in addition to the standard access to the government’s broadcast that all students re...
Blog Post
July 20, 2021
The official Covid death count in India as of end-June 2021 is 400,000. The reality is, of course, catastrophically worse. Unlike in other countries, authoritative excess death estimates based on official data have not been available because government recording of deaths, especially at the center, ...