The World Bank and other multilateral development banks are historically underutilized assets when it comes to USAID’s development objectives across a wide range of sectors and initiatives. We offer instead a set of recommendations that USAID could implement largely within its own purview, or with a...

CGD's Megan O'Donnell speaks with coauthors Patience Marime-Ball (Women of the World Endowment) and Ruth Shaber (Tara Health Foundation) about the data backing the economic benefits of gender inclusivity, the work that went into creating their new book, and their recommendations for unlocking higher...

As international support for Ukraine ramps up, IMF special drawing rights (SDRs) are being brought into the mix. European Council president Charles Michel supported the Ukrainian Minister of Finance’s call to reallocate ten percent of unused SDRs to Ukraine. But it is unclear what this ten percent ...

Earlier this month two working papers came out hat produce estimates of poverty for India using different sources of data. In this blog post, we reflect on the dramatically different poverty estimates produced by each paper, and the source of the discrepancy.

After the IMF’s August 2021 allocation of $650 billion worth of special drawing rights (SDRs), the G20 pledged to recycle $100 billion worth of that allocation from high-income countries to middle- and low-income countries. These recycled SDRs—not needed by advanced economies—would help lower-income...

In the international development community, “country ownership” is considered a good thing, while criticisims of foreign aid are based on the idea that this is the problem. But only about a third of assistance is actually managed by those it is intended to help.

On the heels of last year’s landmark $93 billion replenishment of the World Bank’s IDA—and with the international community preoccupied with responding to Ukraine—the replenishment of the African Development Fund cannot be an afterthought.