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Blog Post
January 19, 2023
Kenya has become a poster child for digitally driven development. Known as “Silicon Savannah,” the country has a multi-billion-dollar tech industry that routinely produces startups. Among its most prominent successes is M-Pesa. Launched in 2007, the mobile wallet service revolutionized how Kenyans t...
Blog Post
October 21, 2021
Dr. Joseph Atick, Executive Chairman of ID4Africa, and Alan Gelb, CGD Senior Fellow, join Gyude to discuss the evolution of ID systems across Africa, the benefits and risks of digital ID systems, and what African governments can learn from countries like India about what works and what doesn’t.
Blog Post
March 08, 2021
Debates on Sub-Saharan Africa’s development path and prospects often focus on two questions. Looking back, why have countries not experienced the structural transformation towards labor-intensive manufactures that has played such an important a role in the rapid development of Asian countries? And, ...
Blog Post
August 19, 2020
In 2017, Malawi was one of the only countries in the SADC and COMESA without a functioning national registry and identification system. Supported by the United Nations Development Programme together with several other donors, Malawi managed to achieve universal ID coverage in some 180 days, joi...
Blog Post
April 06, 2020
The COVID-19 response amounts to a significant expansion in the scale and scope of direct cash transfers as well as other social assistance—a huge increase in government-to-people (G2P) payments. As we explain in our new report, delivering on these programs will require an enormous increase in ...
Blog Post
December 03, 2013
This week, I will be travelling to Beijing, China, with my CGD colleagues, Alan Gelb and Christian Meyer, to attend an authors’ workshop for the Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, at the National School of Development at Peking University. Alan, Christian, and I will discuss our ne...