Commentary

Budget support offers direct financing to a country’s treasury to create more “fiscal space” for public programs. It has constituted some 14 percent of ODA on average, increasing to over 20 percent in times of crisis. No aid modality is more controversial. Critics argue that, without earmarking fund...

Historically, social assistance payments were often distributed in cash at designated payment points—government offices, community meetings, or schools. More recently, payments have increasingly been distributed digitally, through bank accounts or mobile wallets.

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...

Consider the situation. Faced with growing fiscal stress, the government of an energy-exporting country decides to cut generous subsidies, doubling the price of fuel overnight. Protestors are out on the streets, clashing violently with security forces called in to maintain law and order. They vent t...

At the outset of the pandemic, CGD launched a website, g2p-network.org to facilitate a series of working groups exploring digital payments and COVID-19 and to highlight important findings in the vast and rapidly growing array of academic and policy work on G2P systems. Today, we’re launching a ...

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.