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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
September 24, 2021
Hi all, In a nice change from opening the links with the obit of one of my favourite musicians or actors, this week I get to celebrate an 87 year old genius doing something amazing: Wole Soyinka (author of two of my favourite autobiographies ever, one for each end of his&nbs...
Blog Post
September 17, 2021
Hi all, One day I will start a crowdfunder to get the start up capital for a pet project of mine: the Bad Idea Hall of Fame, a place that records and denigrates the dumbest things people have done. In it will be the first draft of Gigli, a video of the homophobes who tried to attack two men dre...
Blog Post
September 10, 2021
There was some good this week, too, though – most notably the ten-year anniversary of Michael Clemens’s seminal Journal of Economic Perspectives paper, Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk? The anniversary prompted Michael to discuss the struggles he had in ...
Blog Post
September 06, 2021
The need for effective evidence-informed priority-setting in global development is more urgent than ever, with widespread global challenges and reduced funding due to both COVID-19 related public spending and economic slowdowns. This blog explores three key barriers to using value for money evi...
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...