Commentary

We’ve just come back from a week-long trip to Portugal, and if these links come off as slightly exhausted, it’s because they are. We had an amazing time, highlighted by pristine beaches, industrial quantities of clams being eaten by my son, and about 7 viewings of Madagascar, but it was bookended by...

Financial support for health in low- and middle-income countries has come under renewed criticism in recent years by policymakers and experts, critiquing that it often fragments health systems, undermines national priority-setting, and lacks a clear exit strategy. The most recent effort to address t...

As the world grapples with the mpox outbreak, fractional dosing (FD)—a strategy that involves administering smaller doses of vaccines, mainly to stretch limited supply—could be a game-changer.

A successful IDA21 replenishment is needed to sustain essential development and climate support in small states, but key policy reforms would also improve the World Bank’s effectiveness in these countries.

India is among the worst countries in the world on the World Economic Forum’s gender gap index, ranking 129th in 2024. Representation of girls and women in textbooks is a natural complement to ongoing successful efforts to increase gender parity in schools. This blog analysis gender bias in textbook...

Nobody doubts China is a world power. But it is still underpowered at a number of global institutions. China could make progress in fixing that problem at the World Bank by increasing its contribution to IDA, the Bank’s soft lending arm for the world’s poorest countries, in the ongoing replenishment...

The COVID-19 pandemic was a wake-up call to the world, revealing vulnerabilities in our global health systems and, perhaps most critically, in how we finance the prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery (PPRR) efforts needed to combat pandemics. As we confront the mpox public health emergenc...