Commentary

Without a teacher at the front of the classroom, no learning can take place. But all over the world, teachers are leaving the profession in droves. There are a variety of reasons for this—from low pay to political instability. High levels of teacher attrition not only strain education systems, becau...

Nutrition financing and its data are complex due to the diverse interventions for nutrition across sectors and stakeholders, with both direct and indirect benefits.  In this piece, we walk through what we’ve learned in navigating the basics of nutrition financing from three key sources—the Institut...

The gap between parties on international economic policy is often smaller than the gap between consensus positions over time. While the Biden Administration has introduced migrant-supporting measures including relief for the undocumented spouses of citizens and community sponsorship of refugees, bot...

Two posts on the parlous state of social science. First, Ben Recht made me crack up from the title of “I don’t care what the studies say.”, including that masterful full stop. It’s a serious post though, not satire, and though it takes an extreme position, it reflects something about how I feel abou...

As the replenishment process for IDA, the arm of the World Bank that provides concessional lending, is in full steam, the stakes are unsurprisingly high for Africa. This is partly because IDA provides grants and low-cost financing to 75 low-income countries, 39 of which are on the African continent....

Gender data is needed to gauge the extent to which financial services include and benefit women. However, sex-disaggregated data that tracks access to and use of financial services is still hard to come by, and it is especially rare to have country-level data that captures the universe of financial ...

In our piece earlier this year about how and when policymakers engage with research, Janeen Madan Keller, Erin Collinson, and I made a point in passing that attracted some attention: evidence uptake in organizations is relational. What we meant was that, for the most part, policymakers don’t make de...