Ideas to Action:

Independent research for global prosperity

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Expertise

Technology, infrastructure, governance and anticorruption, human development, subjective wellbeing/happiness

Bio

Charles Kenny is a senior fellow and the director of technology and development at the Center for Global Development. His current work focuses on gender and development, the role of technology in development, governance and anticorruption and the post-2015 development agenda. He has published articles, chapters and books on issues including what we know about the causes of economic growth, the link between economic growth and broader development, the causes of improvements in global health, the link between economic growth and happiness, the end of the Malthusian trap, the role of communications technologies in development, the ‘digital divide,’ corruption, and progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. He is the author of the book "Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding, and How We Can Improve the World Even More" and “The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest is Great for the West.” He has been a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine and a regular contributor to Business Week magazine. Kenny was previously at the World Bank, where his assignments included working with the VP for the Middle East and North Africa Region, coordinating work on governance and anticorruption in infrastructure and natural resources, and managing a number of investment and technical assistance projects covering telecommunications and the Internet.

Charles Kenny keeps a personal blog at http://www.charleskenny.blogs.com

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Media Contact

Holly Shulman
hshulman@cgdev.org

Featured Work

Results Not Receipts book cover
Results Not Receipts: Counting the Right Things in Aid and Corruption

In the News

July 9, 2018
Can IFC rise to its next challenge? (Devex)
May 31, 2018
The U.N. Goal That Doesn't Get A Lot Of Respect (NPR)
May 24, 2018
A Radical Proposal To Fight Poverty In The Developing World: Tax The Rich More Than The Poor (Vox)

Working Groups

Publish What You Buy

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More From Charles Kenny

January 23, 2018
Blog Post
It’s Time for a Code of Conduct on Transparency for...
Michael Jarvis and Charles Kenny

Public-Private Partnership models continue to proliferate, backed by multilateral development banks old and new. But the volume of PPPs in developing countries has stagnated since the global financial crisis, and they won’t deliver unless they are designed and implemented well. Making more and better public-private investments will take a far greater commitment to transparency from participants in the deals. Financiers—MDBs in particular—should take the lead.

January 17, 2018
Blog Post
Aid Transparency and Private Sector Subsidies at the IFC
Charles Kenny

Vijaya Ramachandran, Ben Leo, Jared Karlow and I have just published two papers looking at where and in what capacity the IFC, OPIC, and selected European development finance institutions (DFIs) are investing their money. The core of the papers is a dataset that Jared painstakingly put together by scraping public documentation about DFI projects. It wasn’t easy because DFIs are considerably behind many aid agencies in releasing usable data on their portfolios. And that lack of transparency presents a significant problem if those same DFIs spend aid money on subsidizing the private sector.

January 17, 2018
Blog Post
The International Finance Corporation’s Mission Is...
Vijaya Ramachandran and Charles Kenny

The IFC is designed to catalyze investments in countries that investors might consider too risky to invest in alone. But our recent analysis of IFC’s portfolio found that it is shying away from risky investments, raising serious questions about whether the IFC is focusing on the places where it can make the most difference.

January 17, 2018
Publication
Comparing Five Bilateral Development Finance Institutions...
Charles Kenny et al.

Development Finance Institutions (DFIs)—which provide financing to private investors in developing economies—have seen rapid expansion over the past few years. This paper describes and analyses a new dataset covering the five largest bilateral DFIs alongside the IFC which includes project amounts, standardized sectors, instruments, and countries. The aim is to establish the size and scope of DFIs and to compare and contrast them with the IFC.

January 17, 2018
Publication
Inside the Portfolio of the International Finance...
Charles Kenny, Jared Kalow and Vijaya Ramachandran

IFC’s portfolio is not focused where it could make the most difference. Low income countries are where IFC has the scale to make a considerable difference to development outcomes. While an excessive portfolio shift might imperil IFC’s credit rating, the evidence suggests that there is considerable scope for increasing commitments to low income countries without significant impact to IFC’s credit scores.

December 15, 2017
Blog Post
Fifteen Years Isn’t That Long: The SDGs and Holistic...
Charles Kenny

Do the fifteen year targets of the SDGs stand in the way of their vision of integration and sustainability? If you wanted to achieve long term development progress, you’d probably focus on technology change, learning and innovation in policies, and improving institutional functioning. If you wanted to improve outcomes in fifteen years, you’d probably focus on throwing money at technical solutions. The problems with the second approach include that we don’t have the money, and the technical solutions won’t necessarily work best over the long term.

December 13, 2017
Publication
Meeting the Sustainable Development Goal Zero Targets:...
Charles Kenny and Mallika Snyder

The Sustainable Development Goals are an ambitious set of targets for global development progress by 2030 that were agreed by the United Nations in 2015. A review of the literature on meeting "zero targets" suggests very high costs compared to available resources, but also that in many cases there remains a considerable gap between financing known technical solutions and achieving the outcomes called for in the SDGs. In some cases, we (even) lack the technical solutions required to achieve the zero targets, suggesting the need for research and development of new approaches.

December 11, 2017
Blog Post
Canada’s Feminist Foreign Policy: Building on a Strong Start
Charles Kenny

The Canadian government has made some impressive steps towards prioritizing gender and women’s rights in international relations. I’m hoping that’s a sign of momentum towards even bigger steps in the New Year—using the full range of tools from trade and migration policy through investment and aid.

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April 17, 2013
Blog Post
A Global Map of Subnational GDP
Charles Kenny

Nicola Gennaioli, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes and Andrei Shleifer have just published a fascinating paper in the QJE: “Human Capital and Regional Development”.  They constructed a database of 1,569 subnational regions across 110 countries covering GDP, population, education levels, geographic and institutional factors, and looked at correlates with higher per capita income.  They suggest that geography and education are significant correlates of regional GDP, while their measures of institutions and culture are less well correlated.  They have followed up with a working paper using an expanded dataset, “Growth in Regions” that reports regional convergence of 2.5% a year and note that a rate so slow suggests “significant barriers to factor mobility within countries.”

June 19, 2015
Publication
Finding Cash for Infrastructure in Addis: Blending,...
Charles Kenny

The total scale of incremental investment requirements in infrastructure in developing countries has been estimated at around USD 1 trillion a year, with a range of related studies suggesting numbers between $815 billion to $1.3 trillion. While all such numbers are open to considerable debate, and were not designed to measure the cost of delivering the specific SDG infrastructure targets, they suggest the likely scale of the financing challenge for an SDG agenda which includes universal coverage to adequate housing, water, sanitation, modern energy and communications technologies. 

May 29, 2018
Event
Navigation by Judgment
Charles Kenny

In Navigation by Judgment, Dan Honig argues that high-quality implementation of foreign aid programs often requires contextual information that cannot be seen by those in distant headquarters. Tight controls and a focus on reaching pre-set measurable targets often prevent front-line workers from using skill, local knowledge, and creativity to solve problems in ways that maximize the impact of foreign aid.

January 9, 2013
Publication
White House Should Explicitly Ban Intelligence...
Charles Kenny

Given the vital importance of child vaccination programs to US national security interests, intelligence-community participation in public health services should be explicitly banned. Doing so might help restore confidence in vaccination programs—benefiting those immunized and the health and security of Americans here at home.

June 7, 2016
Publication
Donors Funding Technology: 10 Recommendations
Charles Kenny

Funding the global public good of technology is a useful way for donors to leverage the impact of their aid. Different types of technologies appear to be important to development progress, and to spread, in different ways. ‘Lab coat technologies’ (inventions) spread easily and improve quality of life, ‘process technologies’ (institutions) spread with difficulty and are important to economic growth. For all donor interventions, however, it appears that context matters—the same technology or investment has varied impact in different environments. Donors should take the importance of context on board when designing their technology interventions.

March 7, 2016
Publication
Do the Results Match the Rhetoric? An Examination of...
Charles Kenny and Megan O'Donnell

This paper seeks to determine the degree to which a gender lens has been incorporated into World Bank projects and the success of individual projects according to gender equality-related indicators. We first examine the World Bank’s internal scoring of projects based on whether they encompass gender analysis, action, and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) components, as well as project development objective indicators and outcomes according to these indicators.

December 12, 2011
Publication
More Money or More Development: What Have the MDGs...
Charles Kenny and Andy Sumner

This paper reflects on the global goal setting experience of the MDGs and what might be done differently if there is new round of MDGs after 2015.

January 19, 2017
Publication
Expanding Women’s Role in Developing Technology:...
Charles Kenny and Megan O'Donnell

Just as the evidence suggests that a more gender-inclusive political system may lead to better policies for women and girls and integrating women into corporate boards may mean reaching new consumers, there is a case to be made for increasing women’s presence in developing technology and innovation. Incorporating more women into technology sectors is likely to 1) increase productivity, 2) offers women a source of high-quality jobs, and 3) may have knock-on benefits for female consumers of technology, whose needs are more likely to be taken into account.

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