Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
The UK example has some key lessons for all countries (including the UK itself) who are considering how to improve their current response, and how to “build back better” and prepare for future pandemics.
If further cuts are to come from the ODA budget, how should they be selected and managed? And is there a way to rescue those things of greatest value in the portfolio? In a new note, I argue that there is—and that such a process can improve the quality of ODA spending in perpetuity.
Three years ago, the government pledged “to help improve access to UK markets for world’s poorest countries post-Brexit." Our experts review whether they are still on track to meet this.
The UK is about to merge development and diplomacy in a single department: the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about that, but CGD colleagues have pointed out some opportunities as well. One area where combining the talents of DFID and Foreign Office staff could be turned into a positive sum is in the area of global public goods.
Thanks to COVID-19, national exams in England were replaced with a combination of school-allocated grades and a centralised algorithm leading to a set of results that were widely perceived as inequitable. What did other countries do, and was there any “good” option during this year of lengthy school closures? Using our COVID education tracker, we coded and mapped governments’ approaches to national exams in more than 100 countries where we could find reliable data.
In Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, he divided the world into hedgehogs, who have a singular vision uniting all action, and foxes, characterized by the breadth of their intellectual curiosity and locus of attention. The UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office needs to be both hedgehog and fox to fulfill its promise, being able to relate all of its work to its central vision of being a force for good in the world, while retaining the fox’s ability to work on multiple problems in multiple ways.
A new ICAI report issued this week suggests that large parts of UK aid spending on research and development remain hampered by a design that favors British researcher interests over urgent research topics and capacity prioritized by the world’s poorest countries. The next few months are a perfect opportunity to fix that problem, because the two most problematic funds are up for renewal.
What should be prioritized to make the new FCO-DFID merger the best possible asset for Britain and its development partners? Ian Mitchell shares some thoughts.
“Get Brexit Done” was the Conservative Party’s election-winning slogan last month. Formally, that objective has been achieved. But what does that mean for international development—for aid, humanitarian relief, trade, security, migration, climate change, and beyond? Last week we gave evidence to the House of Lords EU External Affairs Sub-Committee on development cooperation after Brexit. Below we sketch out some of our key discussion points.
The 2019 UK Conservative Party manifesto committed the UK government to “stand up for the right of every girl in the world to have 12 years of quality education.” We offer five recommendations to help the UK government deliver on its manifesto commitment.
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