Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
Last week at UN Financing for Development Conference in Doha, Nancy Birdsall and I presented our Cash on Delivery Aid proposal for improving and scaling-up aid for education.
There was another meeting in Doha this past weekend through yesterday. This time it was the United Nations not the WTO that failed to close any deal.
I attended because CGD organized a "side event" on our COD Aid initiative -- more on that in another comment later this week.
We at CGD warmly welcome president-elect Barack Obama's appointments of Timothy Geithner as Secretary of Treasury and Lawrence Summers to head the National Economic Council. Both are members of the CGD Board of Directors. This is no coincidence.
The Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) just launched its new website. As many of you know, CGD's Steve Radelet is co-chair of this initiative. The new site provides information on how foreign assistance is in our national interest, why it is vital to modernize the current system, and how you can get involved in the effort.
Sen. Robert Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on International Development and Foreign Assistance, Economic Affairs and International Environmental Protection, said he was proud to support any initiative highlighting the global development agenda for the next U.S. president during CGD’s Capitol Hill discussion of The White House and the World: A Global Development Agenda for the Next U.S. President last week.
Everyone says August in Washington, D.C. is quiet. That is of course, unless you are planning to attend the presidential conventions and from what I can tell, just about everyone is sending someone to the conventions. And this time around, CGD is going to both of them.
September 8th: See Our Updated Republican Convention Slideshow and Read the Blog Entry?
The U.S. Congress launched a new bipartisan Caucus for Congressional-World Bank Dialogue at a packed event on Capitol Hill July 16. The caucus, co-chaired by Kevin Brady (R-TX) and Betty McCollum (D-MN), provides a forum for members of Congress to engage the World Bank, parliamentarians and policy experts on poverty reduction, global development and trade.
Back in December 2006 I blogged a meeting in Paris at which the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), a sort of microfinance think tank operating out of the World Bank, won a mandate to hold a mirror up to the aid agencies that fund it. A year and a half later, CGAP's new SmartAid Index looks at the quality of donors' work in supporting micorofinance.
Two former administrators of the U.S. Agency for International Development -- Peter McPherson and Brian Atwood -- said the U.S. government should give greater prominence to development and rewrite the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 in their testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week. Their testimony and other events around town signal growing momentum for a dramatic overhaul of U.S. foreign assistance.
The day after the launch of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network's New Day, New Way Proposal, Representatives Betty McCollum (D-MN), Christopher Shays (R-CT), John Tierney (D-MA) and Frank Wolf (R-VA) introduced a bipartisan resolution to elevate global development and foreign assistance in our national interest. Continuing to build on the surge of momentum for modernizing U.S.
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