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International development has reached a crucial moment in its evolution. Given the great progress in much of the world in the past decade or so, the paradigm of north-south development assistance is now outdated. All countries are engaged in contributing to global development, supporting sustainability and poverty reduction locally, nationally, regionally and globally.
“We know this is crazy ambitious,” Lant Pritchett says to introduce RISE: Research on Improving Systems of Education. He’s right. The RISE program plans to study education systems reform in five countries over six years; CGD directs the research agenda.
Owen Barder says World Humanitarian Day is an opportunity to honor humanitarian workers and organisations, but also an opportunity to think about how the world can do this better.
Over the last five years, our newsletter “Cash on Delivery Aid Update” has begun to cover more than just Cash on Delivery Aid (COD Aid). So we’ve decided to rename the newsletter, but what shall we call it?
It was a big deal when various media outlets declared last week that the evidence to support mass deworming had been “debunked.” The debate now is not about whether children sick with worms should get treated (everyone says yes), but whether the mass treatment of all kids — including those not known to be infected — is a cost-effective way to raise school attendance. The healthiest parts of the debate have been about the need for transparency, data sharing, and more replication in science. Here, we’re going to focus here on the narrower question of the evidence for mass deworming specifically, which is where some journalists have gotten things quite wrong.
In 2002, negotiators from the world over met in Mexico to agree on the Monterrey Consensus of the International Conference on Financing for Development. As Simon Maxwell has pointed out, it is an international document on development cooperation that leads with the most vital financing issues and discusses what is needed to make them work better. And that should stand as a warning to those celebrating the Addis Ababa Action Agenda agreed last week.
On Monday, Grant Shapps, the UK's Minister of State at the Department for International Development, kicked off DFID’s Energy Africa campaign at an event hosted by the Shell Foundation designed to help his team figure out how the UK government can invest its political clout and an initial £30 million ($46 million) to tackle rural energy poverty in Africa. Given solar’s limitations and these risks, how can we make sure that Energy Africa fulfils Minister Shapps’s ambitious brief?
Do more, use rigorous methods, and clearly acknowledge limits — these were the main messages of our recent forum on measuring and evaluating women’s economic empowerment.
In the world of international aid, performance payments are a hot topic. But when it comes to signing performance payment agreements, most funders have been reticent. One of the reasons is a fear of “Double Counting” – paying once for investments to achieve outcomes and a second time when the outcomes are delivered. This concern ignores the complexity of achieving development goals and the intangible assets invested by recipient countries. When funders do agree to performance agreements, they end up ignoring the burden on recipients of “Double Demanding” – disbursing when outcomes are achieved and then setting restrictions on the use of those funds. All this confusion gets in the way of designing effective aid programs.
In Burkina Faso, where most live on less than $2 a day, people want better infrastructure even more than they want jobs. In Benin, Guinea, Liberia, Mozambique, Tanzania – some of Africa’s poorest nations – it is the same. In fact, the cry for more and better basic services is heard in nearly every African country.
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