Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
It was bound to happen: the Covid-19 strain of the coronavirus has come to sub-Saharan Africa. Based on our experiences fighting Ebola in Liberia, here's what African countries need to do now.
Last week, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” In this blog post, I’ll give you a bite-sized introduction to more than 100 of Michael Kremer’s research publications.
In Africa, where widowhood and divorce are common and the rights of women are mostly conditional on marriage, changes in marital status are likely to influence the success of policies aimed at empowering women.
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize, awarded last week to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad, calls attention to sexual violence during war and civil conflicts—a horror too often unstated and wished away. There’s another largely hidden horror the world needs to reckon with: the toll that civil conflicts, some so local that they rarely make the news, takes on children.
Deforestation isn’t associated with higher malaria prevalence in children in 17 African countries. Nor is it associated with higher fever in children in 41 countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. That’s the surprising conclusion of our new CGD working paper.
Rebuilding and strengthening Liberia’s health systems, investing in households with young children, and revitalizing the private sector must be made priorities for Liberia, according to experts gathered at CGD for an event on what the international community can do to help the country’s people and economy recover from the toll of Ebola.
Momentum seems to be building on Capitol Hill for some kind of West African travel ban as an anti-Ebola measure. It sounds like a simple solution. But here’s why a travel ban is pointless—or could even make us less safe.
The priority for policymakers concerned about the Ebola epidemic in West Africa should be to respond to the existing outbreak, treat the victims, and contain its spread. But the longer term lesson is that we need to be willing to spend more on global health.
As African leaders meet in Washington this week, one issue is not on the agenda: the poor quality of basic economic and social data in the region.
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