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Headlines on aid and global development are grim right now. The decimation of USAID has been swiftly followed by major cuts announced in the UK, and smaller cuts planned from a raft of European donors. Many of these aid cuts will lead to people dying. CGD Non-Resident Fellow Ken Opalo writes “this i...

Each year around 169 million people cross borders in search of better economic opportunities, with the largest number migrating to Arab states and the largest share from Southeast Asia and South Asia. These migrants play a crucial role in the economic fabric of both their host and their home countri...

In past years, the UK Government has undertaken substantial assessments of each multilateral’s effectiveness to inform UK funding decisions. In this blog, we explore how these major assessments of Value for Money (VfM) affected the UK’s multilateral aid allocation. To do this, we’ve accessed previou...

Recently, the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) published the annual statistics summarizing how much foreign aid its 30 member states, including Austria, provided in 2021, loudly trumpeting the all time high levels of ODA achieved. It’s a good time to reflect on the uncomfortable tension...

The need for effective evidence-informed priority-setting in global development is more urgent than ever, with widespread global challenges and reduced funding due to both COVID-19 related public spending and economic slowdowns. This blog explores three key barriers to using value for money evi...

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 op...

Last week, the new UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson made sweeping changes to government ministers. Below we set out the limitations of the last spending review—and five ways to do better.

The UK’s development agency, DFID, has stated that it views research as the best way to spend aid and that it intends to place high quality research central to its aid strategy. In a new paper, we find significant problems with the way that UK aid is being used to back rese...

ICAI has just entered its third four-year phase. ICAI is a major asset in ensuring aid is well-spent. Having reviewed ICAI’s prior work, we think ICAI could should focus more on “results claims”—that is, whether the estimates of expected benefits that underpin decision-making...