Events
Upcoming
Effectiveness sounds dull. But what if an extra dollar or rupee in a budget could feed ten people instead of one? Or if $100,000 of international aid spending could be tweaked so it would save ten times as many lives? When the stakes are this high, efficiency in spending becomes a moral imperative. Moreover, unlike debates over ideology or religion, debates over efficiency can actually get somewhere, because there is a straightforward mechanism for resolving them: compare the predictable costs and benefits of different courses of action and see which yields more bang for the buck.
This event will serve as an opportunity to discuss and celebrate the launch of a special supplement to the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene that reports on nine new contributions on the impact of malaria control interventions. Specifically, the articles document the success of various malaria control efforts (including the causal link between malaria intervention scale-up and reductions in malaria morbidity and mortality) and new methods for evaluating the impact of large-scale malaria control programs. Taken together, the articles represent a conceptual and practical framework for planning and executing a new generation of impact evaluations, with possible applications to other health conditions in low-resource settings.
Can teacher quality explain the low learning levels observed in many African countries? Survey data spanning seven countries in sub-Saharan African shows that after four years of schooling, the majority of students fail to master tasks covered in the second year curriculum. In their new paper, Tessa Bold and her co-authors show these low learning levels can be partly explained by teachers’ limited knowledge of curriculum content. Many teachers struggle with tasks that their students should master in lower primary. If all students had been taught by teachers who had mastered the lower secondary curriculum, students would have acquired the equivalent of an additional three quarters of a year of schooling after four years, and the observed gap in effective education after four years would have been reduced by one third.
Long-simmering conflict in Myanmar’s Rakhine state has exploded in recent weeks, leading to the rapid flight of more than 400,000 members of the country’s Rohingya population into neighboring Bangladesh. The pace of this flight has few precedents in recent history, faster even than the massive flight of Albanians from Kosovo during the 1999 war. The Rohingya are fleeing what appears to be a conscious campaign of violence by Myanmar’s security forces, in what numerous observers argue constitutes a policy of ethnic cleansing. Those who have survived the violence and escaped to Bangladesh face enormous humanitarian needs, and uncertain prospects for ever returning to their now-razed villages and homes. Refugees International, Human Rights Watch, and numerous other agencies are assessing and documenting the violence and have deployed personnel to the border region to interview survivors.
CGD, in partnership with the World Bank Group, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Omidyar Network, is delighted to host Nandan Nilekani, the founding chairman of UIDAI (Aadhaar), the unique identification system of India, which has enrolled more than a billion people. Nilekani will speak on “Societal Platforms: A Cambrian Approach to Sustainable Development”—how we can distill principles from the unique architecture of Aadhaar to develop new platforms, like EkStep, that can enable people to access an increasingly wide array of transformative services.
In recent years, there has been tremendous progress in improving the treatment and prevention of diseases, resulting in millions of lives saved around the world. While some of this progress is due to economic growth, aid from several bilateral, multilateral, and philanthropic donors has made important contributions to reducing the global burden of disease. In this seminar, Alec Morton will present new research focusing on decision rules to guide how donors should allocate aid money given that resources are limited.
Past
With plans for a redesign of the State Department and United States Agency for International Development well under way, this is a critical moment for an informed discussion of the latest reforms proposals that will make US foreign assistance more effective and efficient. Please join us for a bipartisan debate featuring authors of four recent reports that outline options for reform and reorganization of US global development functions. The event will bring to light key areas of consensus and divergence among experts, and will aim to highlight emerging organizing principles for the future of US foreign assistance, potential structural changes to the US global development architecture, and opportunities for building momentum in a fluid political and legislative environment.
In 2014, unprecedented numbers of children and families began crossing the southern border of the United States, sparking an ongoing debate on what was driving them and how the U.S. should respond. Using data provided by the Department of Homeland Security, new research by Michael Clemens finds the flow of unaccompanied child migrants to the United States has been driven by a complex mix of violence and economic forces. How do these elements interact, and how can foreign policy be a form of migration policy?
Strengthening institutions is a foremost priority in fragile states and building fiscal capacity is especially important in the effort to exit fragility. In its recent paper Building Fiscal Capacity in Fragile States, the IMF draws on analysis of 39 fragile states and eight country case studies to describe its approach to fiscal reforms in fragile states and to draw lessons going forward. Participants will bring both advisory and policymaker perspectives to the panel discussion.
In The Shadow List, State Department crisis expert Judd Ryker is chasing an American banker who’s disappeared after falling for a Nigerian scam. Meanwhile, his CIA wife Jessica is hunting a notorious Russian mob boss. Little do they know, they’re pulling on opposite ends of the same dangerous thread. Throw in Chinese oil companies under attack, corrupt American politicians, a kidnapped NBA star, and an undercover FBI sting operation and it’s the latest diplomatic thriller ripped from the headlines by CGD senior fellow Todd Moss.
Policymakers in rich and poor countries interested in boosting growth increasingly view women entrepreneurs as an underutilized asset. The launch of the Women’s Entrepreneurship Facility (We-Fi) at the G20 Summit is one example of a major initiative to mobilize more than $1 billion to help women start and grow businesses. But, beyond the scale of resources, important questions about how they are allocated need to be addressed.
Please join a panel of distinguished thought and practice leaders from the World Bank, WeConnect, and the Global Banking Alliance for Women for a discussion of how to formulate a holistic approach to this set of challenges. What does the evidence tell us about the most effective ways to support access to finance, access to skills and networks, and access to markets? And how can interventions best be combined?
The 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic broke out and affected thousands of people at a time when there were no medicines approved to treat or prevent Ebola. Poor infrastructure, capacity gaps, widespread mistrust, and disagreements over the design and ethical nature of any clinical trials complicated efforts to conduct research on investigational drugs and vaccines. In the wake of the outbreak, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine tasked a committee with analyzing the clinical trials carried out during the outbreak and developing recommendations to improve the implementation of such trials in the future. In this session, committee members Gerald Keusch and David Peters will discuss findings from the committee’s recently released report and the kind of governance structures that need to be in place for effective international coordination and collaboration.
More than a billion Indian residents now have a biometric digital identity: Aadhaar. Its use across various sectors is increasing rapidly. The State of Aadhaar Report 2016-17 aims to provide a comprehensive overview of Aadhaar’s technological and operational architecture, legal and governance framework, uses in financial inclusion and social protection, and emerging applications in other sectors. Given the large scale and complicated nature of Aadhaar and its uses, the purpose of this report is to provide a holistic picture of the Aadhaar landscape over the last decade, to encourage evidence-informed discourse and decision making in the public and private sectors, and to spur future policy-relevant research projects.
As part of its national health reforms, El Salvador assigned community health teams to 98 of its poorest municipalities. While some municipalities received traditional (input-based) aid to support the program and others received national funding, some municipalities received funding through the Salud Mesoamerica Initiative (SMI), a results-based aid (RBA) program focused on maternal and child health targets. In this seminar, Sebastian Martinez will present on his new research with Pedro Bernal and Pablo Celhay, which uses a difference-in-difference design to assess whether municipalities that received RBA funding were more effective at delivering health services. Martinez will also discuss the program's spillover effects on men and the elderly, as well as its implications for population health.
To coincide with the launch of the IMF’s latest global economic forecasts, and following the G-20 Summit, please join IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde and CGD president Masood Ahmed for a conversation about challenges and trends ahead for the global economy.
What is the role of the IMF in ensuring inclusive growth and stability in the years to come, and how should it respond to ongoing and emerging issues, including fragile states, rising inequality, technological innovation, and the future of international economic cooperation? The discussion will focus on issues related to the future of the international economy.
In their new paper, Markus Goldstein and co-authors examine the effects of land title registration in Rwanda using a national-level randomized control trial. They concluded that the program resulted in a significant shift of labor from agriculture to non-farm enterprises and wage work, with an improvement in welfare.
Please join us to celebrate the launch of Charles Kenny's latest book, Results Not Receipts: Counting the Right Things in Aid and Corruption. This work illustrates a growing problem: an important and justified focus on corruption as a barrier to development has led to policy change in aid agencies that is damaging the potential for aid to deliver results. Donors have treated corruption as an issue they can measure and improve, and from which they can insulate their projects at acceptable costs by controlling processes and monitoring receipts. Results Not Receipts highlights the weak link between donors’ preferred measures of corruption and development outcomes related to our limited ability to measure the problem. It discusses the costs of the standard anti-corruption tools of fiduciary controls and centralized delivery, and it suggests a different approach to tackling the problem of corruption in development: focus on outcomes.
RISE is a large scale, multi-country research programme developed to answer the question: “How can education systems be reformed to deliver better learning for all?” The objective of this year’s conference is to bring together high profile academics and policy makers to discuss the RISE research agenda. The conference will feature a range of invited and contributed talks and panels, as well as three sessions focused on our six Country Research Teams (CRTs), including the announcement of our two newest CRTs. The RISE Programme is a collaboration between the Center for Global Development in Washington DC, the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, and Oxford Policy Management in Oxford, UK, and our CRTs include Tanzania, India, Pakistan, and Vietnam, with two further countries to be announced shortly.
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) in education that combine public finance to provide free or subsidized access to privately delivered education are expanding in many developing countries, either to increase access where government capacity is limited or to improve learning outcomes—often with limited evidence on their success. This panel will bring together experts from the policy and research spheres to review what we know about the design of effective partnerships, the hazards to be avoided, and the frontiers for new research.
A central issue in designing performance incentive contracts is whether to reward the production of outputs versus use of inputs: the former rewards efficiency and innovation in production, while the latter imposes less risk. But the promise of output-based contracts may remain unmet if providers lack the requisite skills to innovate and increase performance. In this seminar, Manoj Mohanan will present on new research that uses a field experiment in Karnataka, India to explore three questions: How does an input versus an output incentive contract affect maternity care, as measured by rates of postpartum hemorrhage, pre-eclampsia, sepsis, and neonatal survival? Do providers under input incentive contracts use different strategies and input combinations than providers under output incentive contracts? And, finally, does the skill level of the provider make a difference for their performance under the input versus output incentive contracts?
The early days of this new administration are a critical time for bipartisan exchange among leaders of previous administrations. Please join CGD for a conversation with three former Treasury Under Secretaries for International Affairs who played central roles in the Bush II and Obama administrations’ formulation and execution of international economic policy. The panel will discuss the outlook for the global economy, international structural changes and challenges that have emerged since their time in office, the critical issues that will confront the next Under Secretary for International Affairs, and the nature of the job and lessons learned. We hope you can join us for this stellar panel, as we continue to build understanding of global economic challenges and how the United States, working with others, can best meet them.
With cuts to foreign aid on the horizon, the United States, now more than ever, needs to sharpen its tools to operate in a constrained budget environment. Key to this approach is a strong development finance institution that can leverage private investment to achieve development outcomes, as well as create opportunity for American companies abroad—all at less than no cost to the US taxpayer.