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March 24, 2015

Ben Leo Testifies on Modernizing the US Approach to Promoting Economic Engagement in Africa

In testimony last week before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health Policy, CGD’s Ben Leo called upon Congress to modernize how the United States supports economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa. The hearing was called to reflect on the progress since the August 2014 US-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington and to address obstacles that continue to discourage greater private-sector engagement in the region.

Erin Collinson
March 24, 2015

The Evaluation Gap Is Closing, But Not Closed

Recently, I sent out the final Evaluation Gap Update – a newsletter about impact evaluations and the institutions that fund them, implement them, or are supposed to be influenced by them. After 10 years, it seemed the right time to move on to other projects, particularly since numerous other resources have sprung up over this decade (many listed below!). Yet there is pushback on the growth of impact evaluations that sometimes worries me. I hear people say too many impact evaluations are being conducted (despite the need for the information they provide).

William Savedoff
March 23, 2015

Wiping Out Poverty with a New (Old) Aid Strategy

Imagine you are an aid agency with a new mission, set at the highest level: end world poverty. Two come to mind. How are you to achieve such a noble but audacious goal? 

The first thing you’d want to do is define the target: what is meant by ‘poverty’? Perhaps you’d suggest that it was living on a little more than a dollar a day, or watching your children dying from preventable illness.  Perhaps it is some combination of limited absolute or relative consumption –living on less than $1.25 a day or in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution, as it might be.  Or maybe you’d go further and suggest that poverty was multifaceted, and only a range of indicators (perhaps as many as 169) could really capture what it was to be satiated or deprived.

Charles Kenny
March 23, 2015

Labor Pains: Birth and Civil Registration in Indonesia

Rural Lombok seems a million miles from traffic-jammed Jakarta.  It’s also a considerable distance to the nearest town where marriages and births can be registered.  And this isn’t only a problem in Lombok. UNICEF estimates around 30% of Indonesian under-5s are unregistered (around 8m children), the 7th highest proportion of any nation. Without birth certificates these little ones essentially do not legally exist.  I was in Lombok recently to see how Indonesia is trying to address this problem.

Alan Gelb
March 20, 2015

Telling the Story of MCC’s Compacts in a New Way

Now that MCC has completed 18 compacts worth over $6 billion, many stakeholders are increasingly anxious to understand more about what these investments have actually achieved.  After all, a focus on results is a key component of MCC’s core model, and the agency is known for pushing the envelope in this area.  MCC’s rigorous ex-post evaluations will be the critical piece that tells the story about development impact, but the results of these studies aren’t usually available

Sarah Rose

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