We use comparable, survey-based literacy tests for repeated cross-sections of men and women born between 1950 and 2000 to study education outcomes across cohorts in 87 countries. We find that education quality, defined as literacy conditional on completing five years of schooling, stagnated or decli...

The UK has historically prioritised poverty reduction in its aid spending, focusing finance where it is most needed. In this note, we assess the poverty focus of the UK’s bilateral official development assistance (ODA) over the past decade and compare this to other major donors. To do so, we examine...

Foreign aid donors and international organizations supporting education in developing countries have increasingly coalesced around a policy agenda prioritizing foundational learning, measured by test scores in primary school, based on a diagnosis of deficient school quality, and a growing body of em...

A central commitment of action on climate is the promise of “developed countries” to jointly mobilize $100 billion of climate finance per year by 2020 (and through to 2025), formalised at the UN climate change conference in 2010 (COP16). Five years later, the Paris Agreement reaffirmed this commitme...

The Commitment to Development Index (CDI) ranks 40 of the world’s most powerful countries on policies that affect more than five billion people living in poorer nations. In this brief, we summarize the findings from the 2021 edition of the CDI.

How did children learn while schools were closed during 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic? In this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of live tutoring calls from teachers, using a randomized controlled trial with 4,399 primary school students in Sierra Leone.

India lacks an authoritative estimate of the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic. We report excess mortality estimates from three different data sources from the pandemic’s start through June 2021. Estimating COVID-deaths with statistical confidence may prove elusive. But all estimates suggest tha...