The World Bank’s lending function is important and irreplaceable. But providing countries with an important source of financing and investing in evidence do not have​ to be in tension. The role of evaluation should shift from an assessment function to one in which evaluation is a central tool of pro...

With global challenges high on the international agenda and financing set to increase in the coming years, a big push on evidence, backed by dedicated resources, is essential. This note makes the case for a reinvigorated evidence agenda to boost the impact of financing for development and global pub...

The first section of this note examines the causes and consequences of Afghanistan’s financial crisis and lays out policy options the international community can support to enable urgent financial flows and restore the basic functioning of the Afghan financial system. The next section examines prosp...

USAID recently released a draft Local Capacity Development (LCD) Policy. While USAID routinely invests in interventions designed to strengthen local capacity, this is the first time the agency has attempted to articulate principles that will govern its approach and propose, in broad terms, the steps...

Tackling global challenges effectively needs donors to rethink how the resources and expertise of diverse governmental actors are brought together. Bilateral donor governance urgently needs a conductor to coordinate a whole-of-government development policy and an orchestra of actors for its implemen...

Countries provide aid for a variety of reasons, but if uncoordinated, the individual decisions of 30 OECD DAC donors and many more multilateral institutions can lead to wide and ineffective variations in how much aid countries receive.

The prime minister’s most influential advisor, Dominic Cummings, is a champion of “effective altruism”—the use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to maximize the good with a given unit of resources. With the UK government in the midst of a major “Integrated Review” of its foreign, dev...