Can governments contract out school management at scale? In 2016 the Government of Punjab transferred management of over 4,000 failing primary schools to private operators. Schools remained free to students. Private operators received a government subsidy per enrolled student of less than half per-s...

The stakes are high for the African Development Fund (AfDF) as it kicks off its replenishment fundraising exercise this spring. Countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are still grappling with the health and economic fallout of the COVID-19 crisis, with over 30 million of their citizens pushed into po...

As the global financial community considers how to extend debt relief accompanied by IMF adjustment programs to vulnerable low-income countries, the issue of policy conditions for fiscal adjustment will inevitably arise. This paper considers the effectiveness of conditions related to domestic revenu...

Many stress the critical role of the private sector in filling yawning sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) infrastructure finance gaps, only widened by the pandemic. Our paper looks in detail at financially closed (construction-ready) transactions with private participation in SSA from 2007-2020. Despite the “...

This paper discusses three potential requirements for country platforms to facilitate effective delivery of GPGs. We propose that existing country platforms be repurposed to coordinate the contribution of domestic and external stakeholders to GPG delivery efforts at the country level. For this propo...

How should governments and donors engage with the growing private sector in education in developing countries? Enrolment in private schools now exceeds 50 percent at the primary level in many major urban centres across Africa and Asia. Whilst the majority of these schools are small and independently...

The pandemic and its economic impact have been a revealing test of the multilateral development bank (MDB) system and of individual MDBs. Although lending by the MDBs as a group rose significantly in 2020 (39 percent), this is much less than the rise in MDB lending in response to the Global Financia...