This week, public health advocates gather in London to mark the 20th anniversary of the global safe motherhood initiative, launched in 1987 to reduce the number of mothers who die or suffer injury giving birth. Despite the advocates' work, the initiative has yet to gain the political traction needed...

This paper analyzes the use of incentives (money, food and other material goods) for patients and healthcare providers to improve tuberculosis detection and treatment. It finds that although managing the distribution of money and food can be complicated, performance-based incentives do work. It ends...

USAID launched a project in 1995 to deliver basic health services in Haiti. The project began by reimbursing NGOs for their expenditures, but evolved to include payments based partly on performance targets. The result: marked improvements in health, particularly in immunization coverage and attende...

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs are one way to create incentives for poor people to use preventive healthcare services. Evaluations show that CCT programs work, and their use is spreading rapidly throughout the developing world. This paper analyzes key features of CCT programs and offers pr...

Nicaragua was one of the first low-income countries to try a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. Under the program, poor families are paid for keeping their children in school and visiting preventive healthcare providers. Healthcare providers are paid based on their performance against predet...

Diarrheal diseases kill two million children a year in poor countries. Vaccination, oral rehydration therapy, breastfeeding, and micronutrient supplementation have been effective in saving lives but the continuing toll suggests that further investments are needed. In this CGD working paper, non-resi...

This paper examines IMF projections of donor aid to low-income countries and whether these projections changed after world leaders pledged at the 2005 Gleneagles G8 summit to double aid to Africa by 2010. The authors find that IMF projections since the post-Gleneagles Summit have shown little change...