The World Bank is in the most visible position as it works on its evolution roadmap. But change is needed across the MDB system to enable these institutions to play a more effective and a much bigger role in helping the world meet these challenges. Together they hold about $500 billion in shareholde...

The assignment is clear. During this year’s Annual Meetings of the IMF and World Bank, shareholders instructed the World Bank to develop a work program for its own evolution (“to identify gaps in the Bank’s current institutional and operational framework…”) by the end of the year. Secretary Yellen l...

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...

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...

This note summarizes two years of research under the Center for Global Development project “Governing Data for Development,” led by Michael Pisa and Ugonma Nwankwo along with project co-chairs Pam Dixon and Benno Ndulu. The project was funded by the Hewlett Foundation and guided by a ...

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...

The world is now more than a year into the second global crisis of the century. This time, the IMF has stepped up. But what about the multilateral development banks? One of their central roles is to expand the fiscal space of middle- and low-income countries (MICs and LICs) for development spending,...