Publications

This brief summarizes three years of research under the project, “Rethinking Humanitarian Reform,” led by Jeremy Konyndyk, Patrick Saez, and Rose Worden, and funded by the aid departments of the United Kingdom and Australia. The project aimed to understand the incentives behind the humanitarian system and shift them to better prioritize the needs of affected populations. Read more at https://www.cgdev.org/project/rethinking-reform-toward-demand-driven-humanitarian-action.

The rapid increase in the number of countries that have enacted data privacy regimes over the last decade promises greater protection of personal data for a growing share of the world’s inhabitants. But meaningful questions remain about the effectiveness of these regimes in practice, alongside concerns that poor implementation of data privacy laws could weaken the protection provided and stifle innovation that supports economic growth and development. Here are the key takeaways from a roundtable discussion hosted by CGD on the issue.

 A Decision Tree for Digital Financial Inclusion Policymaking is a comprehensive analytical framework to diagnose the factors significantly impeding improvements in digital financial inclusion in specific country settings. The methodology has been published as a CGD working paper and applied to five case studies: Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Pakistan.

The Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA) measures and compares providers of official development assistance (ODA) on quantitative indicators that matter most to development effectiveness and quality. It aims to encourage improvements to the quality of ODA by highlighting and assessing providers’ performance.

In this policy brief, we summarize the findings of a CGD working paper, The Gendered Dimensions of Social Protection in the COVID-19 Context. We explore the role of social protection, with an emphasis on social assistance policies and programs, in addressing increasing poverty, food insecurity, unpaid care work, and gender-based violence—all exacerbated by the onset of the crisis and associated containment measures. We document these trends and how they disproportionately impact women and girls, as well as the extent to which governments and donors are integrating a gender lens into their social protection efforts and make recommendations to ensure that future efforts effectively reach and benefit women and girls.

Always considering gender is smart foreign policy. Globally, gender plays a significant role in determining the barriers people face and the opportunities they have available to them—including their access to economic opportunities and leadership positions, or protection from violence or climate change impacts. When foreign policy ignores the gendered nature of these barriers and opportunities, policy decisions risk exacerbating inequality, slowing growth, and undermining the durability of peace agreements, among other detriments

The Biden administration can restore the US government’s reputation as a global leader on gender equality—and take it to the next level through employing an intersectional lens.

As much as current US policy has sought to characterize China’s lending program in blunt and strictly negative terms, the reality is mixed.