Center for Global Development - Latest Blog posts

Turning the Beat Around on Foreign Assistance Reform: Two Events Shift Debate From Why to How

2008-07-03T10:28:12-04:00

Two former administrators of the U.S. Agency for International Development -- Peter McPherson and Brian Atwood -- said the U.S. government should give greater prominence to development and rewrite the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 in their testimony before the...

President Sarkozy's Compassion for the Poor and Hungry

2008-07-02T16:13:39-04:00

A report in the Financial Times by John Thornhill leads with a remarkable quote from French President Nicolas Sarkozy warning the EU that he would block a proposed World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement on agriculture that would reduce European production...

India Sees (Some Of) the Light on Solar Thermal Potential

2008-07-02T14:20:28-04:00

On Monday, one week in advance of the climate-themed G8 Summit in Japan, the Indian government released its first ever national climate change action plan. In line with previous statements by India and other developing countries, no specific emission targets...

On Zimbabwe: How Do the Worst Leaders Affect Development?

2008-07-01T10:40:16-04:00

One of the great underexplored areas in economic development research is rigorous investigation of how bad leaders affect development. A series of actions by Robert Mugabe's regime have coincided with an epic collapse of Zimbabwe's economy, erasing half a century...

Lord Stern Calls for New Conditionality -- On Climate and from Developing Countries this Time!

2008-06-30T18:30:22-04:00

Lord Nicholas Stern of Stern review fame delivered CGD's Richard H. Sabot Lecture last week. It was superb, as Joel Meister reports. Nick managed the trick of combining technical clarity on the economic issues -- economists can turn to his...

Lord Nicholas Stern Calls for Action on Climate and Development in Third Annual Sabot Lecture

2008-06-30T18:19:04-04:00

Last week the Center for Global Development hosted the third annual Richard H. Sabot Lecture to honor the memory of Dick Sabot, a development practitioner and scholar, and a founding member of CGD's board of directors (transcript available on Tuesday...

Arvind vs. Arvind on India's Growth Surge

2008-06-30T15:26:24-04:00

The Economist recently published a lively review of India's Turn: Understanding the Economic Transformation, by Arvind Subramanian, a senior fellow at CGD and the Peterson Institute. The clever headline of the review, Arvind vs. Arvind, refers to the slightly different...

Let them Eat: Tokyo Favors Subsidized Rice for Cattle Over World's Poor?

2008-06-25T17:23:30-04:00

A few weeks ago, our CGD Note, Unwanted Rice in Japan Can Solve the Rice Crisis -- If Washington and Tokyo Act, created quite a stir. Policy makers and the public could not believe that Japan was feeding rice to...

Congress Demands World Bank Reform as Condition for Clean Tech Fund Authorization

2008-06-23T17:08:59-04:00

The House Financial Services Committee will consider new legislation this week that would contribute $400 million in FY2009 to a multilateral Clean Technology Fund (CTF), administered by the World Bank, to promote low-carbon energy production in developing countries. Scheduled for...

Adding Value with AGRA

2008-06-23T16:15:33-04:00

The MCC recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). This MoU -- the fourth signed this year by the MCC -- should be applauded as the type of smart partnership...

The Final Cut: Smart Advocacy Reduces MCC Rescission to $58 Million

2008-06-23T14:18:19-04:00

The latest version of the FY08 supplemental bill passed by the House last week reduced the Senate-proposed rescission of the Millennium Challenge Account from $525 million to $58 million (see page 48). As we reported earlier, this "cut to the...

Japan Should Release Surplus Rice ahead of G8

2008-06-20T18:22:13-04:00

This posting is joint with Peter Timmer and Vijaya Ramachandran Over the past few weeks, rice consumers in Africa and other developing countries have watched anxiously as world prices have fallen steadily, at least in part due to our insistence...

Earth to America: The Price of Gasoline Isn't Too High, It's Too Low

2008-06-20T14:50:39-04:00

On Wednesday, President Bush joined presumptive Republican nominee John McCain in supporting the reversal of a long-standing ban on offshore oil drilling. Bush believes such action, along with exploitation of oil shale deposits and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife...

Kofi Annan's Unusual Approach to the Crisis in Zimbabwe

2008-06-18T13:46:19-04:00

In today's Financial Times, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan makes a strong case for collective action on the situation in Zimbabwe. Mr Annan argues that "if the government, which many claim to be the author of violence, cannot ensure a...

Operation Smart Power: The Non-Military Surge We Need

2008-06-16T13:42:07-04:00

The day after the launch of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network's New Day, New Way Proposal, Representatives Betty McCollum (D-MN), Christopher Shays (R-CT), John Tierney (D-MA) and Frank Wolf (R-VA) introduced a bipartisan resolution to elevate global development and foreign...

Rescinding Rescission

2008-06-16T09:22:04-04:00

As an update to our earlier blog on this issue, rumor has it the original $525 million rescission of FY08 funding to the MCC has been reduced in conference to around $60 million. We applaud the efforts by civil society...

HIV/AIDS Funding and Health Systems: How do AIDS Donors Interact With National Health Systems?

2008-06-12T13:00:00-04:00

A heated debate has emerged in the global health community over whether or not disease-specific funding, particularly the large sums of donor money for HIV/AIDS, is positively affecting health systems in developing countries (my colleagues Ruth Levine, Mead Over, and...

House Committee Tells U.S. Treasury to Heed Calls for Redesign of Clean Tech Fund

2008-06-09T16:39:30-04:00

Controversy over the World Bank's proposed design for a multibillion dollar Clean Technology Fund (CTF) reached a House subcommittee last week. When the hearing ended, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), the chairman of the subcommittee, voiced support for CGD senior fellow...

Viewers Respond to "A Funny Video about Foreign Assistance?"

2008-06-09T15:31:21-04:00

Last week, CGD launched a new video to help convey why the next president needs to give U.S. foreign assistance policy something akin to an extreme makeover. "Bring U.S. Foreign Assistance into the 21st Century" has since been watched on...

We Need a Metaphor for Health Systems. What About the Human Body?

2008-06-02T12:37:49-04:00

Creating a shared metaphor is a powerful way to make an abstract concept tractable. Just think about how the metaphor of "war" dominates and shapes so much of what we do in public health: the war on cancer, the fight...

Shining a Light on What Works: Aravind Eye Care System Wins Gates Award

2008-05-30T15:51:40-04:00

Congratulations to the Aravind Eye Care System for winning the Gates 2008 Global Health Award, a $1 million prize that is the largest of its kind given for international health. Presented at the Global Health Council's 35th Annual International Conference...

"AIDS Spending Harms Health Systems" -- Passionately Disputed but Hardly Refuted

2008-05-22T14:34:35-04:00

Roger England's article on "AIDS exceptionality" in the British Medical Journal argues that AIDS has received a larger share of total health spending than its contribution to the burden of disease would justify and that this large increase is having...

Administration Doesn't Object in SAP to MCA Cuts

2008-05-21T16:44:08-04:00

Yesterday I blogged about the hatchet taken to the MCA by Senator Gregg and others in the supplemental bill. I had hoped that the Administration would push back hard in its Statement of Administration Policy, but it did not. The...

Sacrificing the MCA to be Good Just Isn't Smart

2008-05-20T11:31:18-04:00

Today, the full Senate will in all likelihood pass a supplemental appropriations bill that includes two amendments introduced by Senator Gregg (R-NH) that cut long-term international development funding from the Millennium Challenge Account to pay for additional emergency disaster assistance...

Good Drugs are Hard to Come By

2008-05-19T17:56:56-04:00

It's hard to know what to make of the news about bad malaria drugs in Africa reported in the new study from the team at Africa Fighting Malaria. The team went around to private pharmacies in six African countries and...

PEPFAR Should Be Strengthened, Not Blocked

2008-05-14T17:59:03-04:00

The "hold" that seven U.S. Senators have placed on PEPFAR reauthorization by Congress (see Michael Gerson's column Moral Scales in the Senate in today's Washington Post and Josh Busby's related blog) literally threatens the lives of over a million people...

MCC and ERRs: Turning a Triple on Transparency into a Home Run

2008-05-13T15:29:18-04:00

This is a joint blog posting by Sheila Herrling and Amy Crone. A quick shout-out to the MCC on the launch of its new economic rate of return web feature! It shows how the MCC and its partner countries use...

Prevention Failure Redux: Unexpected Tradeoffs in HIV Testing, Prevention and Treatment

2008-05-12T11:28:13-04:00

Last Monday, CGD posted my working paper entitled, "Prevention Failure: The Ballooning Entitlement Burden of U.S. Global AIDS Treatment Spending and What to Do About It." In response, I've received a number of e-mail comments on various aspects of the...

"Pay for Prevention" and Other Innovative Ways to Reduce the Spread of Disease

2008-04-30T12:22:33-04:00

The front page of the weekend edition of the Financial Times reports a Tanzanian research proposal with the breathless fanfare usually reserved for a medical or scientific breakthrough. In fact, the FT is not announcing a new research finding, but...

AEI Takes on Demand Forecasting for Malaria

2008-04-24T11:39:25-04:00

In honor of World Malaria Day tomorrow, AEI research fellow Roger Bate has issued a new policy brief and related magazine feature decrying the state of global demand forecasting for artemisinin-based cominbation therapies (ACTs):WHO estimates often rely on 'need,' a...

Global Health Geometry

2008-04-23T11:20:00-04:00

The ongoing debate about "vertical" versus "horizontal" approaches to health swings like a pendulum. My colleague Ruth Levine has previously pointed out the rhetorical tendency towards polarizing this debate in favor of practical solutions for resource allocation to health systems;...

"Diagonal" Health Care: Clever Cartoons Hide the Benefits of Complementarity and the Costs of Unbalanced Provider Incentives

2008-04-22T12:30:30-04:00

A paper by Gorik Ooms of Médecins Sans Frontières Belgium and co-authors introduces a new metaphor to the discussion of policy towards developing country health systems: "diagonalization." This word adds a useful image to the still unresolved and increasingly sterile...

A New Lens on a Familiar Question: Did Organized Family Planning Efforts Do More Harm Than Good?

2008-04-21T16:32:44-04:00

*This blog was co-authored by Barbara Seligman, consultant to CGD In his recently released book, Fatal Misconceptions: The Struggle to Control World Population, Matthew Connelly, an associate professor of history at Columbia, tells a cautionary tale about the arrogance that...

What Happened to Women and Children First?

2008-04-18T16:11:33-04:00

The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood is hosting an event in Washington DC: The "Stories of Mothers Lost" includes an exhibit that displays a series of artistic fabric panels representing women in 19 countries around the world. The panels...

The Global Disease Derby

2008-04-11T18:07:30-04:00

"Malaria is a winning horse" - the one on which you should be hedging all your bets for a great quick win in the world of global disease racing. AIDS - it takes too long and there is no cure...

New Online Health Systems Database

2008-04-11T08:56:57-04:00

Abt Associates' Health Systems 20/20 project has just launched a great new resource:The Health Systems Database is an easy-to-use web-based tool that compiles and analyzes country data, allowing users to quickly assess the performance of a country's health system. The...

Missing the One-Armed Man

2008-04-02T12:30:16-04:00

Yes, it's true, I'd like to be able to vacation in Vegas. But that doesn't seem like a good blog entry for CGD, so I thought I'd write about something else instead. Though if anyone's looking for a blackjack buddy...

Here's your chance to become a fellow in Liberia!

2008-03-27T19:39:38-04:00

We have begun recruiting for the next round of Liberia fellows who will head out to Monrovia this summer! Are you a young professional with a Masters degree (e.g., an MBA, MPP, MPH, or a law degree) and one year...

Stand Up and Be Counted

2008-03-21T09:40:59-04:00

March 21st: Today's a holiday here, not because it's good Friday, but because it's census day. Imagine how excited folks in the US would be if they got a day off for this! The day, though, underscores the importance of...

Warmth, Commitment, and Questions in El Salvador

2008-03-10T11:02:01-04:00

I am here in El Salvador for the MCA Monitor Reports from the Field series. The first thing that hits upon arrival in San Salvador is the warmth – in the climate, from the people, and through the services that...

Standing with Liberia's First Female President

2008-03-07T11:49:12-05:00

[This article was published in the Winter ‘07-‘08 Alumnae Magazine for Georgetown Visitation, an all girls’ college preparatory school in Washington, D.C. It is posted here in celebration of International Women’s Day, March 8.] Once upon a time, I...

MCC Signs Largest Compact to Date ($698m) with Tanzania

2008-02-25T12:06:13-05:00

Last weekend, as part of his whirlwind tour of five African countries in six days, President Bush signed the Tanzania Compact – MCC’s 16th and largest to date. Although concerns about possible expansion of U.S. military presence in Africa overshadowed...

Conor Hartman Quoted in the Media (Again)!

2008-02-22T12:14:54-05:00

In this blog posted by Kevin Corke, a NBC News White House Correspondent, Conor Hartman speaks about optimism and progress in Liberia....

Scott Family Fellow Conor Hartman Featured in the Media

2008-02-22T12:03:42-05:00

Conor Hartman, a Scott Family Fellow working in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, was featured in this article from America.gov, on Feb. 21, 2008. American Volunteer Helps Liberians Realize a Better Life Development specialist Conor Hartman praises the country’s leadership...

Getting Ready for Bush

2008-02-19T12:03:40-05:00

On Thursday, President Bush will be stopping in Liberia for 5 hours to meet with President Sirleaf. Monrovia’s hotels are awash with American security and presidential advance teams. Roads that have sorely been in the need of repair are suddenly...

Peacebuilding Fund Supports Liberia at US$15 million

2008-02-11T10:27:10-05:00

In mid-December, the UN Peace Building Fund (PBF) awarded US$15 million to Liberia for short-term, catalytic peacebuilding efforts over the next 18 months based on Liberia’s Peace Building Priority Plan, developed together by the Government and UN. Liberia is the...

Introduction and Inauguration of “Liberia in Pictures”

2008-02-07T12:00:46-05:00

My position in the Scott Family Liberia Fellows program is Special Advisor and Assistant to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. The position is dynamic and offers great insight into the workings of a Foreign Ministry that is looking to...

A Jack that Portends a Full House

2008-02-06T13:53:20-05:00

Last weekend, I decided to make good on a New Year’s resolution to explore this country – in 6 months of living here, I still have not slept outside of Monrovia (work always calls, unless I make an effort)....

Observations from the Brussels Airport

2008-02-06T13:05:28-05:00

Hey, there. Dan Hymowitz, one of the new fellows here. I've been in Liberia for two weeks now. So far it's been an incredible experience and obviously there are lots of interesting things to report. But I'll use my first...

Presidential Recognition

2008-02-06T11:44:26-05:00

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf delivered her annual message to the National Legislature on January 28th to report on the state of the nation. After reviewing accomplishments under the four pillars of the interim Poverty Reduction Strategy (iPRS) – Peace...

Beginnings of Regional Unity through Soccer?

2008-02-01T16:29:26-05:00

Just after the Guinean soccer team defeated Morocco in an early round of the Africa Cup of Nations (the equivalent of the soccer World Cup for Africa) dozens of young men ran, shouting and singing, through the capital’s central streets...

MCC approves $23 million Threshold Program with Niger

2008-01-31T09:05:21-05:00

MCC has announced a three-year, $23 million program to focus on corruption and strengthen demand for girls’ education in Niger. It is the 19th approved Threshold Program for the MCC and brings the total committed funding to approximately $419 million....

CEO Danilovich Enters the Blogosphere

2008-01-24T17:55:03-05:00

Yesterday, the MCC launched its CEO into the blogosphere with a new communications tool -- the CEO Blog. Although not the first of its kind for a U.S. government agency -- EPA, DHS, State Department, and the Library of Congress...

Scott Family Fellow Norris Tweah Featured in the Media

2008-01-10T11:14:06-05:00

This article features Scott Family Fellow Norris Tweah. It was posted on Western Michigan News, January 9, 2008: WMU grad awarded fellowship to assist Liberians Jan. 9, 2008 KALAMAZOO--A recent Western Michigan University graduate is the recipient of a $35,000...

International Housing Coalition Argues for New MCC ERR Analysis

2008-01-01T15:48:46-05:00

The International Housing Coalition published a new report that assesses how the Millennium Challenge Corporation uses rates of return analyses to assess project funding proposals from qualifying countries, evaluates the usefulness of this approach in estimating economic growth and poverty...

Final FY08 Omnibus Keeps MCA at $1.54 Billion

2007-12-19T21:44:01-05:00

Last night, the Senate approved the FY08 Omnibus spending bill with $34.31 billion in base funding for the International Affairs budget. The House-approved $1.54 billion for the Millennium Challenge Account stayed in tact through the Senate approval process....

Latest FY08 Omnibus Spending Bill Gives MCA $1.54 Billion

2007-12-17T20:53:32-05:00

Today we got our first look at the results of Senate and House Appropriators' weekend wrestling with the FY08 Omnibus Appropriations bill, comprising the remaining 11 appropriations bills, including State-Foreign Operations. In an effort to meet the president’s demand that...

MCC Board Selects (and Quietly De-Selects) FY08 Countries

2007-12-13T11:23:23-05:00

Yesterday, the Millennium Challenge Corporation Board of Directors decided which countries to add to -- and if you look closely, which countries to withdraw from -- the list of those eligible for funding. For Compact program eligibility, the Board chose...

MCC Signs $36m Threshold Program with Peru

2007-12-10T11:28:23-05:00

On November 30, the MCC signed a $35.6 million Threshold Program with Peru to combat corruption and improve immunization. Peru becomes the 18th country to sign a Threshold Program with the MCC, bringing the total amount committed to the Program...

Liberia Fellows Application Period Now Closed

2007-11-14T15:12:41-05:00

The period to submit applications for the Liberia Fellows or Liberian Law Fellows program has now ended. Thanks to everyone who applied! We received a total of 118 applications—29 for the Law fellows and 89 for the Liberia fellows program!...