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Blog Post
April 05, 2024
As the Center for Global Development’s inaugural Evidence in Policy Fellow, I just finished an extended engagement to help increase data and evidence use in the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance. While at State, I spent much of my time leading and participating in the work of the inter...
Blog Post
March 29, 2024
The US foreign assistance data for FY 2022 is nearly complete, except for some missing Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and Transportation data, and the data reveals some interesting trends. First, FY 2022 did not break the historical record of total obligations, but it came closer than any...
Blog Post
November 13, 2023
The creation of a “forest carbon economy,” where countries reap the economic benefit of the emission reduction contributions of their forests, is increasingly seen as an important source of income for countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific. Brazil’s President Lula is promoting the cre...
Blog Post
October 11, 2023
Budget support offers direct financing to a country’s treasury to create more “fiscal space” for public programs. It has constituted some 14 percent of ODA on average, increasing to over 20 percent in times of crisis. No aid modality is more controversial. Critics argue that, without earmarking fund...
Blog Post
January 19, 2023
Kenya has become a poster child for digitally driven development. Known as “Silicon Savannah,” the country has a multi-billion-dollar tech industry that routinely produces startups. Among its most prominent successes is M-Pesa. Launched in 2007, the mobile wallet service revolutionized how Kenyans t...
Blog Post
August 25, 2022
The Office of Foreign Assistance performs three core functions. First, it coordinates the formulation of future USAID and State Department foreign assistance budget requests—a process that begins two years before the start of a fiscal year. Second, it manages the execution of the current fiscal year...