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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
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
July 14, 2023
It’s rare to read an education report that doesn’t mention the learning crisis. As data on low learning levels have emerged in recent years, global education aid has swung its focus sharply toward improving test scores among primary school children. Of course, learning to read is a good thing in its...
Blog Post
July 03, 2023
The global debate around high-stakes exams is strongly influenced by research from high-income countries. That research emphasises who gets sorted into the “best” schools. An alternative perspective that hasn’t received enough attention takes exams as artificial bottlenecks that prevent many childre...
Blog Post
July 03, 2023
UNESCO tells us that only one in seven low- and middle-income countries knows how much learning has been lost due to COVID school closures. Where there has been no measurement, simulations of learning loss are beginning to take the place of empirical facts. Yet countries examine millions of kids eac...