Policy-based guarantees (PBGs) have long been a multilateral development bank (MDB) instrument in search of a purpose. PBGs—a credit enhancement for sovereign market borrowing—have been around for decades but their uptake has been limited. In most instances, they have proven remarkably effective in ...

DFC has been the subject of a growing list of proposals from lawmakers that envision the agency tackling a wider range of challenges than initially envisioned. The agency may find ways to leverage this heightened interest. However, delivering on the bipartisan, foundational vision for DFC amid evolv...

The World Bank and other multilateral development banks are historically underutilized assets when it comes to USAID’s development objectives across a wide range of sectors and initiatives. We offer instead a set of recommendations that USAID could implement largely within its own purview, or with a...

At a time when governments seem able to agree on very little, the consensus around the Bank’s need to scale up its engagement on climate and other global public goods is striking. But “scaling up ambition” is vague, and there remains a great deal of work to do to pin down what it means in practice f...

On the heels of last year’s landmark $93 billion replenishment of the World Bank’s IDA—and with the international community preoccupied with responding to Ukraine—the replenishment of the African Development Fund cannot be an afterthought.

This week we welcome the release of a new CGD book: Relief Chief: A Manifesto for Saving Lives in Dire Times, by Mark Lowcock. A former UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator—and a current Distinguished Non-Resident Fellow at CDG—Mark gives us an inside ...

In a recent note, we asked whether IDA, the arm of the World Bank that provides concessional lending to the poorest countries, has the right approach for determining the balance between grants and loans which its recipients receive. We noted that IDA concessionality depends on the level of recipient...