Foreigners don’t receive much of America’s $35 billion annual foreign aid budget, at least not directly. Less than ten percent goes to local charities, companies, or governments in developing countries. The Biden administration, like past administrations, is trying to reform the system. But it needs...

Later this month world, leaders will gather at the United Nations headquarters in New York to discuss how to fix education. Even without big money or binding treaties, delegates can advance important reforms with clear, concrete ideas for action. Here are five big questions we think they need to ans...

You’ve seen the headline; indeed, you’ve probably seen it from us. According to widely cited estimates, about one in three children around the world are lead-poisoned, or about 800 million total. This means that they have blood-lead levels exceeding 5 micrograms per deciliter, a common reference lev...

Many cost-effective education programs suffer implementation failures and political resistance when scaled up in government systems. But not all.

Suppose you’re the minister of education in a lower-middle income country. It’s budget season. You have a meeting tomorrow with the finance minister to make your case for more education spending. You know she’s skeptical that money is really what’s holding your school system back. The World Bank say...

Has the Modi government accelerated or decelerated poverty reduction? It’s hard to know, as India has effectively stopped measuring poverty. A new World Bank paper using private-sector survey data finds the share of people living below $1.90 per day has been falling, but is higher than we thought, a...

A couple weeks ago, Uganda finally ended the longest national school closure on record, reopening its public schools after nearly two full years. One might anticipate a fairly dramatic decline in learning levels. Indeed, in a very non-scientific poll of my twitter followers, the dominant view was th...