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Blog Post
December 20, 2021
As the year draws to a close, the temptation to claim wisdom from adversity and experience becomes irresistible. We did it last year, by exploring what we learnt while the world burned around us. 2021 was perhaps a marginal improvement: not quite the best of times, but not quite the worst of times, ...
Blog Post
October 29, 2021
The UK government has announced that it anticipates a return to spending 0.7 percent of gross national income (GNI) on official development assistance (ODA) in three years’ time. It is confident enough in this that the just-published Spending Review, which sets departmental budgets up to the 2024/25...
Blog Post
September 27, 2021
Changing organizational culture to embrace evidence and its use in decision-making is a long, hard slog. Over the last decade, USAID has made progress in that journey and—in many ways—has outperformed many federal agencies on fulfilling certain evidence requirements. But room for improvement remains...
Blog Post
September 27, 2021
There are a plausible set of circumstances under which the UK’s status as a serious bilateral donor would be under existential threat. They would take the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) from having slightly more than £8 billion in 2019 over which it has full flexibility to spe...
Blog Post
August 05, 2021
The case against the cuts to the UK’s aid budget is well-rehearsed. We know they damage the UK’s contribution to its own priorities, that the stated aim to revivify the budget when “fiscal conditions allow” is barely coherent, and that it leaves a laundry list of good causes going wanting.
Blog Post
May 26, 2021
Since the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) began implementing the steep cuts to the UK’s aid budget imposed upon it by the Treasury, much of the immediate reaction has focused on the immense human cost of reducing aid during a global pandemic. What has not been clear, however, is ...