It’s clear that development agencies will be faced with hard choices in the years to come. CGD’s 2022 Development Leaders Conference will bring together senior policymakers from official bilateral and multilateral development agencies and institutions to explore the way forward for development, dur...

Decision makers within governments, aid agencies, multilateral organizations, and NGOs have not yet fully harnessed the value of evidence for better public policies. To address this missed opportunity, we convened a virtual working group from 2020 to 2022, bringing together 40 policymakers and exper...

But to the extent the overall foreign assistance system is poorly managed to deliver, it is worth looking at who bears responsibility for those failures. The answer, surely, is the institutions implementing the programs—the ones who buy the goods and services ultimately purchased with US funding. It...

In the UK’s newly released international development strategy, the government commits to upping bilateral finance to 75 percent of the FCDO’s total aid spend by 2025. Here, we look at what this means for budgets, and for the UK’s international role.

In the international development community, “country ownership” is considered a good thing, while criticisims of foreign aid are based on the idea that this is the problem. But only about a third of assistance is actually managed by those it is intended to help.

The UK’s Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicts that Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s famous two-test decision rule for increasing the UK’s aid budget back to 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income (GNI) is expected to be met next year. If that holds true, it means that the UK has a little less than ...

This blog post is based in part on a presentation delivered by Nancy Birdsall on March 19th, 2022 as part of the MIT Seminar XXI program, hosted by Kenneth Oye.