How newspapers and media outlets cover a topic can affect what people believe and what they do. Research shows that news coverage affects people’s actions across many aspects of their lives, from voting to fertility. In education, violence in schools is a crucial challenge: it is common, it is insuf...

Over the years, US lawmakers of many stripes have embraced the value proposition of foreign assistance. While their precise motivations have varied, ensuring US international aid is transparent, accountable, and effective has been vital to this long-running bipartisan support.

Schools play many roles in society, but most people believe that they should at least help children to master fundamental skills—like literacy and numeracy—and make sure that children are safe in their care. Unfortunately, far too often, children are neither safe, nor learning. Many children experie...

Once again the links come to from a precariously balanced laptop, perched on cramped knees on a bus, packed cheek-by-jowl with other commuters. It's not a set-up that inspires great chattiness. Nor does Sri Lanka's ongoing attempt to plumb depths of cricketing incompetence never before plumbed, or—s...

The creation of a “forest carbon economy,” where countries reap the economic benefit of the emission reduction contributions of their forests, is increasingly seen as an important source of income for countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific. Brazil’s President Lula is promoting the cre...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused losses of lives and livelihoods on a scale that many of us had never seen in our lifetimes, shedding light on the ways that pandemics are a “neglected dimension” of global security. And yet, as we are already observing, proposals for increased, sustained support for surv...

The World Bank’s soft lending arm, IDA, will begin its 21st round of replenishment negotiations soon. One thing on the agenda will be the IDA Private Sector Window (PSW), which uses IDA resources to subsidize private sector investments primarily through the World Bank Group’s International Finance C...