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Blog Post
January 09, 2024
Child vaccination is one of the most powerful and cost-effective tools to save lives. But just how good is the data that we’re using to track progress on this life-saving intervention? In this piece, we examine trends in the quality of government-produced vaccination data. Our main message is that r...
Blog Post
October 17, 2023
There’s not a lot of low-hanging fruit in global development. On the issues that matter most, from preventing the next pandemic to expanding migration opportunities, and financing climate adaptation, even minor progress tends to require big financial commitments and often faces deep political resist...
Blog Post
July 30, 2023
In a new paper, we examine the connection between exposure to lead—a dangerous but prevalent neurotoxicant—and children’s learning outcomes. We find that lead poisoning alone could account for more than 20 percent of the learning gap between rich and poor countries. Given the comparative ease of, sa...
Blog Post
May 16, 2022
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...
Blog Post
March 30, 2018
While I think it's silly to argue we spend too much on girls' education, perhaps it's reasonable to ask whether a concern with gender equality and a cold hard look at recent data would lead anyone to put their marginal dollar into girls' schooling over, say, campaigning for gender quota...
Blog Post
June 05, 2017
Two recent books reveal an internal debate about the value of childcare and women's work at the Inter-American Development Bank. Impact evaluations show home visitation programs are cheaper and better for kids than center-based childcare. But a new volume argues the cost-benefit calculation may ...
Blog Post
April 25, 2017
A commission led by the UN's special envoy for education, Gordon Brown, is calling for a doubling of global aid for education, without any clear reform agenda to raise learning levels in the world's failing school systems. That might be ok: bad schools in poor countries still seem to produce...