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Blog Post
August 03, 2023
On August 1, 2023, the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken launched the new Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy at the Acheson Auditorium in the State Department. Reorganizing government is unglamorous and rife with political hazards, but it has the potential to build a faster and better...
Blog Post
August 02, 2023
The future of such spending in countries currently experiencing or at high risk of debt distress is particularly troubling. A country is in debt distress when its ability to service domestic and external debt is impaired. This blog post delves into these issues based on more recent health spending a...
Blog Post
August 01, 2023
There’s a lot out there on how to improve educational outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. On the one hand, one may be tempted to lean into Finnish education scholar Pasi Sahlberg’s critique: “There are so many ‘facts’ now available about how to fix education, that anyone…can easily gravita...
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
July 27, 2023
Last week’s Senate Appropriations Committee markup revealed a vast gulf dividing the Capitol with respect to development and diplomacy funding for the coming fiscal year. The two chambers’ State and Foreign Operations spending bill toplines are more than $9 billion apart, with the House coming in at...
Blog Post
July 24, 2023
The UK has much to learn from its performance during the COVID-19 pandemic as well as its extensive involvement in the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak. Important questions linger as to why the UK—a world-leader in public health, and a country in possession of a flourishing biological research secto...
Blog Post
July 14, 2023
It’s rare to read an education report that doesn’t mention the learning crisis. As data on low learning levels have emerged in recent years, global education aid has swung its focus sharply toward improving test scores among primary school children. Of course, learning to read is a good thing in its...
Blog Post
July 11, 2023
There is no substitute for an effective teacher. Great teachers make an enormous difference in their students’ learning outcome s: in Ecuador, teachers who had higher quality interactions with their kindergartners improved their language and math skills. Just as importantly, great teachers help stud...
Blog Post
July 11, 2023
Even prior to the pandemic, the educational achievements of Bangladeshi children were below desired levels. The prolonged disengagement from learning during the pandemic raised concerns about learning gaps or even learning loss. But there are limited data on children’s learning status (foundational ...