A CGD blog. The private sector should be engaged with the World Bank Group. But this necessary and important relationship needs guardrails and these are being tested by a closer relationship between firms and World Bank leadership, as well as reforms to bring the Bank Group’s private and public sector arms closer together.

An article for In Development. Lower income countries need a new path to rapid growth. Higher income countries need workers. It’s a match made in heaven. Part- subject of an Effective Altruism Forum discussion.

A CGD Policy Paper. The IFC has the potential to be a macroeconomically significant player in the world’s poorest countries that most need a more vibrant private sector. Sadly, however, it provides very little finance to firms in those countries. The IDA Private Sector Window was designed to help that problem by subsidizing both IFC…

A CGD blog. We need an honest reckoning: about what is affordable, about where it makes more sense for the public sector to directly invest, about more realistic ways to spark structural transformation in the poorest countries-and about the role of development finance institutions.

A CGD blog with Eeshani Kandpal et al. In October 2025, we published a blog documenting an emerging but as yet incomplete picture: cholera deaths were on the rise across several sub-Saharan African countries as US aid for water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) contracts were cancelled across the continent. Angola, the Democratic Republic …

A CGD blog with Justin Sandefur. We now have full fiscal year 2025 (FY2025) data for sectoral- and country-level spending administered by USAID (from October 1, 2024, to September 3, 2025). The data cover the last three months of the Biden administration and the first nine months of the Trump administration. Compared to FY2024, the…

A CGD blog. The shuttering of USAID last year dramatically reduced the administration’s capacity to manage the foreign assistance awards process-particularly to issue new awards. Based on our best estimates, using last summer’s personnel numbers, this left each remaining contracting officer in charge of hundred…

A CGD blog. A recent Washington Post editorial reports some good news about sub-Saharan Africa: the regional economy grew by an estimated 4.1 percent in 2025. The editorial argues that this demonstrates that while the “abrupt change” made to US foreign assistance last year was “messy,” it “forced governments to…

A CGD blog with Eeshani Kandpal. The World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings arrive at a moment of increasing global disorder. Both the Bank and the IMF have an important role in helping client countries deal with the associated crises. But the World Bank could play that role far better without the distractions of a…