Charles Kenny

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 damaging internal re…

A CGD blog. The World Bank has a new report out, Industrial Policy for Development, designed not least to be an update and re-evaluation of the 1993 World Bank East Asian Miracle report that confirmed the institution’s broad stance against industrial strategy at that time. The preface of the new version, writt….

A CGD Policy Paper. The model of manufacturing export-led growth followed by a number of countries in East Asia and beyond is becoming ever more complex to emulate. But new pathways to rapid growth for developing countries are emerging. Higher-income countries are seeing rapidly declining working-age populations, creating an increased demand for immigrants. Emigration is already a significant source of household income and human capital investment, and remittances are on a similar scale to manufactured export revenues for many countries. But for emigration to be a key element of a growth strategy requires harnessing migration for structural transformation, involving a focus on emigration to countries that can provide the needed skills, investment and trade opportunities to accomplish that. Subject of an Economist column.

A CGD blog. Even as the strategy of using manufactured exports to kickstart rapid growth is showing its age, a strategy focused on the movement of people rather than goods is coming into its own. Emigration as a growth strategy could help ensure continued growth and convergence through the twenty-first century….

A CGD Note. This note considers how the G20 could support more rapid growth in low-income countries (LICs)—countries with a GNI per capita below $1,145 (1.5 percent of the US level, or 9 percent of China’s). G20 countries have considerable self-interested as well as humanitarian reasons to focus their attention on lifting LICs out of national poverty and toward self-sustaining growth. They also collectively dominate most of the international flows and institutions that could help speed LIC progress to middle-income status from trade through migration, aid, and finance as well as technology development, global regulation and standards setting.