A masterclass on cash transfers and how to use High Level Panels to influence Policy

March 10, 2017
One of the things I do in my day-a-week role at LSE is bring in guest lecturers from different aid and development organizations to add a whiff of real life to the student diet of theory and academia. One of the best is Owen Barder, who recently delivered a mesmerizing talk on cash transfers and the theory of change used
Read more >>

Payment by Results hasn’t produced much in the way of results, but aid donors are doing it anyway. Why?

March 23, 2016
I recently attended (yet another) seminar on the future of aid, where we were all sworn to secrecy to allow everyone (academics, officials etc) to bare their bosoms with confidence. So I can’t quote anyone (even unattributed – this was ‘Chatham House plus’). But that’s OK, because I want to talk about Payment by Results, which was the subject for
Read more >>

Why is migration a Cinderella issue in Development?

July 11, 2012
Read more >>

What to do about Syria? How about declaring its oil and arms contracts illegitimate? Neat idea from CGD

March 20, 2012
Read more >>

An American thinktank in London – development BS (blue-sky) session with the new CGD Europe

October 10, 2011
Read more >>

Really CGD? Really? The perils of attack blogs.

March 25, 2011
Read more >>

Cash on Delivery – worth a try?

May 18, 2010
You’ve got to hand it to the policy entrepreneurs at the Center for Global Development – they sure know how to get new ideas onto the tables and into the minds of decision makers. One of their biggest and most interesting new(ish) ideas is ‘Cash on Delivery’ (CoD), and I’ve just been reading their new book on it. The concept’s
Read more >>

Cash on Delivery: a big new aid idea? Actually, the EC’s been doing it for years!

August 6, 2009
One of the more exciting proposals in the UK Conservative’s recent Green Paper on development (see previous post here) is the idea of making aid ‘Cash on Delivery’ (CoD). ‘We will commit to pay a certain amount to a recipient government for a specific measure of progress – for example £100 for every extra child who attends school, or for
Read more >>

I’ll see your trillion and raise you another one: how big a bailout does the developing world need?

March 5, 2009
Talk of mere billions is for wimps these days. I’ve just read two proposals for ‘big numbers’ on bailouts to help developing countries get through the global economic crisis, one from the World Bank’s chief economist, Justin Lin, and the other from Washington thinktank CGD’s Nancy Birdsall. Nancy’s paper,  entitled ‘How to Unlock the $1 Trillion’, reckons ‘as much as
Read more >>