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81. From Principles to Practice: Strengthening Accountability for Gender Equality in International Development

Author:
Megan O'Donnell
Publication Date:
01-2020
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Center for Global Development (CGD)
Abstract:
Existing accountability mechanisms focused on global gender equality are largely retrospective in nature. Where mechanisms do probe at governments’ commitments to future progress, they often lack accompanying incentive structures (“carrots and sticks”) to encourage ambition. Countries re- port their progress implementing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Beijing Platform for Action, participate in annual Commission on the Status of Women sessions, and touch on gender equality as part of voluntary national review reporting for the Sustainable Development Goals. Although these processes, among others, provide an opportu- nity for country reflection and for civil society engagement, they do not mandate that governments establish and adhere to forward-looking, specific commitments detailing how they aim to promote gender equality. The absence of future commitments makes it difficult for civil society actors to hold governments to account according to well-defined metrics. At the same time, governments and women’s rights advo- cates worldwide are increasingly discussing and adopting “feminist foreign policies” and “gender-re- sponsive budgeting.” There is a need to clearly define with robust and transparent metrics what these terms mean and how to hold countries who claim to be “feminist” and “gender-responsive” account- able for ambitious progress, while also encouraging other countries to increasingly prioritize gender equality.
Topic:
Development, Gender Issues, Inequality, Feminism, and Equality
Political Geography:
Global Focus

82. Actually Navigating by Judgment: Towards a New Paradigm of Donor Accountability Where the Current System Doesn’t Work

Author:
Dan Hoing
Publication Date:
02-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Global Development (CGD)
Abstract:
This working paper explores how donors can move towards greater Navigation by Judgment, highlighting the actions people inside and outside aid agencies can work to make change— encouraging more Navigation by Judgment on the margin, starting today. It focuses principally on accepting the need for a very different way of measuring success and holding projects and personnel accountable, and when and why that might be a very good idea.
Topic:
Accountability, Transparency, Charity, and Donors
Political Geography:
Global Focus

83. Blueprint for a Market-Driven Value-Based Advance Commitment for Tuberculosis

Author:
Kalipso Chalkidou, Martina Garau, Rachel Silverman, and Adrian Towse
Publication Date:
02-2020
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Center for Global Development (CGD)
Abstract:
Innovation—delivering new drugs, diagnostics, and devices—is a critical tool in the global fight against disease and premature death. Yet despite the potential for innovation to improve health around the world, the pharmaceutical industry’s investments in research and development (R&D) generally neglect diseases of the poor in favour of more lucrative high-income markets. Responding to this R&D gap, donor “push” investments have helped advance an innovation agenda to serve low- and middle-income countries. Though these investments have helped accelerate market entry of several important innovations, other donor-push products have fizzled upon market entry due to unaffordable or non-cost-effective pricing, disappointing efficacy, lack of political will, or lower-than-anticipated country demand. And with many large middle-income countries (MICs) poised to soon transition from donor aid, the sustainability of the current donor-led model is in question. Tuberculosis (TB), an infectious disease primarily affecting the poor and vulnerable, ranks among the top 10 global causes of death. Current TB treatment cycles are long and toxic, causing some patients to discontinue treatment, develop acquired drug resistance, and risk spreading a drug-resistant pathogen to others. Drug-resistant strains are more difficult to treat, traditionally requiring long-duration toxic regimens and high-cost hospitalization (though recent innovations offer a shorter, more tolerable, and more affordable treatment). Despite years of global investment in TB control, modelling suggests that global goals for TB cannot be achieved without major technological breakthroughs. One particularly desirable innovation would be a short-course universal drug regimen (UDR)—equally capable of treating drug-sensitive and drug-resistant strains, with a two-month or shorter treatment duration. Donors, particularly the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), have funded substantial early-stage R&D to source new treatment compounds that could contribute to a UDR, but substantial additional investments in late-stage trials would be required to bring such a UDR to market.
Topic:
Health Care Policy, Drugs, Medicine, and Pharmaceuticals
Political Geography:
Global Focus

84. Managing Better: What All of Us Can Do to Encourage Aid Success

Author:
Dan Hoing
Publication Date:
02-2020
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Center for Global Development (CGD)
Abstract:
Management by way of top-down controls and targets sometimes gets in the way of aid donors’ aims, undermining project success. These unhelpful controls often stem from a need to account for performance; legislatures or executive boards induce agencies to exercise tight process controls and orient projects towards what is measurable and reportable. My 2018 book, Navigation by Judgment, presents quantitative empirics from a database of 14,000 projects and qualitative evidence from eight case studies in support of this claim. I wrote the book in part because I imagined it would be useful to show aid agencies and authorizers empirics that demonstrated the problem—that the first step to change was recognition. But after talking about my book at aid agencies and authorizers, I am confident that while my 2018 diagnosis was right, my theory of change was all wrong.
Topic:
Leadership, Business, Accountability, Transparency, and Management
Political Geography:
Global Focus

85. Who Are the World’s Poor? A New Profile of Global Multidimensional Poverty

Author:
Gisela Robles Aguilar and Andy Sumner
Publication Date:
01-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Global Development (CGD)
Abstract:
Who are the world’s poor? This paper presents a new global profile of multidimensional poverty using three specifications of multidimensional poverty. The paper draws comparisons with the global monetary poverty profile and with the new World Bank measure of combined monetary and non-monetary poverty; discusses how global poverty differs by specification, the extent of multidimensionality, and presents a set of estimates of the disaggregated characteristics of global multidimensional poverty in 2015. We find the following: (i) at an aggregate level, the overall characteristics of global multidimensional poverty are similar to those of global monetary poverty at $1.90 per day; (ii) at a disaggregated level, we find that poverty in rural areas tends to be characterized by overlapping deprivations in education and access to decent infrastructure (water, sanitation, electricity, and housing) and counterintuitively, given the proximity, in principle, to better health care and economic opportunities, it is child mortality and malnutrition that is more frequently observed within urban poverty; and (iii) the extent of the multidimensionality of poverty differs substantially by region; moreover, some deprivations frequently overlap while others do not.
Topic:
Poverty, World Bank, Inequality, and Rural
Political Geography:
Global Focus

86. Gendered Language

Author:
Pamela Jakiela and Owen Ozier
Publication Date:
01-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Global Development (CGD)
Abstract:
Languages use different systems for classifying nouns. Gender languages assign nouns to distinct sex-based categories, masculine and feminine. We construct a new data set, documenting the presence or absence of grammatical gender in more than 4,000 languages which together account for more than 99 percent of the world’s population. We find a robust negative cross-country relationship between prevalence of gender languages and women’s labor force participation and educational attainment. We replicate these associations in four countries in sub-Saharan Africa and in India, showing that educational attainment and female labor force participation are lower among those whose native languages use grammatical gender.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Language, Masculinity, and Femininity
Political Geography:
Global Focus

87. Governing Big Tech’s Pursuit of the “Next Billion Users”

Author:
Michael Pisa and John Polcari
Publication Date:
02-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Global Development (CGD)
Abstract:
en years ago, only 6 percent of the population in low-income and lower-middle-income countries had access to the internet. Today, nearly one in every three people there does. The rapid expansion of internet access across the globe is a welcome development, but it raises new policy challenges. And while there is broad agreement in the development community on the importance of getting digital policy “right,” too little attention has been paid to how policymakers in the developing world can best engage with the companies who dominate the digital landscape. As governments reassess their relationship with these companies, an increasing number are enacting policies that raise barriers to the cross-border flow of data and put the largely global and open nature of the internet at risk. In this paper, we review how internet use has evolved in the developing world over the last decade, with a focus on initiatives by big tech companies to reach the “Next Billion Users.” We then examine how concerns about data privacy, disinformation, and market concentration have manifested in lower-income countries and how policymakers have begun to respond. We close by considering ways the development community can support policymakers seeking to maximize the benefits of an open internet while minimizing its risks.
Topic:
Science and Technology, Governance, Inequality, Privacy, Internet, and Emerging Technology
Political Geography:
Global Focus

88. The Two Hundred Billion Dollar Question: How to Get the Biggest Impact from the 2019 Replenishments

Author:
Andrew Rogerson and Owen Barder
Publication Date:
02-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Global Development (CGD)
Abstract:
n 2019/2020 donor governments are anticipated to pledge up to $170 billion to various multilateral organisations as part of their replenishment cycles. In the past, these large replenishments have been approached piecemeal and characterised by path dependency, which arguably has led to underperformance of the multilateral system as a whole. This unusual bunching of replenishments of some of the largest organisations in 2019 provides an opportunity to think more coherently about multilateral funding and to address key systemic problems, such as overlapping mandates and under-funding of some parts of the system. In this paper we recognise that it is unlikely that donors will take a formal, system-wide approach to the replenishments, but instead provide three suggestions that could nudge donors toward better coordinating the effect of their decisions. These are (1) multilaterals should be invited to set out in advance, and in a common format, their “offer” on a number of key issues, (2) donors should increase the envelope for core multilateral funding by diverting money away from earmarked funds, and (3) donors should provide a confidential forecast of their likely replenishments to a trusted intermediary, so that the “business as usual” baseline scenario is known.
Topic:
International Cooperation, Multilateral Relations, and Multilateralism
Political Geography:
Global Focus

89. Cohesive Institutions and Political Violence

Author:
Thiemo Fetzer and Stephan Kyburz
Publication Date:
02-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Global Development (CGD)
Abstract:
Can institutionalized transfers of resource rents be a source of civil conflict? Are cohesive institutions better at managing conflicts over distribution? We exploit exogenous variation in revenue disbursements to local governments and use new data on local democratic institutions in Nigeria to answer these questions. There is a strong link between rents and conflict far away from the location of the resource. Conflict over distribution is highly organized, involving political militias, and concentrated in the extent to which local governments are non-cohesive. Democratically elected local governments significantly weaken the causal link between rents and political violence. Elections produce more cohesive institutions, and vastly limit the extent to which distributional conflict between groups breaks out following shocks to the rents. Throughout, we confirm these findings using individual level survey data.
Topic:
Political Violence, Violence, Institutions, and Human Resources
Political Geography:
Global Focus

90. Women and the Future of Work: Fix the Present

Author:
Charles Kenny
Publication Date:
02-2019
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Global Development (CGD)
Abstract:
There is a lot we don’t know about what automation will mean for jobs in the future, including its impact (if any) on gender inequality. This note reviews evidence and forecasts on that question and makes four main points: Past automation has been (broadly) positive for women’s average quality of life, economic empowerment, and equality. Forecasts of the gendered impact of automation and AI going forward based on the current distribution of employment suggest considerable uncertainty and a gender inequality of impact that is marginal compared to the potential impact overall. The bigger risk—and/or opportunity—is likely to be in the combined impact of automation, policy, and social norms in changing the type of work that is seen as male or female. Minimizing any potential aggravating impact of automation and AI on inequalities in economic power in the future can best be achieved by maximizing economic equality today.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Labor Issues, Employment, Inequality, and Feminism
Political Geography:
Global Focus