Working Groups
Humanitarian and emergency assistance is overstretched and underfunded. Many people living in countries with weak or cash-strapped government services live with the daily risk of disaster. This working group is examining how vulnerable countries and frontline humanitarian agencies can make use of insurance and index-linked securities to provide funding to tackle natural disasters much more effectively. It brings together voices and perspectives from the public, private and academic sector to help develop a program on parametric insurance with a focus on fixing humanitarian and emergency financing.
Related Experts: Owen Barder, Theodore Talbot
The high level panel will seek to address these fundamental questions as part of an effort to provide a new policy blue print for multilateral development banks, both new and old. Starting with the basic elements of financing and governance first defined 70 years ago, the project will identify what is essential, what is adaptable, and what no longer serves a useful purpose in MDBs.
Related Experts: Nancy Birdsall, Scott Morris
Paying for global health programs on the basis of their outcomes has the potential to focus various actors on a single goal and make those investments more efficient and impactful. Yet in the face of institutional inertia, risk aversion, and operational challenges, few such projects have made the jump from theory to real-world implementation.
Related Experts: Amanda Glassman, Mead Over, Rachel Silverman, Sebastian Bauhoff , Yuna Sakuma
The Energy Access Targets Working Group will assess the current common definition of “modern energy access” and propose possible alternative targets. With at least a billion people worldwide living without electricity, and many millions more held back by blackouts and high costs, improving energy access is increasingly a top priority for governments, business leaders, and citizens across the developing world. With Power Africa, SE4All, and the inclusion of a universal energy access target in the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals, the international community is responding to these growing demands. It is thus imperative that modern energy targets and indicators are set in a meaningful and practical way.
Related Experts: Ben Leo, Jonah Busch, Scott Morris, Todd Moss, William Savedoff
The Unintended Consequences of Rich Countries’ Anti-Money Laundering Policies on Poor Countries Working Group examined how rich countries might rebalance their policies to continue to protect against money laundering and terrorism financing without hindering the ability of people from poor countries to conduct business and transfer money across borders. In 2014 migrants sent over $400 billion of remittances home through formal systems and at least an additional $130 billion through informal channels. Businesses in poor countries also engage in cross-border transactions whether it be to export goods or import key inputs. But banks in rich countries, under pressure from anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism enforcement efforts, are increasingly “de-banking” money transfer organizations, thereby raising costs or removing services for users, some of whom then turn to informal channels. This shift may have detrimental effects on poor people as well as on the security situation.
Related Experts: Alan Gelb, Ben Leo, Beth Schwanke, Gaiv Tata, Matt Collin, Vijaya Ramachandran
Related Experts: Frances Seymour, Jonah Busch, Michele de Nevers, William Savedoff
Increased financial inclusion—greater access by the poor to the use of payments, deposits, credits, insurance and risk-management services—can improve the opportunities and welfare of people living in poverty.
Related Experts: Alan Gelb, Ben Leo, Liliana Rojas-Suarez
In many large federal or decentralized countries, the majority of public spending on health is executed by state and district governments (see graph below). Improving health in these countries—and globally—depends on improving the sufficiency, efficiency, and effectiveness of health spending at the subnational level. The Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers for Health Working Group, a partnership of CGD and the Accountability Initiative in India, is tasked with identifying practices that improve health and increase the efficiency of subnational allocations.
Related Experts: Amanda Glassman, Anit Mukherjee , Victoria Fan
Transparency in government contracting has gained increasing international support over the past years. Some countries, including the Slovak Republic, Colombia and the United Kingdom, have begun publishing online the complete text of government contracts.
Publishing government contracts can bring many benefits: companies, especially new bidders, have a clearer idea of the goods and services they will bid to provide; governments benefit from increased competition among contractors and product quality; and civil society would have the opportunity to keep track on the value for the money invested and the service delivery.
Related Experts: Charles Kenny, William Savedoff
If you have $200 to spend on health in a developing country, would you vaccinate 10 children against deadly childhood diseases or provide AIDS treatment to one woman to prevent transmission of HIV to her unborn child? Policy makers routinely face such tough budgetary dilemmas with little expert guidance. The Priority-Setting Institutions for Global Health working group report provides practical means to assist priority-setting efforts in low- and middle-income countries.
Related Experts: Amanda Glassman
Pages
As more money is made available for the development and purchase of products that are needed to diagnose, prevent and treat leading causes of death and disability in developing countries, the need to improve demand forecasting comes into sharp relief. Shortcomings in demand forecasting increase the risks for suppliers, resulting in higher costs, supply shortages and concerns about the long-term viability of investing in R&D for health products that would benefit the developing world.
In 2011, the Center for Global Development launched the Future of IDA Working Group, an effort to bring together serious scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to think through specific options for World Bank management and shareholders to consider as the demand for IDA assistance was changing. Many countries, including some of IDA’s largest and best-performing clients, were and are preparing to graduate from needing IDA assistance.
Related Experts: Alan Gelb, Andy Sumner, Devesh Kapur, Enrique J. Rueda-Sabater, Nancy Birdsall, Owen Barder, Todd Moss, Vijaya Ramachandran
The working group was convened to produce recommendations for the fourth executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).
The report of the Working Group on Clinical Trials and Regulatory Pathways provides practical policy recommendations to help deliver better, safer, and cheaper medicine and treatment to the 1 billion people suffering from neglected diseases.
The central objective of the What Works Working Group was to document a series of programs in international health that were judged to be successful using a high standard of evidence.
The Commission on Weak States and U.S. National Security recognized that weak and failed states matter to U.S. national security, American values, and the prospects for global economic growth. The commission outlined a framework for action that seeks to mobilize key actors and instruments in U.S. foreign policy to the task of meeting the threat of weak states.
The Group assessed whether a mechanism to increase market-based incentives to purchase a future vaccine product could be designed, and how it might work in practice. The final report, Making Markets for Vaccines: Ideas into Action, laid the groundwork for a $1.5 billion pilot for a vaccine to prevent pneumococcal disease, which annually kills some 3 million children in developing countries.
The African Development Bank Working Group prepared recommendations to help put the AfDB back on the road to success, at a moment of leadership transition. Recommendations included advising the president to identify and focus on a few key priorities on which the bank has a strong comparative advantage, such as regional infrastructure. Final report: Building Africa's Development Bank: Six Recommendations for the AfDB and its Shareholders.
The Global Health Indicators Working Group assessed the utility of a range of available data to construct indicators of health policies; the primary purpose was to inform decisions about eligibility criteria by the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation. Final report: Measuring Commitment to Health (PDF).
The group developed practical recommendations to increase the quality and quantity of impact evaluations, with a focus on health and education. The final report, When Will We Ever Learn? Improving Lives through Impact Evaluation recommended the creation of an independent entity to coordinate and support high-quality impact evaluations. This led to the creation of the International Initiative on Impact Evaluation (3IE).