By Samantha Custer, Elizabeth King, Tamar Manuelyan Atinc, Lindsay Read, Tanya Sethi

When data advocates promote evidence-based decision-making in education systems, they rarely specify who the intended users are, for what purpose, and what kinds of data are needed. The implicit assumption is: by everyone, for everything, and any data.

But since collecting, processing, and communicating data require substantial resources, it is prudent to assess whether data produced are indeed accessible and valuable to key decision-makers. Surprisingly little systematic research exists on the types of information education decision-makers in developing countries value most—and why.

In a new report, Toward data-driven education systems: Insights into using information to measure results and manage change, the Center for Universal Education at Brookings and AidData offer insights to those very questions. We analyze the results of two unique surveys that asked education policymakers in low- and middle-income countries about their use of data in decision-making. Survey participants included senior- and mid-level government officials, in-country staff of development partner organizations, and domestic civil society leaders, among others. (For more details on the surveys, see page 18 in the report.)

The report aims to help the global education community take stock of what information decision-makers actually use and offer practical recommendations to help those who fund and produce education data to be more responsive to what decision-makers want and need. We summarize the findings below:

Finding 1: Having enough information is seldom the decisive factor in making most education decisions; instead, decision-makers desire to have sufficient government capacity.

Enacting education policies, changing programs, and allocating resources are complex decisions that demand weighing multiple factors, such as having sufficient capacity and financial resources, having enough information, and having the support of the public. So where do data and information fall within a decision-maker’s cost-benefit analysis?

We found that information is not as important as technical capacity, financing, and political support. Some decisions, however, depend more on having sufficient data and information, such as creating or abolishing schools or grades, and testing students. One possible explanation could be that leaders feel they need strong justification (via an evidence base) for these decisions which could become easily politicized.

Finding 2: Education decision-makers use evidence to support the policymaking process, for both retrospective assessment and forward-looking activities

But while information may not be the most decisive factor in education decisions, its role is significant. We found that decision-makers in the education sector are more likely to use data and analysis as compared to other sectors (such as health and governance), including for forward-looking purposes, such as design and implementation of policies or programs, as well as retrospective assessments of past performance. As shown in Figure 2, most education sector decision-makers (over 70 percent) report using data or analysis fairly consistently throughout the policymaking process.

Finding 3: Education decision-makers most often use national statistics from domestic sources and program evaluation data from international sources.

Decision-makers overwhelmingly rely on national statistics from domestic sources and program evaluation data from international organizations. The high use of national statistics points to the salience of such data for each country, including, for example, dropout rates for primary school students by district or municipality, the number of schools providing secondary education in each village, or pupil-teacher ratios in urban vs. rural areas.

Finding 4: Education decision-makers consider administrative data and program evaluations most essential, and want more of the latter, signaling a gap between need and supply.

We asked leaders about their wish list—what types of information would they want more of? We found that those who allocate and manage resources place a premium on administrative data (e.g., number of schools, teachers, students) and government budget and expenditure data (e.g., school-level budgets, expenditure per student). Meanwhile, those working on personnel management need teacher performance data, whereas leaders tasked with overseeing instructional matters need program evaluation data and student-level assessment data. Given respondents’ wish lists, we identified four opportunities for data producers to respond to unmet demand: (1) program performance and evaluation data; (2) budget and expenditure data; (3) student-level assessment data; and (4) teacher performance data.

Finding 5: Education decision-makers value domestic data that reflect local context and point to policy actions, and improving the timeliness and accessibility of information will make it more helpful.

Having identified some of the gaps that exist in meeting the needs of education decision-makers, we asked what producers and funders of data should do better or differently to meet the data demands. Leaders said that data from both domestic and international sources were most helpful when they provide information that reflects the local context. They also viewed information from international sources as most helpful because it provides policy recommendations (43 percent) and is often accompanied by critical financial, material, or technical support (36 percent). Leaders viewed domestic data as helpful when it was available at the right level of aggregation, as well as timely, trustworthy, and insightful.

When asked what improvements producers could undertake to make data more valuable, respondents suggest improving the timeliness and accessibility, as well as improving data disaggregation, accuracy, and trustworthiness. The respondents requested data from the national government, in particular, to be more accessible and disaggregated.

Finding 6: Decision-makers strongly support strengthening their countries’ education management information system (EMIS) to bolster their education data ecosystem.

Beyond finding general areas of improvement for education data, we also asked respondents to rank a list of specific solutions. Respondents largely agreed on the seven solutions proposed, rating all of them as “extremely important”, on average. But of the seven solutions, the recommendation to strengthen the EMIS within the education ministry resonated with the highest number of respondents.

Moving from data generation to impact

The path from data generation to impact is not simple, automatic, or quick. The seemingly straightforward story of information supply, demand, and use is complicated by users’ norms (how they prefer to make decisions), relationships (whom they know and trust), and capacities (their confidence and ability to turn data into actionable insights). The process of moving from data generation to use and, ultimately, to impact on education outcomes must also take into account the different institutional environments (i.e., political context) that may incentivize or dampen efforts to make decisions based upon evidence.

Most essentially, though, investments in data creation must be matched by an equal (or greater) emphasis on increasing the use of evidence by decision-makers, built from a strong understanding of what data and information they use, value, and want. Understanding why education decision-makers and influencers do not notice, value, or use data that are produced by their own statistical agencies or by international organizations deserves more attention than it has received thus far.

Download the full report here »

      

 

 

By John McArthur, Krista Rasmussen, Gavin Yamey

      

 

 

By John McArthur, Krista Rasmussen, Gavin Yamey

The launch of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2016 introduced a new era for the global health and development community. The new goals, which apply to all countries and run to 2030, include one health goal, SDG 3—to “ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages”—with 13 associated targets. Target 3.1 calls for the global maternal mortality ratio to be below 70 deaths per 100 000 live births, a 68% reduction in only 15 years. Target 3.2 calls for all countries to lower their child mortality to at most 25 per 1000 live births and their neonatal (age 0-28 days) mortality to at most 12 per 1000 live births. Are countries on course to meet the new targets, and, if not, what do they need to do to accelerate their progress?

In this article, published in the British Medical Journal, we address alignment of current trajectories with the SDG targets for maternal mortality and child mortality. We explore how much acceleration is needed for off-track countries to achieve the relevant targets. We then present corresponding estimates for the number of lives that will be lost if the targets are not achieved. This allows us to identify which countries have the largest number of lives at stake. We end by briefly summarizing key issues to be addressed in order to accelerate progress.

      

 

 

By Homi Kharas

      

 

 

By John McArthur, Krista Rasmussen

We recently published a new article, “Change of pace: Accelerations and advances during the Millennium Development Goal era,” in the academic journal World Development. The paper assesses a cross section of key indicators to compare trends before and after the start of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the internationally-agreed anti-poverty targets for 2015. Using a combination of empirical assessments, the article aims to determine which trajectories changed where, and to what scale of human consequence. The results slightly update those from our Brookings working paper published last year, taking advantage of official data released over the course of 2017.

Some key findings include:

• Low-income countries and sub-Saharan African countries registered positive acceleration on a majority of the indicators assessed and accounted for much of the world’s post-2000 accelerations.
• Middle-income countries typically registered larger cumulative gains than low-income countries but had less acceleration overall.
• 20.9 million to 30.3 million additional lives were saved due to accelerated rates of progress above previous trajectories, with sub-Saharan Africa accounting for approximately two-thirds of the total.
• Faster progress on primary school completion led to at least 74 million more children finishing primary school compared to business-as-usual trajectories.
• Undernourishment, access to water, and access to sanitation showed mixed patterns of acceleration; extreme income poverty declined at a faster rate; and environmental indicators had no systematic evidence of faster progress.

Accounting for lives saved

The total estimated number of lives saved is based on child deaths, maternal deaths, HIV/AIDS deaths, and tuberculosis deaths not attributed to HIV. Children accounted for the largest number of lives saved—an estimated 9.7 million to 18.7 million overall. Figure 1 illustrates the gains. The top dotted line shows “Counterfactual A,” which extrapolates each developing country’s average child mortality trend from 1990 to 2000. The next dotted line shows “Counterfactual B,” based on corresponding trends from 1996 to 2001. The solid line then represents the actual reported number of child deaths per year. The red line at the bottom shows the scenario if all countries had met the relevant MDG target by 2015: An additional 8.8 million lives would have been saved.

Figure 1: Total deaths in children under-5 compared to business-as-usual trajectories, developing countries

Among the other calculations, progress on HIV/AIDS accounted for the second-largest number of lives saved, at 7.7 million, followed by tuberculosis at roughly 3.2 million. (Note that we consciously seek to avoid double counting, with an adjustment for child mortality and HIV/AIDS numbers in particular.) Improvements in maternal mortality led to an estimated 400,000 to 657,000 additional lives saved. Across health indicators, the majority of incremental lives saved occurred in sub-Saharan Africa and low-income countries, even when excluding India.

Keeping up the pace

Our paper aims to clarify where patterns of progress did and did not change during the MDG era. In so doing, we hope it helps establish boundaries for future research on why some patterns shifted while others did not. In turn, this can inform thinking on where further changes of pace are required to achieve a new generation of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets.

In a separate new forward-looking paper, we estimate that nearly 12 million children’s and mothers’ lives depend on meeting the relevant 2030 targets, compared to todays’ business-as-usual trajectories. The SDG ambition to “leave no one behind” implies a new round of breakthroughs are necessary. The MDG history shows that current trends need not persist.

      

 

 

By Margaret Biggs, John McArthur

Canada enjoys some of the world’s highest average living standards. The country is widely admired for its natural beauty and its cities rank among the most livable in the world. Not surprisingly, outside observers look at Canada with admiration and Canadians themselves are proud of their natural riches and the society they have built. But below the surface, Canada, like other countries, faces profound challenges. Many segments of the population face economic and social exclusion. Inequality is creeping upward. And the country’s environment faces risks—from depleted fisheries to loss of biodiversity and the effects of climate change, most conspicuously in the Arctic.

At the same time, forces on the horizon threaten to create new challenges and compound existing ones. Large numbers of jobs are at risk of disruption from technological change. Fewer than half of Canadians are estimated to have trust in public institutions (Edelman, 2018). Canada is also challenged outside its borders. As a middle-sized open economy, the country is deeply invested in the postwar norms of international cooperation. But the rules of the international order are in flux, and protectionist forces are on the rise. Canada cannot be complacent. It needs to update its approaches to confront intersecting challenges at home and abroad.

Canada is not the only country grappling with these domestic and international challenges. Quite the opposite: developed and developing economies alike are confronting the need to promote prosperity that is both socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable. It is the common nature of these issues that led all 193 UN member states in 2015 to adopt the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as universal objectives for 2030.

But advanced economies such as Canada are unaccustomed to tracking their progress against comprehensive international benchmarks like the SDGs—let alone organizing policy efforts to achieve them. This paper presents a framework for doing so. Throughout, we aim to present concepts to inform strategies, instead of delving into specific policy details. As part of this, we differentiate between issues to be tackled at home, those to be tackled abroad, and those on which domestic actions contribute to collective global outcomes. Throughout, we emphasize the difference between issues that are currently “on track” for success and those that need a breakthrough. This informs a subsequent distinction between where “business as usual” might be satisfactory and where new approaches are required.

      

 

 

By Dasmine Kennedy, Christina Kwauk, Armene Modi, María Cristina Osorio Vázquez, Damaris Seleina Parsitau, Adrianna Pita

When it comes to global development goals, the evidence shows that nothing else has so wide-ranging a breadth of impact as educating girls. For International Women’s Day, we’re showcasing the work of the Echidna Global Scholars – leaders from NGOs and academia who work to improve learning opportunities and outcomes for girls in the developing world. In this episode, Dasmine Kennedy, Armene Modi, Maria Cristina Osorio, and Damaris Parsitau talk about empowering some of the most marginalized girls in Jamaica, India, Mexico, and Kenya, and engaging their communities to invest in girls for wider social and systemic change.

Show notes: 

• • Supporting the education of teen mothers in Jamaica
  • Jamaica’s policy for the school reintegration of school-age mothers
  • Empowering adolescent girls: Promising approaches at key tipping points in their lives
  • Giving girls wings to fly: Tools to empower adolescent girls in rural communities in India
  • Understanding girls’ education in indigenous Maya communities in the Yucatán Peninsula
  • Fostering resilience in indigenous Maya girls: The power of education
  • Engaging the custodians of tradition and culture: Leveraging the role of multiple actors in Maasai girls’ education
  • How young men can change the gender and social norms of the Maasai people to support girls’ education
  • Life skills education is more than teaching skills
  • Echidna Global Scholars

Direct download of this episode (mp3)

Some of the transition music heard in this episode was composed by Steven Lee and Gastón Reboredo III.

With thanks to audio producer Gaston Reboredo, Chris McKenna, Brennan Hoban, and Fred Dews for additional support.

Subscribe to Intersections here or on Apple Podcasts, send feedback email to intersections@brookings.edu, and follow us and tweet us at @policypodcasts on Twitter.

Intersections is part of the Brookings Podcast Network.

      

 

 

By John McArthur

      

 

 

By George Ingram

Congressional leaders—Senators Bob Corker and Chris Coons and Representatives Ted Yoho, Adam Smith, and Ed Royce—have introduced bills to meet the long-discussed need to upgrade U.S. development finance capabilities.

The principal U.S. instrument for development finance, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), was an innovation at its creation in 1971 as a spinoff from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and has been an effective development tool. But with a nearly 50-year-old operating authority and limited budget resources, OPIC is unable to match the abilities of its European and Chinese counterparts.

The nearly identical House and Senate versions of the Better Utilization of Investments Leading to Development (BUILD) Act would create a new U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (IDFC) as the successor to OPIC with expanded authorities and tools. The new entity would be provided with key new capabilities—the ability to make equity investment, a doubling of the contingent liability ceiling to $60 billion, and an extended operating authority (seven years in the House bill and 20 years in the Senate bill in place of the recent year-to-year lifeline).

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

Others in the foreign policy and development communities have articulated why this initiative is so important for achieving U.S. development objectives. I will focus this piece on several issues to consider. As I do, keep in mind several concepts:

First, development finance joins public and private finance and capabilities, the use of assistance in conjunction with private finance, to spur inclusive economic activity by reducing the risk to the private parties. It occurs along a continuum that extends from pure grant assistance to pure market finance. Grant assistance does not exist in one isolated box and development finance in another; they are co-mingled to enhanced impact.

Second, USAID has been a pioneer in leveraging the private sector as a critical element of its development programs. In the past decade and a half, USAID has participated in more than 1,600 public private partnerships. Two signature initiatives are Power Africa, which works with 142 private sector partners (including 69 American companies) to build energy capacity in Africa, and Feed the Future, which has leveraged nearly $830 million in private sector capital investment since 2011.

Third, the mandate of the new corporation must carefully balance the primary mission of development with the agility required of an effective development finance agency.

CLEAR DEVELOPMENT MANDATE

The legislation establishes development as the mission of the IDFC but without clarity as to definition or scope.  One widely accepted vision of development is found in the statute establishing the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC): “economic growth and poverty reduction.” Today that objective would be updated by inserting “inclusive” before economic growth.

This, and other improvements to the development mandate covering accountability, transparency, evaluation, and learning are being shared with Congress and the administration in specific line item suggestions by the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (which I co-chair).

STRENGTHEN LINKAGE TO USAID

A strong and productive relationship between the IDFC and USAID will be a linchpin to the U.S. achieving development objectives. The bills designate the administrator of USAID as the vice-chair of the IDFC board and suggest the position of chief development officer to coordinate with USAID and the MCC.

The USAID administrator as vice-chair of the board should be assigned specific responsibilities, and the position of chief development officer should be mandated with the duties enumerated beyond “policy and implementation” to sharing of resources, data, analyses (such as constraint analysis), and evaluations. The officer could be held responsible for leading a learning agenda with other agencies and a government-wide development finance strategy, maybe the surest way to solidify IDFC-USAID collaboration and program integration.

Another mechanism to build collaboration is employee secondments, which is assigning a member of one organization to another organization for a temporary period, as is common in military services.

MANAGING THE DEVELOPMENT CREDIT AUTHORITY

The Development Credit Authority (DCA) is a prime example of the critical relationship between the IDFC and USAID. DCA extends a guarantee (typically up to 50 percent) to an entity to facilitate its activities being more developmental, such as more inclusive lending by a financial institution. The legislation would move the authority to the new agency, although some experts disagree as to whether this function fits best with the IDFC or should remain in USAID.

If DCA is transferred to the IDFC, policymakers should consider:

• Demand for DCA guarantees comes from USAID missions, so USAID country staff are the field operatives for DCA.
• DCA has no budget of its own (except for administrative cost of the small staff), as the funding to cover the guarantee comes from USAID mission budgets.
• DCA programs are often linked to a USAID program. For example, 10 DCA guarantees, supporting $530 million in finance, are involved in Power Africa.

WITHER THE OFFICE OF PRIVATE CAPITAL AND MICROENTERPRISE

The Office of Private Capital and Microenterprise, intended to serve as USAID’s center of excellence and technical knowledge for private sector activities and microenterprise, would be moved to the IDFC. Before doing so, policymakers should weigh several factors.

USAID would have to recreate the technical capacity of the office for private sector guidance in order to continue to provide advice and guidance to country missions and other operating units.  Furthermore, consider whether microenterprise activities are more poverty alleviation, akin to USAID programs, or development finance.  If the latter, how does this impact the USAID microenterprise mandate?

BEST PRACTICE IN LABOR, ENVIRONMENT, AND HUMAN RIGHTS

The OPIC statute sets out a clear mandate on labor rights, environmental impact, and human rights. Today, expectations and sound business practices are even stronger than when OPIC was created.

Business leaders have come to understand that these are not just nice social concerns, but can directly impact bottom lines. Companies today are adopting comprehensive commitments on sustainability, as reflected by some 7,500 companies issuing sustainability and responsibility reports (see forthcoming Brookings book, Summits to Solutions) consistent with global guidelines. As one example, a broad coalition of international companies that operate in Cambodia are calling on the government to honor the rights of workers to organize and to a minimum wage and to cease harassment and criminal charges against union leaders. The bill should reflect these corporate best practice.

RELEVANCE OF ENTERPRISE FUNDS

The bill provides the authority to establish enterprise funds through reference of certain sections of the original authority to create the Polish and Hungarian enterprise funds from the 1991 Support for East European Democracy Act. The intent is to transfer the responsibility for enterprise funds from USAID to the IDFC.

The enterprise fund model was an innovation developed in response to the opportunity to introduce private enterprise into Central and Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Of the resulting 10 enterprise funds, two were shuttered early and the others, having completed their original mission, have closed their doors and used the income from selling their portfolio to repay the U.S. Treasury or finance legacy development functions. Only the Western NIS Fund (in Ukraine and Moldova) retains investment activity for a few more years.  Two more recent enterprise funds are operating in Tunisia and Egypt.

Several matters come to mind. The bills continue the practice of a White House-appointed board for enterprise funds. Is this useful today? While some board members possessed the expertise to perform superbly, the qualifications of others were political connections. What is the value of taking six-to-nine months for the White House to appoint the board, another six-to-nine months for the new entity to get up and running, and at best two-to-three years before investing begins?

Beyond that, first answer the question whether a specific enterprise fund authority is necessary or relevant. As to necessity, the reason for the original statute was to provide authority for USAID to engage in equity investment. The bill already does that in the basic authorities.

As to the relevance, the introduction to a recent USAID evaluation of the enterprise funds suggests the answer:

“Despite the enormous challenges of the transition from planned to market economy, the former Soviet bloc countries were very different from today’s developing countries in several important ways…These countries did not have, however, a private sector, and in particular, a diversified private financial sector that could support the financial investments needed to transform the economy into a market-based system. This is the gap that the enterprise funds were designed to help to address. They were a solution to a problem in a very specific context.”

Today, there are few countries lacking private sector and financial markets. Furthermore, unlike when the enterprise fund authority was first established, if analysis of a country’s financial markets suggests that equity fund activity is appropriate, why go to the time and trouble of creating a new politically-sponsored entity? The IDFC could go into the market to contract with an existing social impact fund, an NGO with experience operating for profit development entities, or issue a request for a proposal.

And why use scarce grant money when market finance is available? Since 1987, OPIC has committed $4.1 billion in 62 private equity funds in emerging markets, which in turn have invested more than $5.6 billion in more than 570 privately owned and managed companies in 65 countries.

Finally, regarding responsibility for their legacy operations, consider that those foundations and scholarship funds are grant type activities currently overseen by USAID and would be irrelevant and a distraction to the new entity.

COLLABORATION TO FILL THE GAP

Estimates to fund the internationally-agreed 2030 Sustainable Development Goals range from $2 to $5 to $7 trillion dollars annually. Global development assistance is a fraction of that, totaling $157.7 billion in 2016, and has been relatively static in recent years. The estimate for total global development finance is $70 billion in 2014 and growing. Need more be said about the imperative to grow development finance and for all U.S. government agencies relevant to the task to be engaged and contribute their capabilities? This will require an unusual but critical level of collaboration especially between USAID and the new IDFC.

The success and pattern of collaboration between USAID and the IDFC will be set in the first few years by the leadership of the two agencies. The right players appear to be in place. Administrator Mark Green at USAID is a strong supporter not just of development assistance but also development finance. Ray Washburne is proving to be a strong and collaborative leader of OPIC. With continuation of the bipartisan and bi-agency spirit of cooperation demonstrated by congressional sponsors and agency heads, the IDFC can make a significant contribution to U.S. development policy.

      

 

 

By Molli Ferrarello

Ana Revenga is a Senior Fellow in the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution. Her work at Brookings focuses on policies to mitigate the impact of globalization and technological change on inequality and employment, as well as on the broader agenda of ending extreme poverty by 2030.

Revenga’s professional career has spanned a variety of assignments at the World Bank and at the Spanish Central Bank, as well as teaching assignments at the Centre for Economic and Financial Studies in Madrid. She is currently teaching at Brown University and is a Nonresident Research Associate at the German Development Institute/Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) as well as a founding partner of ISEAK, Initiative for Socio-Economic Analysis and Knowledge, a think tank associated with the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain. Her areas of expertise are development policy, international economics, poverty and inequality, labor economics, employment, and social policy and gender.

In her 27-year career at the World Bank, Revenga worked in a number of senior management and technical positions in East Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America, and Middle East and North Africa regions, as well as in OECD countries. Until December 15, 2017, she was the Deputy Chief Economist at the World Bank Group. Prior to that, she was the Senior Director for the Poverty and Equity Global Practice in charge of all the technical teams working on poverty and equity, and serving as the principal spokesperson for the World Bank Group on these issues. Previously she was Director of Human Development in the Europe and Central Asia Region and Acting Vice President for the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network at the World Bank. In 2011-2012, Revenga was Co-director of the 2012 World Development Report on Gender Equality and Development. She was also an author of the 1995 World Development Report (Workers in an Integrating World) and contributed to the 2006 World Development Report (Equity and Development).

Revenga has published extensively on employment, globalization, inequality, social protection, poverty, and trade issues in journals such as Scientific American, The Journal of Economic Inequality, The World Bank Research Observer, The World Bank Economic Review, Finance & Development, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, The Journal of Labor Economics, The Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, and Moneda y Credito.

She has a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Economics from Harvard University, a B.A. in Economics and Mathematics from Wellesley College, and a Certificate in Human Rights from the Law Faculty at the University of Geneva.

      

 

 

Once financial markets became fully engaged around the global climate change agenda, transparency and accountability as well as intense cooperation among stakeholders took hold. Though volumes in green finance are still small, their footprint is measured on a different scale altogether. Thanks to green finance, various actors such as governments, financial institutions, investors, multilateral institutions, cities, corporations, and civil society actors across the globe are participating in intense climate change discussions.

The financial community is now turning its eyes to the United Nations’ sustainable development goals, which encompass climate, environment, and much more. Eleven years after creating green bonds, the European Investment Bank (EIB)—the European Union bank—is introducing a new debt product, a sustainability bond, highlighting the bank’s role in sustainable finance both in and outside of Europe. The new product will aim to raise awareness around the importance of social, green, and sustainable investment and to support the achievement of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

On April 20, EIB and the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings will co-host a panel of development finance experts to discuss the implications of EIB’s new bond product in support of the SDGs in addressing climate change and other environmental challenges.

Following the conversation, panelists will take audience questions.

Please use the entrance on 22nd Street when arriving.

      

 

 

While rural people hold the key to realizing a future without hunger and poverty in the developing world, rural farmers remain disproportionately poor and food insecurity is rising in many countries. For this reason, multilateral intervention in support of food security and nutrition is vital.

The most enduring solutions for feeding people and reducing extreme poverty in low-income countries entail efforts that empower rural farmers to increase their productive capacities. The goal of doubling of small-holder productivity is targeted in the Sustainable Development Goals. This objective can only be achieved by mobilizing more resources. On April 23, a panel of experts will discuss the issues and constraints such efforts entail. IFAD’s President Gilbert F. Houngbo will explain how his organization can scale up contributions and impact aimed at improving the lives of the world’s rural people.  Other panelists will discuss the changes in institutions, markets, and investment necessary to underpin the delivery of food and jobs by transforming agrifood systems in the developing world.

      

 

 

By Simon Zadek

Last week, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank held their annual Spring Meetings, bringing together leaders across public and private financial sectors to discuss issues of global concern. Top of mind was financing sustainable development and the progress being made in integrating sustainability into global financial markets.

The United Nations Environment Programme Financial Inquiry launched a new report, “Making Waves: Aligning the Financial System with Sustainable Development.” The report reviews progress between 2014 and 2017. In 2014, there was a mix of skepticism and optimism. Today, there is momentum for more transformative integration.

“Surely you cannot touch the financial system: It’s sacred,” exclaimed one seasoned climate negotiator when hearing of the goals of the U.N. Environment Inquiry in 2014.

“Admirable, but a fool’s errand to suppose that global finance as a system can be aligned with sustainable development,” concluded some of our best friends.

“At last!” commented one institutional investor who shared a growing view that reforming the financial system was key to making substantial environmental and social progress.

Our mandate was to advance options for improving the financial system’s effectiveness in mobilizing capital toward a green and inclusive economy. Yet from the outset, there was simple disbelief that it was possible or appropriate to systematically insert sustainable development as a design criteria into the heartland of the $300 trillion global financial system.

Conventional wisdom, after all, has it that policies and financial rule making are better kept apart. Stated more bluntly—don’t mess with financial markets.

What the Inquiry found was that many parts of the world were not organized according to such convention. Particularly in developing countries from South Africa to Indonesia and Bangladesh, and from China to Peru, we found a “quiet revolution” in progress in shaping financial markets according to diverse policy priorities, from financial inclusion, to air pollution, to black economic empowerment, and to climate.

Two years into the Inquiry, on October 8, 2015, we launched its first global report, “The Financial System We Need: Aligning the Financial System with Sustainable Development,” to a packed hall at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Annual Meetings in Lima, Peru. It was the first time that the U.N., let alone the U.N. agency responsible for environmental issues, had chaired a panel of central bank governors to talk not about the environment, but the future of the financial system. (A full list of reports is available here.)

When the curtain on the one-hour event came down, it was evident that we had crossed a threshold making it harder to exclude the matter of environment, climate and sustainable development from the business of financial policymakers and regulators. Reinforcing this was the announcement by China during the discussion not only that it would take green finance into the G-20 finance track during its presidency in 2016, but, in a historic step, that it was asking the U.N. Environment to manage this work stream on its behalf.

Today, less than two and a half years later, it would be hard for any central bank governor to dismiss the relevance to his or her work of sustainable development. Such a shift in so short a period is remarkable in itself, and has been achieved through the hard labor of many amazing people and initiatives. And although there is much to be done in translating this into tangible, ambitious action, we see a growing proportion of bankers, investors, stock exchanges, and insurance firms making commitments to align their operations with climate change and broader sustainable development objectives. Citizens and civil society organizations have also moved into the financial system arena, stimulating incumbents to look afresh at their purpose and practice.

The Inquiry has tracked the global number and range of policy measures to advance aspects of sustainable finance. At the end of 2013, 139 subnational, national-level, and international policy and regulatory measures were in place across 44 jurisdictions. Most of these were first-generation efforts to improve disclosure in securities markets and by pension funds. Four years on, the number of measures has not only doubled—to 300 in 54 jurisdictions—but the pattern of activity has changed fundamentally, with a substantial rise in system-level initiatives, which now account for a quarter of the total. These include the growth in national level roadmaps for green and sustainable finance in countries, including China, the EU, Italy, Indonesia, and Morocco, just to name a few.

Figure 1: The doubling in policy and regulatory measures, 2013-2017

Source: www.unepinquiry.org

Moving from momentum to transformation is unfinished business. For example, there has been a 14-fold increase in labeled green bond issuance from just $11 billion in 2013 to $155 billion in 2017. Yet such progress needs to be set against the scale of the global bond market of around $100 trillion. Similarly, there has been an increase in the divestments in carbon-intensive assets to an estimated $5 trillion in 2016, but we equally need to set this against investments in coal, oil, and gas over the same period of around $710 billion.

Progress to date should not discourage more transformative ambition to reshape finance, given the challenges we face and the opportunities that this finance could realize. There is certainly a need for more of both to get to where we need to be. While the job is clearly not done, many actors can and will take the agenda of sustainable finance forward, within national governments, civil society, international organizations, financial institutions, and across the U.N. system.

Aligning the financial system with the U.N. 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is not just a matter of more of the same, but of harnessing major change opportunities, given the complexity and dynamism of this system, rather than seeking to blueprint solutions as one might in designing, say, a car. For example:

• Financial crises offer major opportunities to reshape aspects of the financial system, as has the recent one, albeit with mixed results.
• International political agreements offer opportunities to shape systemic outcomes, such as the Paris Climate Agreement, which has helped system-level initiatives to advance climate considerations across the financial system.
• Digitalization will transform the financial system, and its relationship with the real economy, creating many new opportunities for advancing financing for sustainable development.
• Major investment programs such as China’s Belt and Road initiative, provide opportunities to influence the alignment of major investment flows.

The Inquiry’s approach, and for opportunities going forward, is to harness such transformational waves, rather than taking the well-worn approach of experimenting through pilots and then scaling through replication. The Inquiry, although having completed its 50-month journey, has spawned and supported the emergence of many ongoing, catalytic initiatives. This includes our work with the G-20 on sustainable finance, and several coalitions of the willing, including the Network of Financial Centres for Sustainability: The Sustainable Digital Finance Alliance, co-founded by U.N. Environment and Ant Financial Services, and the Sustainable Insurance Forum.

The Inquiry has been a catalyst for change, not an underlying driver. Its value-add, beyond being in the right place at the right time, was to uncover the many relevant innovative initiatives created by extraordinary champions from around the world, connect these initiatives directly through the exchange of experience across its partners, and on that basis to shape an overarching narrative that validated the ambition to align global finance with sustainable development.

Its approach proved to be quite powerful in encouraging systemic change. It is an open question as to whether there may be lessons from the Inquiry for catalyzing other aspects of sustainable development…but that is for another day.

Dr. Simon Zadek was a co-director of the U.N. Environment Inquiry into Design Options for a Sustainable Financial System (2014-2018); and is visiting professor and senior fellow at the Singapore Management University.

This post draws from the Inquiry’s fourth and final global report, “Making Waves: Aligning the Financial System with Sustainable Development.”

      

 

 

By Charlotte Petri Gornitzka, Anthony F. Pipa

Three years after the global community committed to the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) put forth by the 2030 Agenda, the 30 countries that are members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) are still struggling to translate this framework domestically. Applicable to rich and poor nations alike, the SDGs provide a framework for collective action that highlights the interdependence of development priorities, countries, and people. Achieving the ambitious goals by 2030 will entail harmonization across many sectors—from education, to urban development, to water supply, to climate mitigation, to maternal and child health, to name just a few priority areas.

There is no one size fits all solution, but efforts clearly must be comprehensive. To accelerate progress and reduce the risk of countries falling off-track, the OECD-DAC and the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution recently co-hosted a roundtable for DAC members to share experiences in implementing the SDGs by leading whole-of-government efforts while mobilizing other stakeholders.

National governments may want to consider a two-dimensional approach when taking on the SDGs. First, they should adopt a whole-of-government approach—setting national priorities based on their own circumstances while investing internationally to drive global progress. Second, they should consider a whole of society approach—providing leadership so as to mobilize and harness the contributions of a diverse set of stakeholders.

Our roundtable surfaced key issues ripe for further exploration: What is the best way for governments to organize and bring together domestic and global development priorities? How can governments lead SDG implementation while at the same time leaving room for others to lead, maximizing the contributions of all involved? To what extent can policy coherence accelerate progress, and where do countries begin?

A few key insights:

National government ownership must go beyond global development agencies and architecture.  High-level political buy-in is critical, as it helps national governments reorient their policy frameworks, plans, and budgets to achieve the SDGs. The success of the SDGs depends on the ability of governments to foster institutional collaboration and create ownership across institutions, both domestic and global. Getting there requires leadership from the top.

High-level attention and support from finance ministers and their treasuries can be powerfully catalytic.  Resource strategies must go beyond aid budgets alone to packages that unleash financing for development, both from other ministries as well as private investors and businesses.

This mixed approach of using development finance to mobilize additional finance towards sustainable development or blended finance is already being used in 17 DAC member countries. The OECD report Making Blended Finance Work for the SDGs highlights that blended finance has the potential to unleash greater levels of financing for development, and that donor governments must ensure that the resources mobilized target a broad range of development issues to meet the needs of the SDGs.

Auditors are also well-positioned to provide critical leadership and support to governments in their efforts towards achievement of the SDGs. Incorporating the SDGs in performance objectives and proposed outcomes of government efforts promotes a coherent approach that ripples out into an agenda that is shared throughout different levels of the bureaucracy government-wide.  Collecting globally valid information on the progress of governments in an easily accessible way will serve as a strong guiding force in moving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development forward.

Governments must pursue a coherent policy and regulatory environment to mainstream the SDGs across sectors, ensuring that their policies are on track both domestically and internationally. While DAC members are mobilizing to implement SDGs domestically, they must continue to work in concert with international partners to promote progress around the world. The goals, often interconnected, may require making tough decisions on trade-offs and tackling obstacles of ownership and implementation.  Investment in policy coherence must be prioritized and also encompass a conflict resolution mechanism, as government objectives will inevitably come into conflict with each other.

Myriad multilateral and regional institutions and platforms are adapting to this agenda. The DAC, through its reform agenda, has committed to better serving its members and the broader international community, building on its strengths and placing achievement of the SDGs at the core of its reforms. Countries must take leadership as shareholders of the international system, supporting and shaping it to deliver effective implementation. Together, countries should construct a system that supports and accounts for their efforts and impact.

Alignment with provincial and city governments will also be crucial. A key facet of the SDG agenda depends upon its localization, focused on making progress in a specific place or location. National governments can provide direction as well as support in facilitating the leadership of local governments in pursuing their own progress on the SDGs.

National leadership must reach into all parts of society, encouraging and harnessing all contributions for maximum impact.  Very much linked to political buy-in is ensuring that citizens, civil society, and the private sector are empowered to engage, drive progress, and challenge governments on SDG implementation. Tackling the complexity and ambition of the 2030 Agenda requires integrated approaches that engage external stakeholders throughout the change process in a systematic and regular fashion. Luxembourg, for example, is hosting regular public hearings and workshops with external stakeholders, including youth, raising awareness and influencing government policy concerning SDG implementation. Governments must also provide the space and support for civil society to strengthen accountability, and may be called on to undertake policy reforms focused on changing behavior in the private sector.

Indeed, national governments, to be successful, are being asked to play multiple roles simultaneously.  Their leadership will depend upon their ability to strengthen their own internal integration and policy coherence among different levels of government. At the same time, they must be champions in chief, acting as a strategic and encouraging partner to businesses, investors, philanthropies, universities, faith-based organizations, citizens’ groups, youth, and other parts of civil society.

No one is expecting the national governments to do everything, but they are best placed to take the lead and re-orient resources, coordinate capabilities, and maximize all efforts.

Governments should adapt servant leader mindsets—guiding but not dominating, embracing new ideas, and challenging and complementing existing structures. By taking such a stance, they can mobilize and harness the efforts of all segments of society to fulfill the 2030 Agenda at home and abroad.

      

 

 

By Subhrendu K. Pattanayak, Hannah Girardeau, Faraz Usmani

Is energy the “golden thread” that connects economic growth, social equity, and environmental sustainability? To answer this question, the Sustainable Energy Transitions Initiative (SETI) set up a systematic review and searched through nearly 77,500 papers over three years. Professor Marc Jeuland and Jonathan Phillips will be summarizing the findings of this new study on energy access and the internationally agreed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the fourth Sustainable Energy for All forum. 

What has SETI found and why should you care? While we know how energy access impacts many of the SDGs, we don’t have enough scientific evidence about what is being done by practitioners and policymakers in low- and middle-income countries. This “know-do gap”—what we know through research and what is implemented—will keep the world from achieving a critical cluster of SDGs.

What SETI did

The search combined three groups of broadly specified terms: 1) low- and middle-income countries country/region, 2) energy technology or fuel, and 3) impacts or energy-use-related descriptors. SETI scholars identified nearly 77,500 articles across multiple academic publications databases, and then screened and double-screened these for relevance based on title and abstract reviews. Ultimately, roughly 10 percent—still a large number of about 8,000 articles—were retained for detailed coding. The SETI team assessed relevance with the consideration of the social dimensions of energy. The analyses focus primarily on the quantitative impact studies.

Figure 1: Number of articles included in the review, by (left) country focus and (right) year of publication

While there has been a burst of energy research in low- and middle-income countries in the past decade, geographic coverage is patchy. Most large countries are well represented, but some such as Indonesia are not. And lower-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa—ground zero for energy poverty—get less attention than they should.

In general, this review points to a troubling pattern: A big gap between what is being evaluated by scholars and the types of programs, projects, and policies being implemented. These know-do gaps take different forms—the interventions implemented are often not the ones studied, the intended impacts are not the impacts studied, and the geographical areas studied do not fully represent the areas of implementation.

Know-do gaps emerge largely because impact evaluations are public goods; that is, because it rarely makes sense for an organization to conduct an expensive impact evaluation that will not directly benefit the project. Besides, there are large differences between evidentiary standards and the research needs of policymakers and researchers. And inevitably, there isn’t enough local capacity to conduct serious evaluations.

If we don’t make scientific evidence much more practice based by encouraging (rigorous-enough) impact evaluations of real-life projects, programs, and policies, we will continue to be in the dark.

What we do know

The SETI review is both systematic and broad and utilizes an “energy services framework” designed to better understand how energy relates to the welfare of end-users. This is what we know:

• Energy access threads though many development goals. Improved energy access can be mapped to at least nine SDGs: poverty (#1); hunger (#2); health (#3); education (#4); gender equality (#5); work (#8); industry (#9); innovation (#10); climate (#13); and land use (#15)—see Figure 2a.
• But the energy thread is not always golden. As shown in Figure 1a, energy transitions might sometimes reduce air quality, hurt health, and harm the climate and forest ecosystems.
• The golden parts of the thread are thin. While some technologies such as as solar (Figure 2b) are consistently more golden, they are a small fraction of the scientific impact studies. This reflects the small share of solar energy in overall generation.

Figure 2: The effects of energy interventions

• Energy for cooking is the favorite subject of study. Scholars and funders play favorites—they have been studying cooking services zealously, especially at the household level and on cooking-health-air-quality interactions.
• Studies on poverty reduction look as much at lighting and heating as cooking. Research on poverty reduction is more evenly spread across the energy services for cooking, lighting, and heating. Firm level studies naturally look at impacts on production and profits; the few studies on GDP almost always look at industrial energy use.

Our biggest blind spots

The SETI review finds that we know very little about the impacts on gender equity and public services such as health care and schooling; agriculture and service sectors, relative to manufacturing and industry; forests and ecosystems, relative to air quality and climate forcing; and solar (both off- and mini-grids), wind, micro-hydro, and biogas.

For example, few (just 67) quantitative studies demonstrate the role of energy in affecting gender equity. Eighty-five percent of these studies focused on cooking services; fewer studies considered lighting (22 percent) and heating (19 percent). Within the relatively large body of interdisciplinary literature on the effects of energy services on household health (438 unique studies), approximately 80 percent of studies focus on cooking, followed by heating (24 percent) and then lighting (11 percent). Far fewer (just 16) consider the impacts of energy on health facilities.

Given all the commotion about solar and other renewables, human capital, and inclusion, these are serious blind spots.

Closing the energy access know-do gap

The SETI review took stock of the research on energy access and energy transitions in low- and middle-income countries. What it found indicates a serious need for research aligned with on-the-ground needs and our ultimate goal of ending energy poverty. Energy might be a golden thread, but this hasn’t yet been proven in a scientific setting. The SETI review threads the needle for closing the know-do gap in places where it matters most. To do this, the global community must:

• Build local research capacity
• Crowd in new funds for research, which are essentially international public goods
• Above all, have scholars and practitioners jointly own and produce applied research that avoid type 3 errors—precise answers to pointless questions.

Of course, all such research on impacts of energy access must be combined with studies of the drivers of energy access—that is, finance, market development (including consumer demand), programming, and regulations.

In short, a lot of stitching still has to be done by researchers and practitioners who care about energy and development. 

      

 

 

By Lex Rieffel

Unemployment is a growing challenge around the world, though it is not a full-blown crisis yet. However, when the crisis comes, it is likely to erupt among urban youth.

While heading off such a calamity will not be easy, the global benefits of doing so would be great. As productive and socially responsible adults, the youth of today and in years to come could make planet Earth a better place for all.

A quick survey of the literature makes it clear that there will be no simple or universal solutions to the challenge of urban youth unemployment. The factors producing it are different in each city and useful interventions have to be well tailored to the cultural context.

Youth are the prime unemployment concern globally because their numbers are growing in most countries and because they are more prone to violence than adults. They have less to lose. Harvard professor Samuel Huntington made the point bluntly in an interview with journalist Michael Steinberger in The Observer on October 21, 2001: “Generally speaking, the people who go out and kill other people are males between the ages of 16 and 30.”

The first major outbreaks of violence by unemployed youth are likely to occur in cities because of the rapid pace of urbanization everywhere. The expectations of people in rural areas seem too low and their dispersion too great to create a combustible moment.  Subsistence existence is normal there.

Fortunately, there are a number of counter currents. Demography may be the most important. Fertility is falling around the world. Women need to have 2.1 children on average to maintain a stable population size. After rising rapidly in the 20th century due to modern medicine and public health, fertility began falling below 2.1 in high-income countries in the 1970s and in the middle-income countries in the 1990s. Maybe fewer young people in the future will reduce the threat of social disorder.

According to World Population Prospects 2017 published by the United Nations, the mid-range forecast for global population in 2050 is 9.8 billion, up from 7.6 billion in 2015. Fertility in high-income countries is projected to remain below replacement level, stuck around 1.80 in 2050. Fertility in the upper middle-income countries will be only slightly higher at 1.82. For the lower middle-income countries, the largest of these four groups, fertility will be 2.25 in 2050, significantly down from 2.88 in 2015. It is the low-income countries, primarily in Africa, that have been and will continue to be the major source of global population growth, even as their fertility rate is projected to drop from 5.0 in 2015 to 3.08 in 2050. Despite this impressive fall, the population of this group of countries is on track to more than double from 600 million in 2015 to 1.4 billion in 2050.

It is possible that fertility will decline faster in the low-income and lower-middle income countries than the U.N. is projecting. As a result, combined with war and disease, the size of the global youth cohort, 15-24 years of age, could start shrinking by 2050. With continuing migration of youth from rural to urban areas, however, urban youth unemployment could be rising in these countries even as the number of youth is falling.

The other major cross current is that governments and the private sector are focused on creating more good jobs for youth. The leading sources of information and discussion about youth employment are the International Labor Organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, and the World Bank based in Washington, D.C. Both sources are promoting research on effective interventions and ways to scale these up.

Youth employment is also on the agenda of the G-20 Summit process, under the G-20’s Framework Working Group on the Future of Work (co-chaired by India and Canada). This week the ILO is convening the first global conference on “Innovation for Decent Jobs for Youth.”

The extensive academic research on youth unemployment highlights the complexities of the global challenge. For example, the expectations and education of youth vary tremendously between high-income and low-income countries. At the same time, the capacity of governments to mount effective programs varies greatly. Furthermore, the interests of international nongovernmental organizations and multinational corporations do not always align with the countries of greatest need.

There is a thriving universe of programs seeking to prepare youth for employment through a variety of training and job market activities. Most governments in the world are supporting at least one form of a youth employment program, from volunteer service to tax benefits to matching employers with youth. A multitude of international and domestic NGOs are working in this space. One of the oldest is the International Youth Foundation based in Baltimore, Maryland. Leading multinational corporations have put youth employment at the center of their corporate social responsibility programs, including CitiGroup, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Mastercard Foundation, and McKinsey & Company.

So far, however, assessments of these interventions have found few that have a major and sustained impact on employment, or can be scaled up easily, or can be replicated effectively in other cities.

A major complication is the pace of technological and social change. From one year to the next, the world has gone from seeing social media almost as a panacea to being a threat to civil order. The work place is changing before our eyes, with the gig economy growing while full-time, long-term employment with benefits is stagnant or shrinking.

Is enough being done to avoid an urban youth unemployment crisis before 2030, the benchmark year for the U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals? Goal 8 is especially relevant; it includes “full and productive employment and decent work for all.”

What kinds of programs seem to have the potential for mitigating the risks of a crisis and can be scaled up or replicated across cities? Is it enough to focus on preparing youth for jobs or will it be necessary to tackle directly the potential for youth violence in cities and even redefine our visions of work?

An attempt will be made over the coming year to answer these questions in an effort to make sure that the global policy community is giving the challenge of urban youth employment the attention it deserves.

      

 

 

By Mariama Sow

Last week, the International Energy Agency, the International Renewable Energy Agency, the United Nations Statistics Division, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization released the joint report Tracking SDG 7: The Energy Progress Report 2018. The report finds that the world is not on track to meet the targets set by Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7—“Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all,” which includes ensuring universal access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy services and increasing the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix. The report indicates that while SDG 7 targets may not be met by 2030, significant progress is being made. Moreover, trends at the national and regional levels—especially in Africa—offer encouraging signals.

The report finds that, for the first time in history, Africa’s electrification deficit is falling in absolute terms, i.e., there are fewer people without electricity. This result is largely due to the high performance of East African countries. For instance, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania expanded access to electricity by at least 3 percent of their population annually between 2010 and 2016.

Despite such progress, the continent still hosts the largest share of people without access to electricity. In fact, the total share has more than doubled, a trend particularly reflected in rural areas. Notably, Africa has seen significant population growth in the past decades, which may have affected the continent’s efforts in providing electricity to a large share of its population.

Off-grid solar electricity drives access in Africa

While lagging in terms of access to electricity, African countries are making strides in terms of access to renewable energy. In particular, the world has seen an uptake in the use of solar energy, the most popular form of clean energy, due largely to major gains in Asia and Africa (Figure B2.2.1.). Africa has the largest percent of the population that use off-grid solar energy among all regions, and the percentage of its total population that uses off-grid solar electricity has nearly quintupled since 2011. Today, 60 million people in Africa use off-grid solar power as an electricity source.

The joint report has developed a framework that evaluates sources of electricity based on three criteria—feasibility, suitability, and relevance. Energy sources that perform well in the three criteria are rated as Tier 1. Figure 2.15a below shows that many countries with solar access above Tier 1 are in Africa. Notably, in Uganda and Rwanda, more than 3 percent of the population is connected to an off-grid solar supply. When countries whose energy access below Tier 1 are considered, we see that many more African countries are providing electricity to a large share of their population through off-grid solar access (Figure 2.15b). Kenya is even electrifying more than 30 percent of its population through off-grid solar access.

In order to accelerate the progress, which has been made thus far, the report recommends bridging the funding gap and embracing new technologies as a solution to the existing electricity deficit in certain areas.

      

 

 

By Molli Ferrarello

      

 

 

By Molli Ferrarello

      

 

 

By Molli Ferrarello