By David L. Caprara

Smart and green cities will be needed to win the battle against climate change. They will also play a key role in meeting the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030. The capital city of  Nepal, Kathmandu, is working to make a big contribution to the creation of smart and green cities while advancing critical youth livelihood opportunities.

To this end, a delegation led by Kathmandu Mayor Bidya Shakya will be visiting Washington D.C. and Fredericksburg, Virginia in advance of September’s U.N. General Assembly that will review progress towards the SDGs.

Earlier this year, Kathmandu hosted a “Smart and Green Cities” conference organized by the Asia Pacific Peace and Development Service Alliance (APPDSA) in partnership with IBM and the Chaudhary Foundation, Global Peace Foundation Nepal, and Code for Nepal. Youth were trained in financing social enterprises in sectors such as recycling and solid waste management that can lead to job creation—with smart city applications adapted from IBM’s Smart Cities training.

Beyond Kathmandu, programs in cities like Nairobi, Kenya, and Manila in the Philippines, are equipping young entrepreneurs in the development of scalable SDG solutions and are being promoted by grassroots and business entities such as M-PESA’s Safaricom and Asian mall builder, the SM Group. At a Global Youth Summit on SDGs sponsored by the SM Group in the Philippines last year, winners of a youth SDG project competition went on to design Android mobile apps that metro Manila has used to promote disaster readiness and community safety monitoring in the typhoon-racked region. Similar youth-led social business ventures in an impoverished neighborhood of Nairobi, Kenya—which I’ve previously described here—have created jobs that turn slum waste to energy through innovative community cookers.

What is unique about the initiatives in Kathmandu is that they put youth at the center of smart (information and communication technology or ICT) and green (solid waste management, clean water, and recycling) innovations. The resilient spirit of Nepal’s people is apparent in its championing of SDG innovations in the aftermath of its devastating 2015 earthquakes, which gave rise to a new post-civil war constitution the same year.

The visiting Kathmandu Mayor’s delegation is being welcomed in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where Mayor Mary Katherine Greenlaw leads a vibrant Fredericksburg-Kathmandu sister city program. The Fredericksburg-Rappahannock region has undertaken a bevy of initiatives with their Kathmandu sister city counterparts on solid waste management, clean Bagmati-Rappahannock rivers, sustainable trekking and student-faculty engagement led by the University of Mary Washington and its Nepali counterpart, Tribhuvan University. Fredericksburg is also home to one of Virginia’s first smart city prototypes along with innovations in cutting-edge solid waste management and recycling practices in the City and George Washington Planning District counties of Stafford, Spotsylvania and King George.

This cross-city learning exchange and marshaling of people-to-people goodwill, coupled with youth-centered enterprise, is representative of initiatives from other global regions that will be featured at the U.N. General Assembly’s upcoming SDG review. Policymakers in the U.S. and other major countries should further incentivize promising smart and green city youth enterprise models in stepped up partnerships with the business community and civil society.

      

 

 

By Homi Kharas, John McArthur, Krista Rasmussen

Do the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) matter for real people? In 2015, at the United Nations, all countries agreed on the set of ambitious economic, social and environmental targets to be achieved by no later than 2030, guided by a central motivation to “leave no one behind.” But is the world on track to do so? What are the consequences if it falls short? How many lives are at stake? This paper considers these questions by estimating the extent to which, if recent trends persist, issues and countries will still see people left behind.

Overall, our findings show that most countries are making progress on most issues, but the SDGs still require much faster progress in order to leave no one behind.

In considering which issues face the biggest challenges if recent trends continue, we find:

• The world is on track to achieve at least half the SDG standard on only 5 assessed indicators—child mortality, hepatitis B, malaria, access to electricity, and extreme poverty—while achieving less than half the objective on 18 indicators and moving in the wrong direction on 2 indicators—air pollution and children overweight.
• Approximately 44 million lives are at stake, including more than 29 million people under age 70 at risk due to non-communicable diseases and 9 million children under age 5 vulnerable to preventable causes of death.
• On indicators of basic needs, often hundreds of millions—and in some instances billions—of people’s needs are at stake. This includes an estimated 475 million people, or 6 percent of world population, who will still be living in extreme poverty in 2030, well short of eradication.
• Distressingly, measures of gender equality are nowhere near on track for full success by 2030, including 850 million women subject to violence and nearly half of all women and girls still facing discrimination in opportunities for public leadership.

In considering which countries face the biggest challenges if recent trends continue, we also find:

• A small number of countries will account for the majority of people left behind on each issue, although the mix of countries differs by indicator. On multiple indicators, Nigeria, India, Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan, and China are home to a large share of the people left behind, as are the United States and Brazil in some instances.
• Independent of population size, countries like Central African Republic, Chad, South Sudan, and Somalia will be furthest from the absolute targets in 2030.
• All OECD countries will face shortfalls on both absolute and relative targets. Every country has its own mix and depth of challenges to address, demonstrating the universal relevance of the SDG framework.

      

 

 

By Dasmine Kennedy

Reintegrating school-aged mothers into formal schooling is met with many challenges for low-income families in Jamaica. While there is progress in getting girls back into classrooms before and after giving birth, lack of child care is an overlooked barrier.

The Women Centre Foundation of Jamaica (WCFJ) provides critical services during prenatal and post-natal phases of school reintegration, offering a haven for women to continue their education. In addition to counseling, mentoring, and continuing education, the center also provides short-term day care facilities for babies of teen mothers.

There are currently 18 WCFJ main centers but only 11 are outfitted with child care facilities that meet the standard for quality child care support. The remaining seven need to build new facilities to provide child care services in keeping with Early Childhood Commission Jamaica standards. Unfortunately, when the mother returns to the formal school system, she is once more confronted with the reality of no child care services. Due to the level of stigmatization currently associated with teen mothers, offering these services at the school would require a complete overhaul of social norms.

Why is access to education important?

Research shows that continuing education for the teen mother reduces the likelihood of multiple pregnancies, exploitation, and daughters becoming teen moms themselves—thus disrupting the cycle of intergenerational poverty. Further, children of educated mothers are more likely to survive and be healthy due to greater access to better nutrition and immunization. However, providing access to education for the mother will never be enough if they are met with basic logistical challenges of caring for their children.

In my previous research, I highlighted a case where a school-aged mother could not receive uninterrupted education due to her lack of child care. The situation was compounded as the child was often ill and needed constant attention from caregivers, resulting in the mother not fully benefiting from her second chance at education. She failed to complete exit examinations to matriculate to further studies, which could have improved her economic situation. Due to the lack of provisions in place to provide for child support and the subsequent barrier to education, the likelihood of this mother remaining in poverty and having another early pregnancy is high.

What can be done?

In order to secure greater life outcomes for teenaged mothers and their children, a national response is required to inhibit factors often associated with impediments to child care support. There is hope. As part of the Ministry of Education Youth and Information’s (MOEYI) K-18 Strategy, the government has committed to providing equitable access to education through several leapfrogging initiatives. These include the provision of day care centers throughout the country to bolster early stimulation programs at an approximate cost of $5 million. With an aim of establishing two-day care centers in each of the 63 provinces in the country, there should be 126 day care facilities established for all women who need those services for the 2018-19 academic year. These centers are safe and free of cost and will provide a conducive environment to bolster child development. Studies have shown that the majority of brain development takes place during the first 1,000 days of life, making such interventions crucial.

Where have other child care facilities been established?

While the initial 126 institutions may not be sufficient to address all child care service needs, it is a step in the right direction. Hopefully it will inspire development partners to establish additional centers throughout the country. South Africa and parts of Latin America including Chile and Columbia have implemented this initiative and could provide important lessons for Jamaica, as could parts of the United States. Michigan, for instance, offers day care services for newborn to preschool-aged children of teenage mothers. The Washington, D.C. area provides child care services for the children of teen parents in high schools, and the Young Parent Child Care Program at the Child Care of the Berkshires, Inc. in Massachusetts is another prominent initiative that provides high-quality toddler care and other services for teen parents. All these examples emphasize the need for day care centers that ensure equitable and quality access to education in keeping with the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.

      

 

 

By Homi Kharas, Rebecca Winthrop

This week, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will release its annual Goalkeepers report card assessing progress toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Among the expected findings is a prediction that by 2050, nearly 90 percent of global poverty will be concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, and two-thirds of the world’s poorest people will live in just ten countries.

The ability to identify human-development hotspots—what we call “severely off-track countries” (SOTCs)—should, in theory, make it easier to apply solutions. Unfortunately, some aid agencies tend to avoid fragile states out of fear that their resources will be wasted. Currently, less than a quarter of OECD countries’ programmable aid is allocated to SOTCs.

But the perception that fragility presages failure is misplaced. With adequate planning, it is possible to implement projects that improve lives in even the riskiest places. Best of all, we know where to start: by investing more in human capital, and especially in education.

According to the Goalkeepers report, the number of children enrolled in primary school in Africa increased from 60 million in 2000 to some 250 million today, and the rate of growth was equal for boys and girls. But while more children are attending classes, school quality remains uneven. The challenge now is to ensure that all children, including those who are in school—at all grade levels—are learning the full breadth of skills they need to thrive.

To give young people the best chance of success, the two “bookends” to primary school—early childhood education and secondary education—must also be sturdy. Early childhood education prepares children for primary school by teaching cooperation, perseverance, self-control, and other essential skills. These formative years are critical for a child’s education, because, according to UNESCO, more than half of all children and adolescents worldwide never develop foundational competencies crucial to becoming life-long learners.

At the other end of the spectrum, secondary education helps adolescents prepare for the job market. To succeed at this level, students must achieve minimum proficiency in reading, math, and numerous non-cognitive skills. But even here, educational outcomes are disappointing. In low-income countries, nine out of ten young people lack basic secondary-education level proficiency across a suite of essential skills, ranging from literacy and critical thinking to mathematics, and problem solving. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, an estimated 200 million young people (about 90 percent of the primary and lower secondary-school population) are not able to read basic texts.

Development specialists know that a good education is transformative for students as well as families, communities, and countries. One study from 2008 found that the quality of a country’s education system—and the cognitive abilities of its graduates—positively influences economic growth. That fact alone should be enough to convince fragile states and their donors to invest in expanding access to quality education.

But there are other, more indirect benefits, especially for women and girls. For starters, better-educated women delay pregnancy and typically have smaller families. Development experts, demographers, and education advocates recognize that in many parts of the world, female empowerment is proportionate to family size. For example, our research has found that a woman with zero years of schooling will have, on average, 4-5 more children than a woman with at least 12 years of schooling.

Increasing educational opportunities for girls would also benefit the planet. The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis has projected that if every girl in the world completed secondary education, fertility rates would drop and the global population growth would slow by as many as two billion people by 2045, and more than five billion by 2100. The deceleration would be even greater if the 214 million women worldwide who want to avoid pregnancy but cannot acquire contraception could access family-planning services. It is no coincidence that many of these women live in countries where fewer girls than boys attend school.

Taken together, schooling and family planning could translate into a 120-gigaton reduction in carbon dioxide emissions over the next three decades, as fewer people consumed fewer resources. It is no surprise that environmentalists like Paul Hawken believe that education—and educating girls in particular—is among the most effective steps the world can take to combat climate change.

The annual Goalkeepers report is a reminder issues like gender inequality, malnutrition, violence, and political instability will plague the world’s poorest people for decades to come. Among solutions, few are as effective as quality education. If fragile states and international donors directed more resources to strengthening education’s three pillars—early, primary, and secondary—the world’s SOTCs would finally have a chance to get back on track.

      

 

 

By George Ingram, Sally Paxton

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have set ambitious targets to eradicate poverty and advance development by 2030. Paying for these ambitions is steep—shifting from mobilizing billions to mobilizing trillions. Recognizing that foreign assistance cannot be the sole source to finance these goals, the 2015 Addis Ababa Financing for Development Conference (and the follow up reviews) have recognized and encouraged the use of different resource streams to meet the SDGs. Central to achieving these ends are private resources, whether in the form of direct financing, co-financing, blended financing, or a host of other innovative structures. Private resources are even more critical given the fact that preliminary figures for 2017 Official Development Assistance (ODA) show that aid has flatlined.

Ensuring sufficient resources to finance the SDGs—turning those billions into trillions—will mean not only mining all potential resources but also enabling these financial streams to work together to best leverage their respective added value. What is the best way, for example, to deploy public money to catalyze larger private sector investment? What financial streams and instruments work best for a particular purpose or outcome? And to what extent are public resources actually mobilizing private investments?

Measuring Development Finance

To answer the last question: Work to establish a standard to measure the amounts of private resources mobilized by public money has been underway for a few years by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC). The latest survey shows that $81.1 billion in private flows were mobilized by official development finance between 2012 and 2015 through five different kinds of instruments. The principal mechanism is guarantees, representing 44 percent of the total mobilized for this period. Multilateral institutions mobilized two-thirds of the total, with bilateral donors accounting for the remaining 36 percent. Among the bilaterals, the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) is the largest, with most of its financial portfolio being guarantees. Not included in this survey, however, is China and others which are not part of the OECD survey process.

The plan is now to continue to work on the survey methodology and include more instruments in future surveys. Collection and publication of this information will be through the regular OECD DAC Credit Reporting Service (CRS) process. That’s the good news. Unfortunately, although the information is collected on a project level basis, publication is not. The information published by the OECD DAC under CRS is—at best—two years old by the time of publication. Both of these factors severely limit the usefulness of this data.

the BUILD Act

Already approved by the House and pending before the Senate is legislation to create a new U.S. development finance institution—the Better Utilization of Investments Leading to Development (BUILD) Act of 2018. At its core, the BUILD Act will combine OPIC and some development finance work at USAID and add new authorities and higher contingent liability to allow the U.S. to more effectively tap into private resources to further U.S. development goals.

Aid Transparency

One of the foundations of U.S. aid effectiveness is the principle of transparency. Publication of timely, open, comprehensive, and comparative information provides policymakers, implementers, taxpayers, partner countries, and their citizens with current data about what is being planned and spent and for what purpose and for what result. This benefits the planning, implementation, and evaluation processes. Aid transparency underpins U.S. foreign assistance—as initiated by the U.S. joining the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) in 2011 and establish in law in 2017 by the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability (FATAA).

Project Level Data

Building on this foundation, both the House and the Senate versions of the BUILD ACT require (to differing degrees) timely publication of data related to investments. Project level information, as required by the stronger provision in the Senate bill, should be the norm, and is, in fact, the law for reporting on U.S. foreign assistance under FATAA and is central to IATI. Such transparency allows for a number of good outcomes, including the ability both to maximize cooperation and to leverage resources and delivery. It is only with this level of granularity that providers of development assistance—whether it be public, private, or a blend of the two—can see the whole picture and make the smartest decisions about what kind of money can best fit the purpose.

      

 

 

By Dhruv Gandhi

Last week, the World Bank released preliminary results from an upcoming report that finds that the world as a whole is not on track to meet the 2030 U.N. Sustainable Development Goal on extreme poverty (SDG1). According to its estimates, global extreme poverty was 8.6 percent in 2018, down from 10 percent in 2015, and becoming increasingly concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa. Examining the SDGs further at the country level, a new Brookings working paper, How many people will the world leave behind: Assessing current trajectories on the Sustainable Development Goals, assesses where countries stand on achieving several SDG targets by 2030.

The Brookings working paper, authored by Homi Kharas, John McArthur, and Krista Rasmussen, evaluates 21 people-focused targets across nine SDGs (1-7, 11, and 16). Some of the indicators assessed in the paper include maternal mortality, access to electricity, malaria, and primary school enrollment. To assess 2030 prospects, the paper extrapolates recent trends on each indicator assuming a “business-as-usual” trajectory for each country. Trajectories are then compared to their respective absolute or relative outcome as dictated by the target, the latter measuring progress relative to a country’s starting point.

As the left panel in Figure 1 shows, using an average distance-to-the-frontier approach where zero is the furthest from the target in 2015 and 100 is the SDG goal, many African countries are among those furthest from achieving the absolute targets in 2030. However, as the authors note, this is due to starting well behind other countries and many, such as Niger, Burkina Faso, and Ethiopia, are on average expected to make considerable absolute progress by 2030 across the targets covered in the paper. As seen in the right-hand panel of Figure 1, countries are also making progress on relative targets, with Malawi standing out for covering more than 50 percent of the way by 2030 on current trajectory.

OECD countries, on the other hand, are much closer to the absolute SDG targets but struggle to cover the “last mile” and all fall short on achieving relative targets, as seen in Figure 2. While many African countries are further behind on absolute targets compared to OECD countries, they are making comparable progress on relative targets. Importantly, some low-income countries including Guinea-Bissau will accomplish similar shares of their relative target gap as many of the OECD countries by 2030.

The authors recommend using their results to focus attention on and address the policy, institutional, and resource constraints faced by those countries lagging behind. Further, they recommend increased international cooperation to help countries making positive, yet slower progress achieve breakthroughs and catch up.

Figure 1: The most off-track countries’ progress by 2030 under business-as-usual

Figure 2: OECD countries’ progress by 2030 under business-as-usual

      

 

 

On November 19, the Cross-Brookings Initiative on Energy and Climate will host Sustainable Energy for All CEO Rachel Kyte in discussion with Initiative Co-Chair David G. Victor on sustainable development, energy access, and the dynamics of global energy and climate.

Rachel Kyte is chief executive officer of Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL), the special representative of the U.N. secretary-general for Sustainable Energy for All, and co-chair of U.N.-Energy. She previously served as World Bank Group vice president and special envoy for climate change, and vice president for sustainable development.

After the session, panelists will take audience questions. Light refreshments will be served.

      

 

 

By Homi Kharas

      

 

 

By Gavin Yamey, Alexander Gunn

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3—ensuring healthy lives and promoting wellbeing for all—is accompanied by a very ambitious set of targets. These include ending avertable child deaths and ending the epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), malaria, and neglected tropical diseases by 2030. Are these achievable or can they be dismissed as just a “fairytale”?

ARE THE TARGETS ACHIEVABLE?

Researchers have tried to answer this question using two complementary approaches. The first is to look at recent trends in death rates and then extrapolate these trends forward to 2030. The second is to model what would happen if today’s health interventions—such as medicines, vaccines, insecticidal bed nets, and diagnostics—were scaled up to very high coverage levels everywhere. In both cases, the results have been disturbing.

In an example of the first approach, McArthur, Rasmussen, and Yamey examined trends in child and maternal mortality over the most recent 10 years for which data were available and then extrapolated the 10-year trend to 2030. They found that 42 countries are not on track to reach both the child and maternal mortality targets in SDG3, and a further 37 countries will miss at least one of these. The Commission on Investing in Health (CIH), chaired by Larry Summers, used the second approach and found that the world would fall short of many SDG3 targets even if today’s health tools were scaled up to around 90-95 percent coverage worldwide.

WE NEED TOMORROW’S TOOLS

The implication of these studies is clear. For many of the SDG3 targets, today’s tools are not enough—we will need tomorrow’s tools as well. While investing in the development and delivery of new health technologies is not the only way to accelerate progress, it may be the most effective. From 1970 to 2000, around 80 percent of the decline in child death rates was linked to the spread of new health tools. Countries that aggressively adopt and disseminate new health technologies gain an additional 2 percent per year decline in their child mortality rate over countries that do not.

Further, investing in health R&D has wider benefits for economic development. A new method of economic evaluation called extended cost-effectiveness analysis shows that many technologies that address poverty-related and neglected diseases (PRNDs) not only improve health but also provide protection against impoverishment and are pro-poor.

WHAT’S IN THE R&D PIPELINE?

So what kind of progress is being made in developing the “game-changing” health technologies that will bend the mortality curve and help countries reach the SDG3 targets? To address this question, we recently conducted a multi-center study, as discussed in the New York Times. We were part of a large research team—15 researchers in total—based at Duke University, Policy Cures Research, the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, SEEK Development, and the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics.

There were three key steps in our study. First, we did a painstaking review of the current R&D pipeline, looking for product candidates that are under development for a set of 35 PRNDs. This review was tough sledding. There are many obstacles to finding out what is in the pipeline; for example, there is no single, centralized database of candidates and pharmaceutical companies often hide what they are developing out of proprietary interests. Second, we used a new financial modeling tool called the Portfolio to Impact (P2I) tool to estimate the costs to move these candidates through the pipeline over the next decade and the likely product launches. This second step showed that the current pipeline is unlikely to yield several important products by 2030—therefore in the final step, we estimated the costs to develop a set of priority “missing” products (e.g., a highly effective HIV vaccine).

Our study has both good news and bad news. Depending on how you view it, the pipeline is both half-full and half-empty. We are likely to see plenty of launches of new products to tackle PRNDs—but some of the most critically needed products are unlikely to see the light of the day by 2030.

We found 685 product candidates for PRNDs, of which 538 candidates met inclusion criteria for input into the P2I modeling tool. Based on standard attrition rates for candidates as they move along the development pipeline, our model suggests that there will be around 128 product launches (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Breakdown of the 128 anticipated product launches, by disease target and product type

Abbreviations: PRNDs: poverty-related and neglected diseases; HAT: human African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness); NCEs: new chemical entities

In the CIH report, Summers and colleagues proposed a list of “important” or “game changing” diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines that could bend the mortality curve. Based on what is currently in the pipeline, our study suggests that 18 of these needed products are unlikely to be launched by 2030, including highly effective HIV, TB, or malaria vaccines, and breakthrough medicines for TB.

THE R&D FUNDING GAP

In our modeling, the total estimated costs to move current candidates through the pipeline and to develop these 18 missing products would be around $4.5-5.8 billion per year over the next five years. Given that we are currently spending about $3 billion per year on product development for PRNDs, the annual financing gap is at least $1.5-2.8 billion. This is an underestimate of total resource needs, as the P2I model does not include all R&D costs—for example, it excludes the costs of early preclinical development (drug discovery and basic research) and of regulatory review and marketing authorization.

This brings us to another alarming trend. Every year, Policy Cures Research publishes an estimate of total spending on product development for PRNDs. Its annual surveys have shown that since 2009, there has been a steady decrease in annual funding, with the exception of a short-term injection of funding for Ebola R&D in the wake of the 2014-2016 West African outbreak.

RHETORIC AND REALITY DO NOT MATCH

So let us review. The rhetoric in SDG3 is utopian, calling for the “end” of multiple diseases and conditions within the next 12 years. However, in reality, much of the world is off track to achieve many of these SDG3 targets. One of the most effective ways to get countries back on track is through the development and deployment of new tools to control PRNDs. Yet along with a continued decline in funding to develop these new tools, our analysis also shows that the current pipeline is unlikely to produce many of the most critically needed technologies.

There’s a profound mismatch happening here. Our global health targets have become more ambitious, yet the global health community is going backward in supporting the innovations need to achieve them. Or as Mary Moran has put it: “In a somewhat Kafkaesque disconnect, these statements by the global health community of their support for—and belief in—the need for R&D of new global health tools are not reflected by their actions in the real world.”

The mismatch not only threatens the achievement of SDG3. It also represents one of the greatest missed opportunities to invest in the health, wellbeing, and economic livelihood of the world’s poor.

      

 

 

By John McArthur

      

 

 

By Homi Kharas, Lorenz Noe

October 16 is World Food Day 2018. It celebrates the founding of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization 73 years ago.

This U.N.-sponsored “day” is an opportunity to reflect on the fact that millions still suffer from food insecurity. People and governments everywhere believe that in a world of plenty, where average incomes are approaching $18,000 (PPP), it is intolerable that human beings anywhere should be hungry. Therefore, governments of every country in the world have boldly declared that they will end hunger by 2030.

This global effort, enshrined as Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, is already three years old. At the U.N. General Assembly in September 2019, world leaders will meet to check on the progress of the SDGs. It seems certain that the news on SDG 2 will be grim by virtually any measure. As of 2017, over 150 million children remain stunted, roughly 820 million people are undernourished (a number that has increased for each of the last three years), and over 2.5 billion people responded that they lacked the resources needed to buy food at some point in the last 12 months, again a sharp increase.

Figure 1: Three dimensions of hunger, 2000-2017

Why is this happening and what can be done about it?

1. Technology

For all the efforts to catalyze a second green revolution using technology, the results for staple crop yields speak for themselves. As shown in Figure 2, sub-Saharan Africa lags far behind the other regions. Not only are yields in Africa the lowest in the world, but they have also had the smallest increases. Unlike in manufacturing, where catch-up technology has helped almost all countries, there are no signs of this happening in agriculture.

Without yields of at least 2 metric tons/hectare, smallholder farmers cannot generate any surplus to reinvest in their lands—they have a hand-to-mouth existence. Sub-Saharan African farmers use just over one-tenth of the average global fertilizer consumption. They face issues of water, with frequent drought and little irrigation. They lack power to till the land and harvest and store crops efficiently. Unless yields can be raised for millions of smallholder farmers on the continent, there will be little hope of making progress on ending hunger. This is why the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with other partners, is doubling down on a new agriculture data initiative to help smallholder farmers in South Asia and Africa, and to focus policymaker attention on their situation.

Figure 2: Cereal yield by region

2. Coherent Policy

Smallholder farmers depend on their own countries’ policy framework, including property rights, safety nets, rural investment climate, agricultural extension support, and market development. These policies, in turn, respond to global market conditions where, unfortunately, agriculture remains highly distorted and potential benefits from trade are significantly underexploited. Figure 3 shows the subsidies for domestic agricultural producers by OECD countries and China. Though the decrease in levels for OECD countries over the last decades is commendable, the absolute level of producer support subsidies still distorts global markets, hurting smallholder producers. Since 2000, China has also been ramping up its producer subsidies in an effort to reduce rural poverty there. China, too, is now reversing course, but together, the fact that the largest economies in the world intervene so strongly in agricultural markets is an obstacle to the global goal of ending hunger.

The Agricultural Incentives Consortium collects data on government policies. A summary statistic—the nominal rate of protection for the agricultural sector—has been trending upwards since the food price crisis of 2008. Governments justify these measures by claiming they are needed to ensure domestic food security and a healthy rural economy, but the experiences of countries such as Australia and New Zealand, that have virtually eliminated tariffs on agricultural products, provide a model for how agricultural trade policy can be designed to promote national and global development. Unless more countries, especially the largest, follow suit, ending global hunger will be a challenge.

Figure 3: Policy distortions on global agriculture—Producer support estimates in large economies

3. Political Economy

A source of frustration for advocates working to end global hunger is the low prioritization of Food and Nutrition Security (FNS) within the crowded space of development aid. There is a clear tendency for aid to be reactive, not strategic. When there are headline-grabbing famines and/or global food price shocks, aid for food and nutrition security goes up. When food prices subside and the crisis is off the front pages, aid declines (Figure 4). Breaking this cycle and creating long-term funding sources for food security will be key to bringing to scale the needed interventions.

Figure 4: Donor aid commitments for food and nutrition security track global food prices

Organizing thinking around FNS interventions

If the world is to achieve SDG 2 and end hunger by 2030, we must focus on outcomes, policies to raise yields and build efficient and inclusive markets, and on public and private investments needed to achieve these outcomes. Our Ending Rural Hunger project is one effort to organize the often bewildering array of data surrounding FNS around a framework of needs, policies, and resources. Analyzing a country’s needs allows us to diagnose priorities and interlinkages between poverty, undernourishment, smallholder yields, and exposure to shocks. Examining a country’s policies allows us to identify gaps in safety nets, market incentives, regulations, and infrastructure. Understanding a country’s resources will reveal the domestic and external financial commitments that a country can marshal to achieve SDG 2.

The world has a lot of work to do in order to achieve Agenda 2030. Looking seriously, country by country, at needs, policies, and resources is the only way to work towards better policies and greater, as well as smarter, resource allocation.

      

 

 

By John McArthur, Krista Rasmussen

Sometimes even the world’s biggest challenges come with their own silver lining of hope. Recent U.N. data show that 5.4 million children under five died last year, mostly of preventable causes related to poverty. In countries with the worst problems, one in eight children doesn’t live to see their fifth birthday, compared to one in 250 or better in many advanced economies. These numbers highlight vast inequalities in life opportunities around the world, but they should not be a cause for despair. Instead, there is reason for cautious optimism and focused pragmatism in tackling the world’s child survival challenge.

Here we highlight three key aspects of child survival trends, applying methods from some of our recent papers (e.g., here and here) to the new official data release.

1. Even countries the furthest behind are making progress

No country’s situation is hopeless—far from it. In 2017, the three countries with the highest child mortality rates were Somalia (127 deaths per 1,000 live births), Chad (123 per 1,000), and Central African Republic (122 per 1,000). As shown in Figure 1, all three countries have been experiencing gradual ongoing declines in mortality. Since 2005, each has seen a full 27 percent reduction.

There is more good news. Looking slightly further back to 2000, Sierra Leone previously had the world’s highest mortality rate, at an estimated 233 deaths per 1,000 live births as of that year, equivalent to nearly one in four children. But since then Sierra Leone has cut its child mortality rate by more than half, down to 111 deaths per 1,000 live births as of last year.

Together, these trends represent extraordinary human progress. For not only is it the case that the world’s most challenged countries have been making consistent gains, but the definition of “most challenged” has itself improved dramatically. Somalia’s child mortality rate in 2017 may be the highest in the world, but it is fully 45 percent lower than Sierra Leone’s mortality rate in 2000. The shift represents a 3.5 percent average annual rate of improvement in the world’s worst-case situation for child mortality.

Figure 1: Child mortality rate in countries furthest from target in 2017

2. Three countries account for half the children’s lives at stake

Targeted efforts will be required to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), established by all countries in 2015, very much including target 3.2—to ensure all countries achieve a child mortality rate of no more than 25 deaths per 1,000 live births by 2030. Building on methods previously presented in McArthur, Rasmussen and Yamey and Kharas, McArthur and Rasmussen, we can compare each country’s recent trend to the trajectory required to reach the 2030 SDG target, and in turn identify the number of lives at stake in the 48 countries with complete data that are not yet on track (141 countries are already on track; three small island states are off track but lack relevant demographic data). Our calculations indicate that, on current trajectory, approximately 9 million lives are at stake, with three countries accounting for more than half the total: Nigeria at 29 percent, Pakistan at 13 percent, and the Democratic Republic of Congo at 12 percent. The remaining lives at stake are spread across 45 countries. So while all off-track countries merit concerted international support to achieve the SDG standard, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the DRC are of unique human consequence for concerted international efforts.

Figure 2: Concentration of children’s lives at stake under current SDG trajectory

3. SDG success requires significant acceleration

The 2030 child mortality target can only be achieved through major accelerations of progress in high mortality countries. Figure 3 shows the extent of the leap required in the three countries with the highest 2017 child mortality rates (Somalia, Chad, and Central African Republic) and three countries with the largest number of children’s lives at stake (Nigeria, Pakistan, Democratic Republic of Congo). The solid line shows the recent annual rate of progress and the red dot indicates the average rate of progress required between 2018 and 2030 to meet the SDG target. Three countries in the top row all require at least a tripling in their annual rate of progress; the three in the bottom row all need to see at least a doubling.

Figure 3: Leap in annual rate of progress required to meet target by 2030

Next stop: 2019

In September 2019, heads of state and government will gather at the U.N. for the first major political check-in on the SDGs. This will be a crucial opportunity for the world to take stock of global trends, diagnose how the world is doing, and identify where things most need to change. Essential new actions might range from an emphasis on technological innovations to bolstering health systems. In any case, when it comes to child survival, there is powerful evidence that even the world’s worst case situations are getting better. The cost of not improving fast enough can be measured in terms of lives at stake. The global story of children’s progress is impressive but not sufficient. September 2019 offers a political deadline for filling the relevant policy gaps.

      

 

 

By John McArthur, Anthony F. Pipa

      

 

 

By Norman Eisen, Daniel Kaufmann, Nathaniel Heller

The Leveraging Transparency to Reduce Corruption project (LTRC) is pleased to share an annotated bibliography (AB) of more than 150 books, papers, tools/datasets, and other resources addressing transparency, accountability, and participation (TAP) efforts along the natural resource value chain. We have also included work that addresses the contextual factors that enable or constrain the effectiveness of TAP approaches. We hope that the AB and related materials described below will serve as a helpful resource for practitioners, policymakers, researchers, donors, and other stakeholders interested in this field.

We have curated these items for the AB from our team’s initial review of a larger pool of more than 650 resources relevant to the LTRC project’s research agenda.  That agenda is to establish and apply evidence-informed leading practices in TAP approaches that contribute to reducing corruption and achieving other sustainable development outcomes.  To learn more about how we created the AB, including our selection and categorization process, please see the methodology section of the AB.

Readers can also explore the entries in the AB by using the mapping tool below. If you are using a desktop browser, note that countries colored yellow on the map are those covered by entries in the AB. Hover over the map to view the country name, then click on the country and scroll down to see the research for that location in the sortable list. Select the “Global/Regional” box at the top of the map to choose studies that focus on 15 or more countries around the world or on a specific region (e.g., Latin America and the Caribbean).

If you are using a mobile device, click on a continent and scroll below the map to view resources that cover location(s) within those continents, or select “Global/Regional” to choose studies that focus on 15 or more countries around the world or on a specific region.

The list of resources that follows the map below also includes links to the original research (where available online) and allows readers to view (and, in desktop browsers, sort by) author last name, resource title, focus area, location, and publication date. A spreadsheet containing this and additional information about each resource is available here.

The AB and this page will be periodically updated to include additional resources and features based upon our ongoing work, as well as in response to suggestions from users.  Please contact us to suggest additional resources or features, or to provide other comments.

      

 

 

With political divisions on the rise and global cooperation imperiled, city officials worldwide are stepping up to lead, solving local problems while sharing solutions and innovations across borders. Making cities such as New York, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles inclusive, safe, and sustainable is vital to the future of the United States—and the globe. Driven by the need to act locally while thinking globally, a growing number of metro areas are adapting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a blueprint for progress.

On November 29, 2018, the Global Economy and Development Program at Brookings and Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy will co-host an event with city officials and development experts to explore the value proposition of the SDGs for U.S. cities. Experts will explore how the 17 SDGs can help cities tackle local economic, political, and environmental challenges vital to the health and wellbeing of their residents. They will debate how U.S. cities can lead and reach the global goals by 2030.

New York City and Los Angeles are publicly promoting and implementing the SDGs, while cities such as Pittsburgh are leading on innovation and sustainability but have not yet connected their strategies to the SDGs. Panelists will also explore how technology can help integrate the SDGs into city strategies and accelerate development gains.

Following the discussion, panelists will take questions from the audience.

      

 

 

By Hoda Jaberian, Alvin Vista, Esther Care

In developing the Education 2030 Agenda, it became clear that education systems require solutions to help prepare students for the challenges of today’s world. How can education empower learners of all ages to assume active roles—both locally and globally—and make informed decisions in building a more sustainable future through peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, and secure societies? Responses to this question have focused on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Global Citizenship Education (GCED), both of which fall under the broad umbrella of 21st century skills.

Linked by the need for transformative education systems to address ESD and GCED, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Target 4.7 of Goal 4 states: “By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development.” Target 4.7 calls for mainstreaming key concepts of ESD and GCED in curricular content, teaching practices, and assessment, and for greater importance in policy planning. 

For the measurement of learning outcomes on ESD and GCED, the main issue at the conceptual and operational levels is that of agreement on the definitions and dimensions of learning. While there is an overall consensus on the breakdown of learning measurement domains (knowledge, value, skills, engagement, and attitude), the understandings and interpretations on GCED and ESD greatly varies based on cultural, traditional, or other contextual lenses affecting the perceptions. Given the breadth of opinion at country, regional, and sub-regional levels over “what” we should be measuring, it is inevitable that there is also very little consensus on “how” we should measure it.

Considering the wide range of both established and relatively new concepts under the 21st century skills umbrella, and the absence of specific processes to collect and analyze related data, Target 4.7 is certainly one of the most challenging targets to measure and monitor. Competencies such as critical thinking, empathy, and creativity that are needed to promote sustainable development and global citizenship are comparatively more difficult than other targets in the SDGs to evaluate. As such, there have been debates on whether we should assess these skills globally in a standardized way at all.

A recent Brookings report shows that very few of the current international large scale assessments (ILSAs) explicitly capture 21st century skills. Another challenge includes the limited opportunities to link data collected through these tools in a statistically meaningful way due to lack of alignment across ILSA survey cycles. Concerns have been raised that current plans for measurement of the global indicator for 4.7 do not establish confidence that such indicators can be viewed from pure statistical perspectives. This could mean that traditional reporting of classical scores and rankings at country level in the monitoring for 21st century skills may be less relevant at the global level.

Given that sources of 21st century skills assessment data are relatively sparse, naturally the data use remains limited. At a policy level, most countries agree on the need for inclusion of 21st century skills in the education systems. However, there remains some resistance to including certain fundamental, but perhaps contextually “controversial” concepts of ESD and GCED— including human rights, gender equality, or climate change—in education policies and teaching materials. Some of these may be considered a national priority in some countries but seen as “sensitive” in others.

For the purpose of improving data quality and coverage, UN agencies active in the fields of ESD and GCED are working with cross-national data collectors to ensure that conceptual frameworks are aligned with standard definitions and respond to Target 4.7 reporting requirements. They also support data collectors through advocacy interventions at bilateral and multilateral levels to increase country participation in the data collection exercises to address gaps in coverage.

With respect to the gap in global monitoring of 21st century skills, solutions need to consider all the above challenges. Specific to UN agencies, two approaches are being adopted toward the provision of comparable data on 21st century skills related to ESD and GCED.

The first solution accepts that understanding of these skills depend on cultural, traditional, and other contextual lenses, and therefore they should be measured within “comparable” contexts. Accordingly, the design of some assessment frameworks is focused on sub-regional or regional coverage where there are greater common understandings. The Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics (SEA-PLM) and Life Skills and Citizenship Education (LSCE) Initiative in the Middle East and North Africa are examples of this perspective. The main argument here is that unless consensus at a regional level is in place on key definitions, values, behaviors, benchmarks, and thresholds on measurement of 21st century skills, global consensus will not be achieved.

The second solution accepts the core concept of national ownership and accountability in monitoring 21st century skills. Accordingly, each country needs to define the contextualized framework on necessary skills that respond to its own needs, and then link with the global trends, priorities, and requirements. Through such country-owned durable solutions, quality data could be collected regularly referencing results for national policies in a timely manner. In this regard, the development of “light” modules that includes key items from the existing ILSA could be made available to all countries as a common good might be a fundamental step. To achieve this goal, structured capacity development on data collection and analysis are essential.

      

 

 

By Anthony F. Pipa

Despite a crisis of confidence at the national level, a significant majority of Americans still believe in the ability of their local governments to deliver. This is good news, because U.S. cities are increasingly responsible for taking on local challenges with global implications, such as pollution, violence, climate change, and economic opportunity and security.

Local actions, global lessons

As municipalities go about their business, they are increasingly turning to their peers, engaging in city-to-city networks and communities of practice (an estimated 300+ globally) to share best practices, experiment with innovations, and design new solutions. It reflects a problem-solving mentality that has earned many U.S. city leaders a reputation for pragmatism over politics.

This is the way American cities such as Los Angeles, New York City, and Pittsburgh come to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs, collectively agreed by the world’s nations in 2015, reflect national commitments to end poverty, achieve economic prosperity, and reduce inequality and injustice while promoting environmental sustainability and tackling climate change.

Yet cities worldwide and in the U.S. are taking on the SDGs themselves, viewing the goals as a planning tool for prioritizing, measuring, and mobilizing social, economic, and environmental progress. On November 29 at Brookings, leaders and experts from these three cities will explore the local value proposition of the SDGs to U.S. cities along several dimensions:

Common Language: As the SDGs have grown into the lingua franca of development globally, they give city officials, stakeholders, and even residents a common and immediate frame of reference when engaging counterparts. The globally accepted and vetted framework offers the potential for comparability, allowing cities to measure themselves against other communities using a holistic vision of sustainable development.

Clear Diagnosis: The SDGs help to view at once the multiple dimensions of development that administrators often pursue through separate offices and stand-alone initiatives. This offers the opportunity to integrate plans to improve—among other things—infrastructure, equity and inclusion, economic growth and jobs, resilience, and the environment. It can also help identify gaps and interdependencies that would otherwise go unnoticed or unexploited. New York City, which developed its OneNYC city strategy before the SDGs were adopted, recognized the overlap and mapped its local milestones to the global goals. This year it became the first city in the world to submit a review of its progress to the United Nations. This advance in accountability allowed city leadership to report on the city’s progress using a recognizable framework accessible to residents and other stakeholders.

Concrete Objectives: As a set of timebound, outcome-based targets, the SDGs give meaning to metrics. It is rare for elected city leaders and their communities to commit to the level of specificity contained in SDG targets. For example, while many communities might endorse a commitment to reducing poverty, it can be much more powerful—and motivating—to commit to reducing poverty by 50 percent by 2030 (SDG target 1.2). The ambition of the goals translates into a universal imperative to “leave no one behind,” forcing municipalities to focus on its most vulnerable residents. While the perception lingers that the SDGs have limited relevance for high-income countries, just the simple combination of target 1.2 with target 10.1, which commits to achieving and sustaining income growth of the bottom 40 percent at a rate higher than the national average, demonstrates that the agenda directly addresses the economic dynamics buffeting many communities in the U.S.

Concerted Action: This type of data-driven goal-setting is embodied in the commitment made in 2017 by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti to decrease the number of unsheltered Angelenos by 50 percent in five years, and functionally end homelessness in 10 years. This predates the city’s commitment to the SDGs, but it demonstrates the mobilizing effect of aligning policy and budget against a publicly accountable goal: a county bond issued for $355 million annually for services and programs, a city bond issued for $1.2 billion for supportive housing, and a mayoral executive directive given to expedite the process of standing up temporary shelters. At the global level, the SDGs have been catalysts for new partnerships among government and the private sector, universities, civil society, and citizens. Investment managers such as PIMCO and Calpers are analyzing how the SDGs measure environmental, social, and governance factors critical to financial performance, while businesses are seeking ways to highlight their leadership.

Another way for America to lead

As cities cooperate through networks such as C40 to address climate change, 100 Resilient Cities to deal with shocks and stresses, and Strong Cities to end violent extremism, they have increasingly found a collective voice on tough global issues, separate from their national government. While the full implications of this political shift are unclear, it has provided an alternative path for American global leadership. One of the most compelling virtues of the SDGs reported by cities globally is their ability to excite and engage citizens, including youth and millennial leaders. This may help cities deal with the trickiest part of their global engagement: getting their residents to care about—or at least see the value of—their forays on the global stage.

Adopting the SDGs is quite easy; serious implementation is much harder. Cities will always need to find customized ways to manage and prioritize. But the SDGs offer a blueprint and useful metrics for city leaders to advance local economic, civic, and environmental imperatives. They give U.S. cities an incentive to play a prominent role in solving the world’s problems while solving their own. At a time when traditional forms of global cooperation are under pressure, this may be a good way for the U.S. to retain the mantle of leadership in development, both at home and globally.

      

 

 

By John McArthur

2018 will go down in the record books as one of seemingly incessant geopolitical acrimony. For many policymakers, the imminent turn of the calendar offers brief respite—a moment to clear one’s head and take stock of the most salient challenges on the horizon. 

What core problems need to be solved amid fast-shifting strategic alliances and the cacophony of public debates? Ultimately, most societies are grappling with a common triple task, even if local manifestations differ.

The first big task confronting many countries is to re-couple overall economic progress with gains in living standards. Twenty years ago, it was a basic tenet that if the economy was growing then most people’s life outcomes were improving. Ongoing economic progress remains crucial for most societies, and is certainly helping to expand the global middle class.

But today there is declining faith, especially in advanced economies, that higher gross domestic product (GDP) translates to better lives for regular families. Many citizens feel economic gains are too concentrated among elites—whether the top 10 percent or even 0.01 percent of any society. Ongoing shifts in automation technology only amplify workers’ insecurities.

As just one stark illustration of the need to recouple economic and social progress, even in the traditionally high-income economies, the U.S. has recently seen its average life expectancy decline two years in a row, while average incomes continued to grow, however modestly.

There is now evidence of similar problems emerging in the U.K. and in British Columbia, Canada. In Canada overall, even after accounting for a boost in public transfers, median after-tax incomes have been growing by less than 0.6 percent a year since the 2008 global financial crisis. Many societies need rewiring to ensure overall advances in the economy connect more directly to improvements in regular people’s lives.

The second big task is to de-couple economic progress from environmental degradation. In short, every new unit of economic gain is still cranking out a corresponding unit of environmental pain. Climate change presents the starkest form of the problem.

Billions of people around the world justly aspire to higher incomes but improvements in prosperity need to be accompanied by reductions in carbon intensity. Within 30 years, the world needs to achieve roughly a 90 percent decrease in the amount of greenhouse gas emissions per unit of GDP. Every country needs to show that its economic trajectory can climb upward while its emissions trend falls quickly downward.

Other environmental priorities need urgent decoupling efforts too. For instance, more than 90 percent of humanity lives amid unsafe outdoor air pollution, which kills more than 4 million people every year. Fertilizer and manure runoff—driven by growing populations with increasingly complex diets—have contributed to 500 oxygen-free “dead zones” in oceans around the world.

Expanding fish-catch technologies are depleting fisheries from the deepest and most remote parts of the high seas, contributing to risks of mass extinction. A small number of rivers, mostly in fast-growing economies, are dumping more than a million tonnes of plastic waste into the ocean every year. Our planet simply cannot sustain the current model of progress much longer.

The third major task is to end marginalization so that absolutely no one gets left behind. I have started to call this we-coupling—we all need to feel part of society’s forward movement together.

In every community, groups are tired of feeling marginalized due to some aspect of their identity—whether gender, race, ethnicity, indigenous status, class, religious beliefs, disability, sexual orientation, language, geography, age, or something else. All human beings need to be actively included in progress. It is no longer good enough for societies to succeed on average; they need to succeed for everyone.

Of course, this triple frame only describes what problems need to be solved, leaving arguments open on how best to solve them. That is exactly the point. In a time of seemingly infinite distractions, a simple “Re-De-We” test can help frame public debates and offer a ballast against excessive narrowing of the issues.

Individual leaders across society need to hold themselves to a similar standard too. Anyone trying to stand on a one or two-legged stool of ideas will inevitably succumb to the forces of imbalance. In 2019 and beyond, the triple task will be fundamental to every society’s long-term stability and success.

      

 

 

By Geoffrey Gertz, Homi Kharas

Arguably the most radical aspect of Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—and what most distinguishes today’s development doctrine from that of earlier generations—is the concept of universalism. This universalism shows up on two levels. First, the SDGs explicitly apply to high-income countries, rather than just low- and middle-income countries. That is, “development” is not just something that happens “over there,” a means by which poor countries can someday hope to look more like rich countries, but rather a communal, collective, and enduring process, with shared obligations and responsibilities across societies.

Second, is the mantra of “leave no one behind.” This reflects the fact that, though in aggregate the world witnessed rapid development gains over the last three decades, many individuals, communities, and countries made little progress. Leaving no one behind means prioritizing global development efforts on the poorest countries, tackling inequality within countries, and fighting for the inclusion of marginalized people everywhere.

While the development community has embraced the principle of leaving no one behind, what should it entail in practice? And what specific policies and actions should development agencies adopt to realize it?

These questions are taken up in the Development Cooperation Report 2018, “Joining Forces to Leave No One Behind,” released earlier this week by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

We contributed a chapter to this report that assesses development assistance to countries that are severely off-track to meet SDG 1, ending extreme poverty. Building on earlier analysis, we identify 31 countries that, based on current trajectories, are likely to have poverty headcount ratios of at least 20 percent in 2030. Notably, we find that today official development assistance (ODA) to these countries is limited: while these 31 countries account for nearly two-thirds of the global population living in extreme poverty, they receive less than one-quarter of total country programmable aid provided by OECD countries—and this figure has been falling in recent years. Moreover, the effectiveness of this aid is further undercut by high volatility, making it difficult to plan and implement long-term strategies. Ultimately, we conclude that to-date donors’ actions on prioritizing support to the furthest behind countries has not lived up their rhetoric: while many donors talk about reorienting their strategies to focus support on countries that need the most assistance, few have actually followed through.

Other chapters in the report assess a series of pressing development priorities, including income inequality, fragility, governance, climate change, women and girls, youth, and disability, in addition to case studies of what’s worked in developing countries and analyses of trends in donor assistance. Overall, while there is, of course, important variation by country and issue area, many authors reach similar conclusions to our own: despite donor rhetoric, reforms to their actual policies, programming, and activities fall short to what will be needed to achieve Agenda 2030.

To help close this gap, in an overview chapter, the report’s lead authors call for new narratives among development practitioners on the importance of leaving no one behind, a systematic approach to mainstreaming the concept of leave no one behind across the portfolio of development cooperation activities, and more and smarter official development assistance. For each of these priorities, the report provides a specific list of actionable recommendations to advance the reality of leaving no one behind.

With the report published, the onus now shifts to donor agencies and their political leaders to take up and implement these ideas. An introductory chapter notes that the report “responds to demand from members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee for greater clarity” on how to translate the principle of leaving no one behind into practice. Was this demand real, or merely cheap talk from officials who are well-steeped in the rhetoric of sustainable development but unable or unwilling to tackle the thorny political and bureaucratic reforms necessary to realize this ambition? It is time to find out.

      

 

 

By George Ingram, John McArthur

Amid a growing body of research on the effects of cash transfers (e.g., see recent summaries here, here, and here), greater attention is needed to flesh out what roles cash can or should play in ending extreme poverty. In emergency humanitarian contexts, by contrast, the intellectual dam broke open years ago on the merits of quick cash disbursements to support acute human needs—even if implementation remains gradual. (Note we use the term “cash” here as shorthand for various methods of direct transfers to individuals or households, whether through the form of actual cash, debit cards, or digital payments.) But in the broader context of development and poverty reduction, cash debates remain active and the corresponding dam has only shown cracks, without yet signs of breaking open toward new consensus in any particular direction.

To delve into the topic, we recently hosted a Brookings roundtable comprised of participants from academia, philanthropy, business, government, multilateral organizations, and non-governmental organizations. The aim was to discuss the state of cash transfer evidence and implementation in the context of the objective to end extreme poverty by 2030, as affirmed in the World Bank’s own headline institutional goal and by all United Nations member states in the first Sustainable Development Goal.

The increasingly specific geographic nature of extreme poverty helps to focus the practical questions at hand. For example, recent estimates suggest that five countries—Nigeria,  DRC, Madagascar, South Sudan, and Mozambique—are on course to be home to more than half the world’s extremely poor people by 2030. If cash transfers are to play a role in ending extreme poverty, then these contexts—which are themselves very diverse—deserve special emphasis in advancing the relevant research and implementation priorities. Importantly, these countries are also grappling with problems of political and institutional fragility, so the practical lines may blur when it comes to development “versus” humanitarian strategies in the final frontiers of extreme poverty.

One short session was not enough to cover all the issues, but it did provide a notable consensus on the need to bolster discussions of why, when, and how cash transfers should be delivered to help end extreme poverty.

WHY

Even ardent promoters of cash transfers are clear in articulating that cash is not a panacea for development, nor a simple substitute for key actions across the development ecosystem. Cash grants to individuals will not, for example, generate essential public goods like roads, hospitals, vaccination programs, and municipal water systems. Nor will they train nurses, teachers, or other long-term skilled workers essential to promote development.

Nonetheless, there are many reasons why cash transfers can be a worthwhile policy tool. For example:

• Cash empowers individual recipients as decisionmakers. In this respect, cash promotes a rights-based approach to development. It prioritizes beneficiaries’ preferences, latent or otherwise, over those of government or development agencies, without needing to deploy intrusive or complex surveys and interviews.
• Cash offers efficiency. It avoids the heavy human and physical infrastructures of delivering services and commodities. There is no complicated procurement of goods and services or lengthy supply chain to manage. Cash can reach the intended recipient quickly and avoids the intermediaries that can siphon off value.
• Cash can help build and reinforce safety nets. Similar administrative infrastructures are required for both: a cash infrastructure can help build a broader safety net system, and a safety net infrastructure can be used to deliver cash in emergencies and build resilience to shocks.
• Cash can boost assets and incomes—both for recipients and for vendors who are serving recipients in the local marketplace.
• Cash can help boost non-monetary outcomes. For instance, cash has been used to boost a range of health and education outcomes, the empowerment of women and girls, and even the avoidance of early marriage.
• Finally, cash can help benchmark other poverty reduction projects and programs. Simply put, cash offers a way to assess the relative efficiency and effectiveness of different approaches in generating desired outcomes.

WHEN

There is increasing agreement in identifying when the relevant preconditions are in place for cash transfers. Multiple ingredients are essential. First, even if cash is handed out as physical currency or debit cards, this still requires local staff and logistical infrastructure for targeting, verification, and monitoring purposes. Once cards are in place they can be readily replenished. Second, transfer systems simply require adequate financing, either through domestic public revenues or international contributions.

Third, a sound financial ecosystem is needed to support transfers and deposits, especially for mobile money. The rapid diffusion of mobile telephony, in even the poorest parts of the world, offers unprecedented opportunities to reach physically disparate communities at very low cost. But doing so requires modern financial regulatory structures and appropriate technical alignment between banking and telecom sectors, alongside appropriate safeguards for consumers.

Cash can be appropriate in situations where it is physically difficult to reach the poorest and those in need, including fragile environments and in states wracked by conflict. Food convoys may not be able to get through a violence-affected region, but if the target population has cell phones or debit cards, and there is adequate market infrastructure, cash can be sent instantaneously so that people can buy food. In this respect, cash can help mitigate particular consumption constraints, such as insufficient income to purchase essential goods and services. But it is not necessarily sufficient to overcome specific problems or imperfections in a market itself, ranging from physical hurdles in supply chains to information gaps or underlying capital constraints.

HOW

Successful cash transfer programs are nothing like the proverbial helicopter drops of money from the sky. But there is still huge scope for research and debate on how best to deliver them. In practical terms, cash can be delivered on its own, as cash-only; as cash-plus-intervention (like grants alongside training programs); or as cash-upon-conditions (like family grants in return for children attending school).

In urgent humanitarian situations where a basic market ecosystem still functions, there is widespread support for cash-only as an immediate way to support basic consumption needs, even if not services like health and education. At the other end of the spectrum, in non-humanitarian situations, there is no clear consensus. Nor is there enough knowledge on the optimal composition and timing of actual transfers. When, for example, is a transfer’s arrival most helpful for a household, and how might transfers be spread over distinct time horizons to achieve various ends?

Another central debate hinges on targeting versus universality: Should cash be prioritized for specific populations or groups living below the line of extreme poverty, or should it be delivered to all citizens in countries with extreme poverty? Part of the issue here hinges on tradeoffs among the budgetary costs of widespread access and the administrative costs of targeting people in need. Much of the issue also hinges on the politics of social protection and social change. Policymakers need to make their own judgments regarding the roll-out of new policies and which sequence of actions might generate public support as opposed to resentment.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

If the world is to succeed in ending extreme poverty by 2030, there is a good chance that cash transfers will play a role in the final stretch. In fact, there will likely be many final stretches spanning diverse contexts, where different forms of transfers could help tackle different forms of local constraints. At a minimum, cash and other interventions should be held to the same standards: what are the impacts, over what time periods, for which populations, and at what cost?

With only 12 years to the deadline, there is urgency for expanded and large-scale experimentation to advance the many underlying debates—the why, when, how, and even where of the diverse cash transfer toolkit. Leading multilateral institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations system can play a pivotal role in guiding these efforts. In doing so, these organizations can help spearhead collective global efforts in delivering on their own headline objectives.