Development & EA - December 2024
Dodgy data, more cost effective cash and megaports
Top Posts
Nigeria's official population (~230 million) may be significantly inflated and could be closer to 170-180 million. (I spent a few days looking into this as it sounded unlikely, but have become more convinced over time)
Oliver Kim - How Much Should We Trust Developing Country GDP?
A consortium of research institutions announced a $75 million partnership to contribute evidence to USAID over the next five years, aiming to improve cost-effectiveness
Ken Opalo - The World Bank and other IFIs should get serious about climate adaptation in low-income countries
GiveWell now estimate that GiveDirectly’s flagship cash program is 3 to 4 times more cost-effective than previously estimated
Peru’s new megaport is poised to transform global trade as China’s gateway to South America, cutting shipping times from China in half, by up to 20 days
Events
5th December - AIM Connect Online
5th December - Powering systems change: Bold climate philanthropy for 2025 and beyond - Giving Green
5th December - The Monsoon Revolution in Bangladesh - are there lessons for future mobilisations against state capture and corruption?
5th December - Financing Primary Health Care: Setting Priorities in a Shifting Funding Landscape
9th December - Unlocking Development Finance for Solutions to Internal Displacement in the Context of Disasters and Climate Change
10-11th December - Stanford AI+HEALTH Conference
Jobs
Wellcome Foundation - Associate Director, Strategy
WAM Foundation - Program Associate
Founders Pledge - Cause Area Lead - Global Health and Development
Center for Global Development - Research Assistant
IISS - Research Associate, Conflict, Security and Development Programme
Health Progress Hub - Fellows will work on real-world problems after receiving a 4-week health policy advocacy course
Taimaka Field Research Fellowship Expression of Interest
Foreign Aid
CGD - The Challenge of Localisation
The impact of independence on reported aid performance
Norway can, Norway should: Take the lead in halving premature death by 2050
Norway has pledged to increase its contribution to the World Bank's IDA by 50% compared to its contribution to the previous IDA replenishment
The Republic of Korea with a 45% increase in its contribution to the IDA
UK doubles aid for Sudan and neighbouring countries
Economic Growth
VoxDev - Where to find development economics resources: Newsletters, articles, podcasts & videos
Uganda’s Bets for Growth - Chinese investment, oil and EV manufacturing
Interview with Oliver Kim - Learning from East Asia
Nigeria’s economy grew by 3.46% in the third quarter, surpassing expectations
CGD - The Global Poverty Line: Past, Present and Future
Is China’s new 100% duty-free trade pledge for African LDCs a big deal?
A conversation with Jishnu Das and James Habyarimana on Education, Health and Economic Development
Namibia seeks to double GDP growth from oil and gas finds
Lant Pritchett - The Case for Economic Growth as the Path to Better Human Wellbeing
Recordings are now available from The Growth Summit in DC
Governance
Civil Service Careers in LMICs: A Guide to High-Impact Careers
Interventions to improve the effectiveness of government procurement
Evidence-informed policymaking grants (up to £150k) - The British Academy is inviting proposals related to evidence-informed policy-making in Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Malaysia, Philippines, South Africa, Turkey, Thailand, Vietnam and/or Least Developed Countries
Nigeria plans $28 billion spending for 2025 budget
Rwanda set to help digitise Guinea’s public procurement
Ghanaian development bank accused of blowing World Bank & European cash “like water”
Development Finance
China, Indonesia seal $10 billion in deals focused on green energy and tech
Kenya in talks for fresh $750m from World Bank, $200m from AfDB
DevEx
What’s in the G20 road map to transform multilateral development banks?
In a bid to increase private capital flows to the countries where it works the World Bank Group is streamlining and scaling its guarantee business
US cancels $1.1 billion of Somalia’s debt
Startups & Business
Pakistan’s Entrepreneurial Future: Can Lessons be Learned from Indonesia?
Three new African healthcare funds announced in October. Also includes a round of health grant opportunities
UK announces $5.2m fund to mobilise up-to $300m of finance through FSD Africa to support SMEs to deliver jobs and growth
Nodem: liquidity for emerging market VCs
Interview with Karim Beguir, Co-Founder and CEO of InstaDeep
Cargon: Flexport for Central Asia
In Francophone Africa there has been an eightfold increase in VC deal volume between 2012-2020 and 2021-2024 H1, compared to just over a twofold increase across the continent
Businessman Ashish Thakkar and Blend Financial Services have teamed up with the aim of launching a $250 million fund aimed at African technology companies
Why entrepreneurship is even more important in crisis-prone regions
Paper.id overcame Indonesia’s love of free Excel invoicing to grow 100x
Chinese EV makers look to Africa as rivalry with US, Europe heats up
AI, Data & Development
Science - Predicting poverty and wealth from mobile phone metadata
New data shows the number of new mobile internet users is stalling (Or maybe those countries have lower populations than official metrics)
Imperial College London has launched its first African hub in Ghana, becoming the first UK university to have a permanent base focused on science and technology in Africa
Rest of World - AI is making Philippine call center work more efficient, for better and worse
WhatsApp-powered bank card launched in South Africa
Orange to expand open-source AI models to African regional languages
Courts in Buenos Aires are using ChatGPT to draft rulings
The UNICEF Venture Fund is offering $100k funding for early-stage, for-profit technology start-ups that can improve the lives of children
South Africa - The Wits MIND Institute has been launched, focused on fundamental AI research
The UN’s AI for Good Summit is on the 8-11th of July 2025
Google - Health AI Developer Foundations is a new suite of open weight models to help developers more easily build AI models for healthcare applications
Charities
Huw - I’m joining Kaya Guides because I think we can make psychotherapy 5 times cheaper
80,000 Hours podcast - Sarah Eustis-Guthrie on why she shut down her charity, and why more founders should follow her lead
Concentric Policies - Marginal Funding for The Single Best Health Policy in the World
Forecast with GiveWell - Metaculus and GiveWell invite you to forecast expected grant outcomes
Interview with Rena Greifinger - MD of the Maverick Collective by Population Services International
Rethink Priorities - GH&D Department - Impact Update
GiveWell - What We Learned From Red Teaming Our Top Charities
A Visit to Suvita in India
Spring Impacts - How 28 leading non-profits secured funding
Infrastructure
Ethiopia - Parliament approves $738 million loan to South Sudan for cross-border highway
Surprise Solar Boom in Pakistan helps millions, but harms grid
The 35,000 MW dream and the Indonesian energy trajectory
The case for and against nuclear in Africa
Malawi launch the construction of 20 MW battery energy storage system
MTN Group extends 5G technology to Benin and Congo-Brazzaville
African Development Fund releases $81 million for construction of road linking Guinea and Senegal
The Tanger Med Port in Morocco is to be expanded. It’s the busiest port in the Mediterranean, with capacity for nine million twenty-foot equivalent containers a year being expanded to allow another one million by 2025
Starlink roll-out across Africa could transform digital health services
Between 2000 and 2020, access to safe water in China increased from 46% to 91%
India
Rural India is now spending more on non-food goods and services than on food
AI for Healthcare: Understanding Data Supply Chain and Auditability in India
Vox - Why is it still so hard to breathe in India and Pakistan?
Rukmini - Services have dominated India's economic shift, now accounting for over half of the GDP. But the jobs have not moved in quite the same way
Pandemics & Biosecurity
How Our World in Data became a global data source on COVID-19
Pandemic Fund raises $982 million from governments and $1.8 billion from international partner organisations
Scientists have detected resistance to artemisinin, a key malaria drug, for the first time among children in Africa
Zambia signs landmark agreement to manufacture cholera vaccine
UN authorizes first mpox vaccine for children in an attempt to control Congo outbreak
How to Build a Flying Ebola Hospital
Nature - An advocacy group is pushing for more ‘human challenge’ trials to spur vaccine discovery. Following COVID-19 and Zika studies, hepatitis C could be next
Lead
CGD - Microplastics and PFAS Are Dominating Headlines, But Lead is Probably Worse
Lead levels in Indian Turmeric exceed safe limits by 200 times
Evidence of turmeric adulteration with lead chromate across South Asia
National Blood Lead Level Survey in Bhutan reveals that 3 out of 4 children tested have blood lead levels that poses serious health risks
Agriculture
Africa Agriculture Status Report
The teff market value is projected to increase from $1.5 billion in 2022 to $3.5 billion by 2030 (due to increasing demand for gluten-free products)
A deep dive into global trade of plantain chips and surprising lack of African exports
Global agriculture fund GAFSP embarks on new replenishment model. The multilateral fund, which works on hunger and malnutrition, is seeking to raise its profile after losing financial support from the U.S
Agriculture technology startups in Africa have received $179 million in investment so far this year — the lowest annual amount since 2020
Health
Measles cases rose 20% last year, driven by a lack of vaccine coverage in the world's poorest countries, and conflict
Deena Mousa went on The Economist’s podcast to discuss the re-emergence of iodine deficiency
CGD - A Time for Change: Reforming the Global Health Architecture
Diabetes rates have doubled worldwide in the last 30 years
Delhi's air pollution turns 'severe' as temperatures, wind speeds drop
Saloni Dattani and Veronika Samborska - HPV vaccination: How the world can eliminate cervical cancer
Environment
Will carbon markets enabled by COP29 really mean $80 billion for Africa?
Solar Geoengineering: The Global South’s Stake in a High-Stakes Debate
Indonesia’s Prabowo vows to retire all coal plants in 15 years
China’s Belt and Road is back - but smaller, and greener
Adaptation Finance and The Multilateral Development Banks: From Concepts to Practice
InnerSpace will release Geothermal Exploration Opportunities Map modules for India and Indonesia in later 2024, followed by Brazil in early 2025
Hannah Ritchie - What’s the impact of AI on energy demand?
Corruption, Conflict & Democracy
The Structural Transformation Case For Peacekeeping
A surge in illegal gold mining that has reduced Ghana’s cocoa production and contaminated water supplies
Innovation & Metascience
How to get involved in metascience. Podcast with Heidi Williams, Paul Niehaus and Matt Clancy
Evidence on the effects of training programs for scientists in LMICs
Billions of people suffer from anemia, but there are cheap ways to reduce this
Google - 9 ways AI is advancing science
Systematic review - How are health care applications of LLMs currently evaluated
Effective Giving
Effective SDG’s - your gateway to navigating the landscape of effective charities tackling the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals
GWWC's 2024 evaluations of evaluators
Announcing Sjir Hoeijmakers as the new CEO of Giving What We Can
Migration
The Mariel Boatlift - What happens when a city adds 125,000 immigrants almost overnight?
How do countries measure immigration, and how accurate is this data?
Other Links
Impact Horizon - Professional community for impact driven consultants
Hi-Med interview with Akhil Bansal - Effective interventions in reducing violence against women
The Lancet - Service coverage for major depressive disorder: estimated rates of minimally adequate treatment for 204 countries and territories in 2021
Alex Tabarrok - Human Challenge Trials Aren’t Riskier than RCTs
Pulse 2024: Awareness and perceptions of effective altruism (among US adults)
Joey - Expectations Scale with Scale – We Should Be More Scope-Sensitive in Our Funding
Good News
Poverty in the Latin America and Caribbean region has fallen to its lowest point, with a reduction of 4.7 percentage points in the regional poverty rate between 2021 and 2023
Panama, Kyrgyzstan, Uganda, Burundi, Sri Lanka and the Czech Republic have said they will totally prohibit corporal punishment; while the Gambia and Nigeria have promised to end it in schools
New HIV infection rates in sub-Saharan African countries have plunged more than half since their 1995 peak