February 2026
AI, Aid and AGOA
Top Posts
Ken Opalo - Africa in 2026 - The 11 trends & factors that will shape African affairs
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argues that AI’s rapid expansion threatens to permanently displace human labour across all skill levels, necessitating real-time economic monitoring and radical policy interventions
He also discusses other topics but I’ve linked to the section related to economic disruption
Todd Moss - What is Think Tank impact? (And what is it not?)
Impact is defined by specific policy mechanisms and real world rule changes, not by internal outputs like reports or media mentions, which are merely tactical tools
US lawmakers have agreed on a $50b foreign assistance package for 2026, a 16% cut, but less severe then the previously proposed ~47% reduction
David Oks
GDP numbers in poor countries are usually fake
A lot of population numbers are fake
I agree with most of this but I don’t think it all evens out globally
US House passes 3 year extension of African Growth and Opportunity Act (and passed the Senate as a 1 year extension before going back to the House)
3rd February update - Deal is tentative at best
Jobs
Against Malaria Foundation - Software Engineer
3 year program by the Mercatus Center designed to identify and fund early career professionals to implement state level economic reforms in India
Learning Lead, EdTech Investments
Product Lead, EdTech Investments
Talent Acquisition Partner
Senior Associate, Philanthropy
LEEP - Strategic Communications Specialist
CGD - Senior Program Manager (Market shaping accelerator)
GiveWell
Probably Good Job Board
Aid
The Circle Foundation and the UN announced an expansion of blockchain based aid to 15 UN agencies
The US and Côte d’Ivoire signed a $937m health memorandum of understanding requiring $450m in domestic investment to transition health programmes toward self-reliance
UN, US sign $2b humanitarian funding agreement for 17 crisis-hit countries
Ken Opalo - The international development community isn’t adapting fast enough to official aid cuts
Semafor - Trump advisers refine their Africa strategy
Focus on critical minerals and supply chain resilience rather than attempting to match China’s infrastructure spending
Semafor - The flaws of ‘trade not aid’
Sects, Money and Global Health - How foreign aid can help countries develop systems of local health research and knowledge…and not inadvertently create an elite cabal
Think Global Health - 1 year post-USAID, global health funding stuck in limbo
Growth
VoxDev and Oliver Hanney are launching a new podcast “Ideas in Development”
Vietnam’s economy: The remarkable story of the last 50 years
The nuts & bolts of economic growth - with Kartik Akileswaran, the co-founder of growth teams
Unlocking high-value agriculture in Peru
Economists vs Technologists on AI - with Deena Mousa (from CoGi)
World Bank
Despite steep tariff increases and high policy uncertainty, global GDP growth in 2025 is set to come in at 2.7%
Unlocking women’s economic potential: Cutting edge evidence from Latin America and the Caribbean
How Côte d’Ivoire rebuilt itself after chaos, and quietly became West Africa’s most dependable growth story
Rohit Shinde
Budget 2026 (India): Good for 8% growth, bad for 12% growth
The puzzle of Pakistan’s poverty
Is India following China’s path to prosperity?
What are some of Colombia’s problems?
UNU WIDER - Trade in Tasks
Argue that understanding trade, growth and development today requires a shift in perspective, from what countries export to what they do within global value chains
Prosperiti Insights - Markets without prices - Price caps can reduce access to third-party markets in India
India’s economy is projected to grow at 7.4% in 2026, 0.9% higher than last year
Work, Labour & Employment
World Bank
New guidebook presents evidence based strategies for designing effective labour programs
The most effective programs in LMICs deliver earnings and employment improvements four to five times greater than the average
How Brazil is redefining the first step onto the jobs ladder
VoxDev - Why is female labour force participation still so low in Egypt?
Windfall Trust
AI may break the capital-labour balance that has kept inequality in check
Bottlenecks may protect labour power, but still won’t prevent a “Great Divergence”
Health
US completes withdrawal from World Health Organization
Global Health Insights
Rowena Luk - The state of healthcare investments in Africa in 2025
Saloni Dattani - The golden age of vaccine development
Novo Nordisk launches weight loss pill in US
Set to accelerate a price war, given that it is priced significantly lower than the jab-based versions
Hannah Ritchie
Child deaths outnumber homicides in the United States, but get far less public attention
Diabetes is growing much faster in South Asia and Africa than in Europe or North America
Malaysia is an outlier: richer than its neighbours but doing worse on child nutrition
Governance & Policy
Tinubu has signed four laws to overhaul Nigeria’s tax system, introducing a 30% capital gains tax and expanding the tax base to reduce the nation’s fiscal reliance on oil exports
Tax dealings – state and private sector relations in Somalia
Rachel Glennerster - Reflections on the World Economic Forum: AI, Geopolitics, and Biothreats
DevEx - Taxing smarter is the key to thriving in an era of declining aid
WEF - The Global Cooperation Barometer reveals strong pressures on multilateral institutions are causing global cooperation to evolve rather than stop
While multilateral forms of cooperation declined, smaller coalitions of countries and companies were instrumental in maintaining overall cooperation levels
Trade
DevEx - The US Trade and Development Agency has survived development cuts by pivoting toward national security and private-sector trade
India and EU announce a free trade deal affecting billions
Mexico’s new tariffs hit Shein and millions of local resellers
China’s $113b free-trade experiment on Hainan Island
EU countries approve Mercosur trade deal after 25 years of talks
Set to create the world’s largest free trade area, covering ~700m people
African trade has been vastly underestimated
Development Finance
IMF approves $442m financing package for the DRC
Zimbabwe has year-on-year inflation falling into single digits, hitting 4.1% for the first time since 1997
Grieve Chelwa - Zambia ditches the IMF...for now
China pulls back on funding African projects
Emerging Tech & Development
GiveWell - AI red teaming at GiveWell: what we’ve learned (and where we’d welcome your input)
Schmidt Sciences awards ~$3m to study AI’s impact on jobs
AI for Good: Cross-sector analysis
Alex Imas - What is the impact of AI on productivity? - Reconciling the micro and the macro evidence
OpenAI have launched ChatGPT Health - Designed for health and wellness
Gates Foundation and OpenAI launch $50m AI partnership to strengthen healthcare systems in Africa
Probably Good - Economics, biology, and anti-malarial apps: An interview with Arnon Houri-Yafin
Evidence & Data
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde - The 2024 Revision of World Population Prospects from the UN Population Division has serious credibility problems, both in data accuracy and in projection plausibility
Nature - No meta-analytical effect of economic inequality on well-being or mental health
Introducing the World Bank Land Data Map
Have environmental microplastics levels been overestimated?
VoxDev - Common misperceptions: What people get wrong about the world and why it matters
Ipsos - 71% of global citizens are optimistic 2026 will be better
Across 30 countries
The Economist - Humanity will shrink, far sooner than you think
Startups & Business
Africa Investment Report 2025
African startups raised $3.8b, a 32% increase in funding volume
Realistic Optimist
Building digital trust in analogue markets
Electrifying last-mile delivery in Kenya and Rwanda
Digital infrastructure for MENA’s payroll & HR
African tech firms normalise debt as capital source
Moniepoint’s transaction volume jumps to 14 billion, worth $294b
Airtel Africa hits 179m customers, surpasses $210b in mobile money transactions
The collapse of KOKO, Kenya’s bioethanol clean cooking start up
Infrastructure
Brian Potter - Stagnant construction productivity is a worldwide problem
Proposed rail investments across Africa more than tripled in 2025
Semafor - Kenya launches $824m pipeline IPO amid transparency fears
Madagascar lifts 16-year ban on new mining permits
Agriculture & Food
VoxDev - How climate change could trap workers in agriculture
Thousands of Kenya’s smallholder coffee farmers risk losing EU market as deforestation law takes effect
Will genetically modified crops be adopted in agriculture in India?
How to raise agtech funding in 2026
For more African agriculture news check out Ag Safari by Hannatu Asheolge
Energy & Climate
Ghana settles $1.47b energy sector debt to restore power stability
The majority of oil marketers are no longer importing petrol into Nigeria as the Dangote refinery is now providing adequate supply
Acumen announced its Hardest-to-Reach initiative secured a total of $250m to expand clean energy access across sub-Saharan Africa
Indonesia’s shift to cleaner cooking fuels has greatly improved air quality and health
Senegal plans to connect 3,637 additional localities to the national electricity grid in 2026, expanding access to 113,654 households
W. Gyude Moore - Who designs Africa’s power future? The missing politics in Mission 300
Nat Bullard - Annual presentation on the state of decarbonisation
Conflict, Corruption & Crime
Growing evidence of countrywide massacres in Iran
The US continues to move assets near to Iran
Syria’s government says it has struck ceasefire deal with Kurdish-led forces
Fatima Abo Alasrar - Yemen’s South between the Gulf Rift and the Southern Cause - The STC gambit collapsed in five days. The question now is what survives it
Innovation & Metascience
Stuart Buck
Back and forth on the value of replication
Update on metascience-related language in the NIH budget
Peer Review 2027: Scenarios for academic publishing in the age of AI
Is replication pro-progress or anti-risk?
Abi Olvera - Aviation’s safety culture is weird and could make drugs so much better
Forecasting for scientific & technological exploration
Argues for bringing public, systematic forecasting into scientific planning and resource allocation
Charities & Foundations
MacKenzie Scott had a twelvefold increase (from $94m in 2024 to $1.2b in 2025) supporting organisations working in LMICs, targeting climate resilience and grassroots empowerment
Raising Impact - “Aims to maximise the impact of philanthropic capital in India and across Asia. We provide analytically anchored, regionally rooted, bespoke philanthropic advisory service to bridge the persistent gap between philanthropic intent and measurable outcomes”
GiveWell podcast
Testing our assumptions through local insights
Evolving our research approach for greater impact
CEARCH - Deep report on effective giving in Asia
Joey Savoie - Are philanthropic advisors too specialised or not specialised enough? I think both
Nick Laing has started a blog - 5 Ways to better charity work in 2026
Other Links
Ben Yeoh podcast with Deena Mousa - How much is a life worth? Effective philanthropy, AI for good & global health
Alexander Kustov - The uncomfortable truths about immigration
Hannah Ritchie - Many people are individually optimistic but think the world is falling apart
Rose M. Mutiso - Africa treats its diaspora like a bank account, not a brain trust
Alice Evans - Cultural leapfrogging: swiping past tradition
Authorities in Togo are investigating lead contamination from battery recyclers
Book Summary: Seeing Like A State by James C Scott
Good News
Global population requiring interventions against trachoma falls below 100 million for the first time
There were 1.5 billion people estimated to be at risk in 2002, dropping to 97 million as of November 2025, a 94% reduction
Uzbekistan maternal mortality has declined by nearly 4.5 times over the last 30 years
Pakistan - Stunting among children under two has decreased by 6.4%, while within the 6-month age group, stunting has declined by 20%
Globally, 2025 had one of the lowest annual death rates from extreme weather in history
Poverty drops to 17.3% in Buenos Aires City
Middle class Mexicans now outnumber those in poverty
For more good news check out Fix The News & Human Progress
I wait for this every month. Thanks for your work!