July 2025
Gavi funding, China removing tariffs and global growth forecasts
Top Posts
Warren Buffett announces $6 billion in donations to 5 foundations, with ~76% going to the Gates Foundation
Novartis set to double investment in NTD-related R&D to $490 million
Nick Laing - ‘Technical Support Units’ - A Dubious GiveWell Grant?
Universal semaglutide access could save 28 million lives in 5 years
Gavi secured more than $9b towards a target budget of $11.9b for its next strategic period (2026–2030)
Including $4.5b in complementary financing from development finance institutions
The Gates Foundation committed $1.6b to support Gavi
World Bank - Trade and policy uncertainty are expected to drive global growth down this year to its slowest pace since 2008 outside of outright global recessions
A new study in The Lancet estimates that USAID spending saved over 91 million lives in the past 21 years, and that the cuts could kill 14 million by 2030
Nick Laing initial hot-take - “It seems borderline implausible that USAID spending has reduced under 5 mortality by 1/3. With so many other factors like development/growth, government programs, medical innovation not funded by USAID (artesunate came on the scene after 2001!), 10x-100x more effective AID like Gates, AMF, etc how could this be?”
CGD have a lower estimate - A Million Lives at Risk?
World Bank to resume Uganda funding after halt over anti-LGBT law
Ethiopia earned $8.1b in exports this year, $3b above target and double last year’s, likely due to floating the currency and more trade being recorded properly
CGD - Charting the Fallout of Aid Cuts: Which Countries Will be Hit Hardest, as Multiple Donors Cut Budgets?
China’s zero-tariff offer for 53 African countries (Bright Simons - Africa's strategic economic importance to China has peaked)
Jobs
Evidence Action - CEO
The Clinton Health Access Initiative - Director, Artificial Intelligence
CGD
Policy Fellow – Lead Exposure - DC and London
Ansh - Chief Operating Officer
Notify Health - Founder's Associate
Gates Foundation
Deputy Director, Tuberculosis Vaccines
Strategy Officer, Malaria
J-PAL Global - Policy Associate
The Development Innovation Lab
Policy Associate, Agriculture
Manager/Assistant Director - Human Centered Weather Forecasts Initiative
Ambitious Impact - Founding to Give Incubation Programme
Launch a high-growth company to donate to high-impact charities
Lead Exposure Elimination Project
Head of Communications
Türkiye Program Consultant
GiveDirectly - Senior Software Engineer
Program Officer - Livelihoods
Strategic Communications Manager
Talent Acquisition Specialist - Research
Researcher
Manager, Gift Processing
Probably Good Job Board
Events
14th July - Can a Global Initiative on Health Taxes Finance Development? - Virtual, CGD
September - Abundance - DC
Aid
IRC - We Just Lost $54 Billion. Now What?
GiveWell Podcast - Forecasting the Future of Global Health Funding, with Elie Hassenfeld and Alex Cohen
CGD
Can We Benchmark Development Agencies on Impact?
USAID’s Role in Global Health Supply Chain Programs and Implications of Aid Cuts
Project Resource Optimization have partnered with Founders Pledge and The Life You Can Save to launch the Rapid Response Fund - to keep critical programs running
John-Arne Røttingen, CEO of Wellcome - Global health can't run on charity, now is the time for reform
Politico - The White House is trying to assure Republicans wary of plans to slash global AIDS funding that they will spare some prevention programs
IDInsight - Managing through the aid freeze: strategies for doing more with less
The Livelihood Impact Fund seeks to meaningfully and durably improve the lives of the global poor
David Lammy & Muhammad Ali Pate - International development is evolving from handouts to partnerships
The GPI - (US) Abundance > (US) Aid
Transfer fees for money sent home by international migrants were nearly as high as US foreign aid in 2023
The Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation, over the last 3 years, has doubled its annual budget to €708m in grants and added ~€400m in annual lending capacity
Japan has more than doubled its foreign aid budget in just five years
Growth
The World Bank has updated its global poverty lines
International poverty line increased from $2.15 (2017 prices) to $3 (2021 prices)
More people escaped extreme poverty than previously thought, but global poverty is higher than estimated
World Bank - Côte D’Ivoire’s land reforms are unlocking jobs and growth - a fivefold increase in the number of land certificates delivered in five years compared to the previous two decades
Alex Tabarrok - No Exit, No Entry - Policies designed to protect workers often harm them by reducing job creation and trapping resources in unproductive firms
India's rigid firing rules cause many firms to stay under 100 employees to avoid compliance, creating a bifurcated market with workers either in the artificially smaller formal sector or in the larger informal sector with no protection
Yaw - India’s Comeback Story: Gold, Crisis, & the IMF Deal
Botswana to cut its 2025 economic growth forecast to almost zero amid prolonged diamond market downturn
VoxDev
How Special Economic Zones promote household wealth in Africa
Evidence from Mexico suggests that carefully designed outsourcing regulation can significantly improve wages without reducing employment
Zambia - economy expected to grow at least 6% in 2025
World Bank - How can Vietnam improve business regulations and spur productivity growth?
Nigeria has massive non-consumption
59% in multidimensional poverty
The average household spends more than 50% of its income on food
There is extremely low productivity, minimal financial services ($281 per capita vs $5,450 in South Africa) and severely limited mobility and electricity access
FT - Vietnam can escape the middle-income trap
Governance & Policy
There have been more than 60 US initiatives on Africa since the 1990s. Few have survived
UNU-WIDER - How Indonesia transformed its position in the nickel value chain through strategic industrial policy, moving from raw material exports to downstream processing
World Bank - 21st-Century Africa: Governance and Growth (via the Africa Brief)
90% of the world’s extreme poor may live in Africa by 2030, with 83% of employment in the informal sector
Internet coverage (3G) reached 84% in sub-Saharan Africa by 2023
An example of how AI may be different to previous tech innovations for government - “Frontline staff can now evaluate tools on their problems for a few dollars in API fees, potentially breaking the old ‘procure and pray’ cycle”
Nigeria’s Tinubu signed four tax reform bills into law, aiming to decrease reliance on commodity sales
Kenya doubles down on labour export plan, aiming to grow the number of jobs secured abroad to 1.76 million from 400k
Türkiye is stepping up its influence in west Africa
Bright Simons
Ghana is the world's 2nd largest cocoa producer, but you can go to jail for buying fresh cocoa or the beans
African governments and institutions have a habit of underinvesting in critical systems with the easy justification that they are not "essential enough". And yet many of the supposedly more essential stuff - like schools, water pumps, and roads - can't be developed at scale without such systems functioning
Ken Opalo - On the Kenyan economy under William Ruto’s presidency
Can discretion in corrupt bureaucracies reward talent? Evidence from Pakistan’s civil service suggests merit can prevail, when incentives align
IGC - Two digital platforms launched to enhance access to policy-relevant data
Bangladesh Social Protection Dashboard
A single condition under night shift regulations increases a woman’s employment cost by 86%. Across 17 Indian states, employers must meet 19+ extra conditions to hire women for night shifts. Well-intentioned protective laws create economic incentives for employers to avoid hiring women altogether
VoxDev - Win-win policies: Examples from economic research
Cleaner brick kilns lower costs and pollution
Transparency in mobile money markets
Improving conditions and incentives for workers can also benefit businesses
The average amount of taxes, charges and fees for international departures from Africa is $68, twice the average for Europe/Middle East
Trade
Côte d’Ivoire launches West Africa’s first agricultural commodities exchange
The Economist on the Ivory Coast's strategy to move up the cashew value chain by processing nuts domestically rather than exporting them raw
The Global Prosperity Institute - The real "tariff men" are in LMICs
World Bank - Global Economy Faces Trade-Related Headwinds
Development Finance
CGD examines how the 40 most important development finance providers perform in terms of both the quantity and quality of their contributions
DevEx
What a 3.5% tax on remittances could do to LMICs
What is Financing for Development 4 and why is it a big deal?
What happened at the last FfD conference, and what has changed since?
Sevilla reporter's notebook Day 1: FfD4 kicks off
ICC, which represents 45 million businesses and has observer status at the UNs General Assembly, accredited 75 businesses to come to FfD4 but only 25 showed up
CGD
CGD and the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development
Which Countries Will Be Hit Hardest by the US Remittance Tax?
A New Compact for Health Financing: Donor Priority Setting
China's Investment Pivot and Africa’s Industrial Prospects - from large scale infrastructure toward small scale manufacturing
According to the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, the average cost of sending remittances to Africa is 7.4%, even before new taxes kick in
The African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) has been downgraded by Fitch Ratings to a notch above junk status
The Chinese FDI Boom in Africa That Wasn’t
A guide to how regional multilateral development banks hire
The African Credit Rating Agency is launching later this year following growing discontent over the credibility of the ratings by Fitch, Moody’s and S&P
Foreign direct investment has weakened, dropping to ~2% of GDP in recent years, less than half of the peak of ~5% in 2008
Africa’s share of global FDI doubled to 6%
DevEx - Blended finance shrinks slightly in 2024, and aid cuts cloud its future
123 deals worth $18.3b in 2024 (down from $23b in 2023)
Nearly half of deals were climate-related
Emerging Tech & Development
Ben Hyman - Will AI kill all the jobs?
Anthropic launches new effort to study AI’s economic impact
African blockchain currency exchange aims to break dollar dominance
Demand comes from international companies that do business across Africa and struggle to move money
Luis Garicano - Epoch AI doubles down on prediction AI will drive 20%+ annual GDP growth
Economists remain sceptical
FT - How stablecoins are entering the financial mainstream
Cross-border payments (faster, cheaper than correspondent banking)
Dollar access in countries with weak currencies/capital controls
Forecasts of $2 trillion in circulation by 2028 from ~$250b currently
VoxDev - AI and development economics: Early evidence and how to keep up
China has a new wave of startups promising to automate everyday tasks better than chatbots
The Lagos Identity Project has been launched, a digital house-numbering system designed to enhance property identification, service delivery and tax evasion
CGD - Powering the Next Generation of Government Portals with Generative AI
Frontier Tech Hub
How can AI help us improve aid effectiveness?
Using AI to accelerate access to justice in Malawi
Ghana and UAE sign $1b deal to build tech hub (although these often seem to go nowhere and you never hear of them again)
OpenAI selects 11 Indian non-profits for its accelerator program
GoogleDeepMind - How we're supporting better tropical cyclone prediction
In Brazil pharmacists are using AI to process prescriptions
“Andrade welcomed new software that flags potentially problematic prescriptions and digs up the data to help him decide if they are safe. It has quadrupled his capacity to clear prescriptions and has caught more than 50 errors in the last few months”
Clinicians can ‘chat’ with medical records through new AI software, ChatEHR
Microsoft opens AI store for healthcare developers
World Bank - How AI can support anticipatory action to address forced displacement
GiveDirectly - How AI helped send cash just before floods hit in Nigeria
Researchers are developing their own language models designed for local tongues, cultural nuance and digital independence
Rose Mutiso has launched The African Tech Futures Lab, advising decision makers on energy, climate and AI
VoxDev - Reading between the lines: Leveraging news data for AI-powered food insecurity forecasts
Startups & Business
Wave raises $137m to expand mobile money services across Africa
Wave also received authorisation to operate in Cameroon
They currently serve 20 million monthly active users through a network of ~150,000 agents and 3,000 employees across the continent
Top fintech cities in Africa - 2025 ranking
Lagos leads with 503 startups, $6b+ in funding
Nairobi hosts 210 startups, $4.6b raised
Cairo ranks third with 194 startups, but leads in capital intensity with $10b
Rational Optimist
Expatriate As a Service - What makes a startup “African”?
Ethiopia central bank says foreign banks can now apply for licences
VC money is fueling a global boom in worker surveillance tech
Transsion wheels into Africa’s EV market - The Chinese company behind 50% of Africa’s smartphone sales now wants to dominate its roads
The African Expansion Starter Pack - What it takes to go pan-African
Infrastructure
W. Gyude Moore - Moves in African Infrastructure - Q2 2025
Morocco has invested $728m in a ‘water highway’ project that redirects excess water from the Sebou River to supply drinking water to Rabat and Casablanca
MTN Group and Airtel Africa have struck a deal to share mobile phone network infrastructure in Uganda and Nigeria
Morocco plans to invest $1.55b to build a new terminal at Casablanca airport
The IFC has invested $100m in sub-Saharan data centre company Raxio Group
What if sewers, not subways, are key to thriving cities? - New research shows just 1% boost in sewer access can raise urban density by 6% without displacing residents
Morocco secures $282m Chinese battery plant
Iraq - $930m World Bank project to extend and modernise railways
Vizier - Syria unlocks a new age of middle eastern rail
Tanzania opens region’s longest bridge (3km)
Sierra Leone to launch first 5G network powered by renewable energy
Ethiopia’s EV Pivot: How One of Africa’s Least Motorised Countries Became Its Most Electrified
World Bank grants South Africa a $1.5b loan for infrastructure upgrades
Lead
Marcus A. Davis - How My Chicago Childhood Lead Exposure Connects Me with One in Three Kids Today
Clare Donaldson & Lauren Gilbert & James Hu - The end of lead
“Lead has been all but eliminated in most of the developed world. Doing the same for the rest of the world might not be difficult”
SSIR - How to build a proven model [Sentinel Cities] into a global network for lead poisoning prevention
Vaccines & Pandemics
The WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence has been launched in Germany
How the malaria vaccine came to the world’s most mosquito-bitten district
WHO - Ensuring sustainable financing and equitable access to novel TB vaccines
Semafor - Gene drive and mosquitoes: Turning a deadly foe into an ally
OWID - Smallpox declined gradually, until the WHO coordinated the global effort to eradicate it
Health
CHAI secures price reduction for sickle cell disease diagnosis
Africa Health Ventures - Health Financing Beyond Aid
P Singer
The future of global health is innovation
Noncommunicable Diseases UN resolution without GLP-1 (‘obesity’) drugs is useless
Sonia with a health tech overview - Next-gen surgery, AI-driven oncology and blood tests for Alzheimer’s
Nearly 20% of cancer drugs defective in 4 African nations
The rise of life expectancy
Though infant mortality is a major part of the story, life expectancy has greatly increased even beyond infancy and childhood
Rwanda hopes to ditch paper health records by December with e-Ubuzima rollout
Global Health Governance in the Age of AI
Is reduced risk tobacco the most effective way to stop smoking?
Our World in Data
Measles leaves children vulnerable to other diseases for years
The end of tuberculosis that wasn’t
Mckinsey on the global healthcare worker shortage
Study finds elevated macrolide resistance in African children following mass azithromycin program
DevEx - Can domestic financing solve the global health funding crisis?
How HearX evolved from a research project to an industry leader in hearing health
NBER - Medical School Closures, Market Adjustment, and Mortality in the Flexner Report Era
Strikingly, we find that medical school closures led infant mortality rates to decline by 8%…suggesting that reducing the supply of poorly trained physicians may have reduced mortality
Our World in Data - Once a leading killer, tuberculosis is now rare in rich countries, here’s how it happened
Energy & Climate
Syria signs $7b power deal, expected to provide over 50% of electricity needs
Hydro-Link are planning to build a 1150 km, ~$1.5b electricity transmission line between Angola and the DRC
World Bank commits $1 billion to revive DR Congo hydro plan, which could generate 11,000 MW, more than triple the current capacity
BII, AfDB and EBRD are loaning Egypt $479m for the development of a 1.1 GW solar power plant integrated with a 200 MWh battery energy storage system
Uzbekistan to enhance energy production through $150m hydropower project
A steep decline in Chinese development finance is reshaping how energy projects are funded across Africa
W. Gyude Moore - Access Without Power: The SDG7 Report’s Silent Gap on Africa’s Productive Future
It reflects a broad pattern about how development practitioners think about energy in Africa: too often as a social good to be distributed, instead of a strategic input for economic transformation
VoxDev
Five things to know about critical minerals
Additionality: What it means & why it’s crucial in the fight against climate change
A massive coastal restoration project in China could increase methane emissions tenfold - underscoring unexpected environmental risks of rewilding
Todd Moss
Pakistan could have potential grid obsolescence within a decade as battery storage and solar become more affordable
DevEx - Climate negotiations in Bonn begin with familiar finance clash
Negotiations at the midyear UN climate summit started off on the wrong foot as delegates spent the first 17 hours brawling over whether to put an article on public finance on the agenda
IEA - Global energy investment set to rise to $3.3 trillion in 2025
Agriculture
ADB, CGIAR and the Gates Foundation to overhaul rice production for smallholder farmers in Asia, with $1.5b from the Asian Development Bank
Crop classification is particularly tough in the early months of the growing season, when satellite signals are weak and crops are harder to tell apart. But a new model called AgriFM performs surprisingly well under these conditions
Air pollution from gas flaring in Nigeria reduces agricultural productivity by ~60% and worsens farmers' health
How peer learning improved agricultural technology adoption in Tanzania
Education
Jishnu Das - Why does the IFC think that children in private schools, many of whom are poor, are not worth investing in?
About one-third of primary school children globally attend private schools, many low-cost
Rather than direct funding to private schools, public money could address system-wide constraints and invest in public schools, which research suggests benefits private schools too
CGD - Four Criteria for Prioritising Education Funds
Indian enrollment
Conflict, Corruption & Crime
The EU added five African countries to its list of nations it determines have poor anti-money laundering controls
Ghana has lost an estimated $11.4b to gold smuggling between 2019 and 2023
How Imperial Brands’ confidential contract kept cigarette prices low in Laos, while secretly enriching a political insider
In Benue, fragile telecoms infrastructure makes an unsafe state even deadlier
UN - More than 4 million refugees have fled Sudan civil war since 2023
Cybercrime is costing African countries ~$4b per year
Cybercrime accounts for more than 30% of all reported crime in Western and Eastern Africa
World Bank - Fragile and Conflict-Affected Situations
These economies account for nearly 50% of the world’s extreme poor
How post-conflict peacebuilding improved public service delivery in Colombia
Evidence & Data
IDInsight have created a ‘Data for Decisions Bootcamp’ for people interested in doing applied social science research, with an emphasis on quantitative methods
Peter Evans, formerly at DFID, reflects on the lessons of nearly a quarter of a century of trying to improve the uptake and real world impact of research and evidence
Experimental evidence from Malawi shows that women's reputation concerns can lead to underinvestment in new technologies and persistence with bad ones
GDP has never been a measure of well-being
How much do we really know about African state of affairs?
Innovation & Metascience
Hard Drugs is a new podcast by Saloni Dattani and Jacob Trefethen about medical innovation
Their first episode is “Lenacapavir: The miracle drug that could end AIDS”
RoRI launches the Atlas of Assessment, a new typology and a global survey of funder approaches to RRA
The Atlas of Assessment is a platform offering curated and quality-assured data on national research assessment systems from around the world
Who evaluates the evaluators?
The Good Science Project - Unbundling the University
Clara Collier - The Origin of the Research University
MIT - Focused research organisations undertake large research efforts and have begun to yield scientific advances
Works in Progress - Animal drugs are approved much faster than human drugs
Could we adopt the same model for humans without compromising on safety?
Open Philanthropy and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation are launching pop-up journals, which curate and synthesise evidence around important, decision-relevant questions in economics
They are inviting organisations to apply for a five-year contract to curate the first pop-up journal, focused on the "Griliches Question" (estimating the social return on R&D investment)
Podcast - David Baker - Using AI for Science
Matt Clancy - Frequently Asked Questions About US Government Funding for R&D
Nature
Distributed peer review of grants makes process more than twice as fast
Transparent peer review to be extended to all of Nature’s research papers
Jacob Trefethen - Science writing from the last two years that stuck with me
The Center for Scientific Integrity has launched Retraction Watch - aimed at rounding up flawed and fake medical-research papers and neutralising their impact on health guidelines
Paragon Health Institute - Fixing the Engine of American Science - Why NIH Needs Urgent Reform
An oral history interview with ARIA CEO Ilan Gur
Nature - Are groundbreaking science discoveries becoming harder to find?
Nonprofits & Foundations
Joey - Who Are the Least Accountable Actors in the NGO World? (Funders)
SSIR
How NGOs Can Act as Learning Labs for Government
Thesis-Driven Funds: A New Model for Transformational Philanthropy
Bloomberg - The Old Model of Billionaire Philanthropy Is Ending
Nick Laing - Are big organisations better than individuals/small orgs at achieving things?
Notify Health Vaccination Reminders - Our first year, pilot results and the path ahead
Open Philanthropy: Reflecting on our recent effective giving request for proposals
Alex Cohen - “While most people know GiveWell for our Top Charities, we're increasingly funding promising opportunities outside that framework. Over the last 4 years, ~30% of our funding went to non-Top Charities vs. ~10% in the previous 4 years.”
Other Links
Vizier - The Geopolitics of the Indian Ocean
Shouldn’t productivity improvements reduce GDP?
Our World in Data
Two billion people don’t have safe drinking water: what does this really mean for them?
Most of the increase in natural disasters in the late 20th century is due to improved reporting
The ruinous growth of sports betting in South Africa
Tom Davidson & Rose Hadshar - The Industrial Explosion
Good News
Egypt becomes first country in Eastern Mediterranean to meet WHO target for hepatitis B control
Morocco's multidimensional poverty halved, from 11.9% in 2014 to 6.8% in 2024
Bolivia and Brazil certified free of foot-and-mouth disease without vaccination
Jamaica’s poverty prevalence for 2023 was estimated at 8.2%, a decline from 16.7% in 2021
Childhood pneumonia deaths have plummeted in Nepal
Child mortality in Malawi has fallen by more than 80% since 1990
Bhutan - poverty declines to 11.6% in 2022 from 28% in 2017
Georgia saw a significant decline in poverty in 2024, with the national absolute poverty rate dropping to 9.4%, down 2.4 percentage points from 2023
Thailand has reduced its smoking rate by 48% over the past 33 years
Botswana - the rate of mother-to-child transmission for HIV has dropped to 1.2%, and fewer than 100 infants were born with HIV in 2023
Assam slashes child marriages by 81% in 2 years, eyes total elimination by 2026
There are over 100 million fewer children in child labour in 2024 than in 2000, even as the child population increased by 230 million over the same period
For more good news check out Fix The News & Human Progress
