June 2025
Gates new deadline, WHO pledges and demographic future
Top Posts
Bill Gates - My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
China has pledged $500m to help support the WHO through 2028
Novo Nordisk has pledged $58m to the WHO
UN - Slowdown witnessed in global development since 2024
I’ve finished up the last two posts for the global development series I was running
Ken Opalo
How should development practice approach the coming reforms in the aid sector?
How to (more reliably) electrify Africa for economic growth and development
Vizier - Syria must undertake land reform and boost agricultural productivity as the first step in rebuilding its economy
Yaw - The Economic & Geopolitical History of Nigeria
Advanced lead paint elimination in countries representing 45% of births in LMICs
Nigeria passed lead paint regulation
The majority of lead paint manufacturers in 10 countries are reformulating
Expanding to address lead in cosmetics & spices
Ryan Briggs - Can We Trust Social Science Yet?
15% of papers still contain code that doesn't run properly and 25% have material errors affecting results
Roughly 30% of statistically significant findings disappear under modest analytical variations
Jesús Fernández-Villaverde on demographic futures and economic outlooks
Fertility is falling everywhere: rich and poor countries alike, booming and stagnating economies, secular and religious societies
Examples - Colombia's fertility rate is 1.06
Iran - 1.44
Tunisia - 1.56
Turkey - 1.48
Globally the replacement rate is closer to 2.2 rather than 2.1, due to selective abortion and higher young female mortality in emerging economies
Brian Nosek on the new executive order - “Restoring Gold Standard Science”
The core principles are aligned with many of the reform movement aims
The major risks for it going off the rails is the implementation strategy that seems to place it directly into the political process
Another form of weaponisation of the reform movement is using reproducibility/credibility challenges as a justification for reducing investment in research
Open Philanthropy - A Quantitative Approach to Vaccine Funding
DALY forecast and R&D funding of the most burdensome diseases/etiologies
Jobs
Ambitious Impact - Founding to Give Incubation Programme
Launch a high-growth company to donate to high-impact charities
Info Webinar on the 24th of June
Lead Exposure Elimination Project
Chief of Staff
Partnership Manager
India Program Consultant – Industry
GiveDirectly - Manager, Partnerships & Philanthropy
Talent Acquisition Specialist - Research
Researcher
Manager, Gift Processing
Probably Good Job Board
Events
3rd June - Scaling African startup teams in the age of AI - Talent Safari
3-4th June - First Annual Research Conference on Global Lead Exposure
11th June - Profit For Good Conference (Amsterdam/Online)
12th June - AI for Good? Evaluating the Impact of AI in Development - VoxDev
16-17th June - Metascience Virtual Symposia
23rd June - Using Labour Migration to Support Europe’s Green Transition - CGD
September - Abundance - DC
If you’re in London there are also these events.
6th June - Effective Giving Post-USAID - One for the World
11th June - Measuring People's Preferences with Tom Wein from IDInsight
Aid
Forecast Series: The Mortality Impacts of USAID Cuts
We estimate that the combined impact of the projected cuts to these five programs will result in between 483k and 1.14 million excess deaths over one year
GiveWell is funding technical support units in 6 African countries to help health ministries navigate foreign assistance cuts
Kevin Starr - Big Aid Is Over - We need to design for what African governments can do and will pay for
Podcast with Bright Simons on the future of aid
In broad terms, USAID spending in Africa is pretty small: “It’s about $12 billion roughly, so you’re talking about less than 0.5% of GDP in Africa.”
“ It’s not the same picture all across the continent, but there were specific spots that were very badly hit”
Bright adds extra thoughts here
CGD
West Africa at a Crossroads: Fostering Stability After Aid Cuts
After Aid Cuts, Here’s How to Make the Most Out of Remittances
Cost-Effectiveness is Not Enough. Aid Must Be Transformational
Katie Auth - Working through the three stages of USAID/MCC grief
Rose Mutiso - Why Growth, Not Aid, Should Be the New Africa Strategy
A new compact for global health: rebalancing power between African governments and donors
NPR - Connecting big givers to programs cut by USAID
Johan Fourie - How Africa must rethink foreign aid
It must not disrupt the relationship between democratic governments and their electorates
Work through the market, not replace it
African countries can fill the aid gap with tax revenue
Foreign aid: Will China fill the void?
Growth
Open Philanthropy - Introducing Justin Sandefur, the new leader of the Economic Growth in LMICs program
A new paper finds a strong and consistent relationship between trust and economic growth
Low-income countries shouldn't give up on low-skill manufacturing-led growth
World Bank
How stronger land systems can spur economic growth and jobs
Mining and Agricultural Recovery Drive Mongolia’s Economic Growth
Nigeria Development Update
Economic growth in the last quarter of 2024 increased to 4.6% (yoy)
Reforms have helped strengthen the foreign exchange market
fiscal deficit shrank from 5.4% of GDP in 2023 to 3% in 2024
Governance & Policy
Rose Mutiso - When the same extractive model is strategic in Australia but exploitative in Africa
Policymakers prefer programs with a local impact evaluation
Salim Jeridi - How Qatar’s leadership used its energy resources to transform the emirate into a global brand and diplomatic heavyweight
Ghana became the first African country to mandate that local pension funds invest at least 5% of their assets in domestic private equity and venture capital firms (which would be ~ $337m)
Might Suriname become the next Oil to Cash experiment?
Oliver Hanney - Unintended consequences: When policy backfires
Pre-announced coca eradication in Colombia led farmers to expand fields beforehand, increasing net cultivation
Indian farmers giving cattle anti-inflammatory drugs killed vultures that ate the carrion. This reduction in vultures caused feral dog populations to explode as they fed on carcasses, leading to a rabies surge, falling water quality and a ~4% rise in human death rates in worst-hit districts
Nigeria’s Tinubu slows policy overhaul as he eyes reelection
UN leadership - relentlessly focused on results?
Nigeria - Malaria Eradication Agency Bill scales second reading in senate
Proposes a centralised and autonomous agency to coordinate national malaria eradication efforts
DRC's digital government initiatives
Internet coverage reaching up to 85% in major urban areas
Implementing a blockchain-based digital identity system
ECOWAS achievements and failures
Kenya's treasury seeks to raise $1b+ from sale of state-owned firms
How industry capture of Filipino officials helped deadlock global tobacco control negotiations
How India's National Clean Air Programme has been restructured to show statistical progress whilst avoiding real pollution reduction
Sanjay Jain - What happens to an economy with digital public infrastructure?
Digitising land records in Punjab considerably reduced agricultural tax collection
Not by lowering the tax base but by weakening state capacity to collect taxes by disrupting the organisation of the bureaucracy
Magatte Wade - "What About the Deaths Caused by Capitalism?"
Who taxes the most, and least, in Africa?
Trade
China eyes Africa as it shifts EV gears in face of US, EU tariffs
How Morocco built an automotive industry from scratch
Additional exports generated by improved market access provide only limited upgrading potential for the local economies
Falling commodity prices could mute inflation risks from trade tensions
EU lifts economic sanctions on Syria
The Commodity Markets Outlook in eight charts
Trade uncertainty opens up “Nigeria First” manufacturing opportunity
Ethiopia’s coffee exports hit record high
Chinese and US trade with African countries
Why strict standards keep Europeans out of African minerals
Africa Smartphone Market - Quarter one growth: 6% yoy to 19.4m units, an 8th consecutive quarter of growth
Development Finance
DevEx - The road to the 2025 financing for development conference
The US House of Representatives has passed a bill imposing a 5% tax on remittances sent abroad by non-citizens
Asian Development Bank support for food security to reach $40b by 2030
US plans to cut funding for the African Development Bank’s main development fund
CGD - Eliminating Inefficiencies, Unlocking Leverage and Maximising the Impact of the EU’s Guarantee Instrument (€39.1 billion)
Surge in cedi currency eases Ghana's foreign debt burden (42% rise against dollar)
African Development Bank Approves $304m Loan to Support Botswana's Fiscal Stability and Economic Reforms
China’s transition from lead bilateral banker to chief debt collector
Switzerland is being strategically outcompeted by Gulf states for global economic and diplomatic influence
The African Development Bank has approved $100m for industrial parks and special economic zones across Africa
S&P Global Ratings has upgraded Ghana’s foreign-currency sovereign credit rating from Selective Default to CCC+
Uganda plans to borrow $568m to finance infrastructure development
Africa’s debt crisis talks to center on need for global reform
AI, Data & Development
Gitlab Foundation with their second AI for Economic Opportunity Fund grantee cohort, including GiveDirectly
CGD - Cutting Through the Noise: Powering the Next Generation of Government Portals with Generative AI
How are we using AI at VoxDev?
Platos Health raises $1.4m to roll out preventive health device across Nigeria
Jonas Kgomo - Towards an Abundance Frontier for Africa
Google have launched the AI Futures Fund to support startups
McKinsey - Leading, not lagging: Africa’s gen AI opportunity
Bill Gates - New tools that can help millions more newborns and their mothers survive
Apollo Agriculture has assisted ~400,000 farmers in achieving yields 2-2.5x higher than the national average in Kenya and Zambia
OpenAI launch HealthBench - An evaluation for AI systems and human health
China deploys world’s largest fleet of driverless mining trucks (100 trucks)
Startups & Business
Tech Safari - Sink or Swim: African Startup Edition
Delivery costs are 50% higher due to poor infrastructure
Africa has a $330 billion credit gap, but fintech lenders face 30% default rates serving informal workers without credit histories
Major players struggled because consumers prefer buying from people they trust rather than faceless platforms
Social media channels like TikTok and Instagram are the most popular ways for people to sell in Africa today.
Timothy Motte
Oya - bettering Brazilian women's health
Supply Pay - trade finance for Mexican farmers
Flouci - Tunisia's neobank
Nigeria accuses Meta of pressure campaign over threat to cut off apps
VoxDev
Informality - literature review
Performance-linked contracts, increasingly enabled by financial technology, can better spur investment among small firms than rigid microcredit
Robot.com’s US expansion signals Latin America’s rising potential in the competitive world of robotics
Tech Safari - Why does Francophone Africa lag behind Anglophone Africa in fintech development
Two non-interchangeable CFA Franc zones despite shared name
French civil law system creates rigid, paperwork-heavy processes vs more flexible British common law
Yabx's proposes using AI to analyse mobile money transaction data (100 billion data points monthly) to create credit scores for 50+ million people without traditional banking history. This could enable lending based on behavioural patterns rather than formal credit records
Indian firms report more regulatory pain than peers
PalmPay to expand to South Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, Uganda and Tanzania after processing 1.35 billion transactions in first quarter
FT - Africa's Fastest-Growing Companies 2025
South Africa (51 companies) and Nigeria (28) account for 61% of the list
One-fifth of companies are fintech
Even top performers operate in few countries. TymeBank, valued at $1.5b, expanded to Philippines and Vietnam rather than other African markets, highlighting regulatory and currency fragmentation costs
From Credit Lines to Capital Markets - A multi-faceted approach to scaling a FinTech loan portfolio in emerging markets
The Unified Payments Interface Juggernaut
Infrastructure
Africa's new space agency could help solve problems on the ground
MTN starts ‘collapsing’ its 3G network in SA to make room for 5G
Nigeria approves $652 million China Exim Bank road finance package
Tech Safari - Despite 650 million mobile phone users across Africa, only 27% actually go online
Data pricing is controlled by telco oligopolies who pass infrastructure costs to users
One solution - Mobile Virtual Network Operators who rent network space from major telcos rather than building infrastructure. This reduces operational costs and enables targeted offerings
In Africa, when something is too expensive, we find a way to sell it in sachets
Bottled water? Reimagined as pure water sachets
Packaged milk? Sold in smaller, single-use packs
Even early airtime? Bought in micro top-ups as low as 50 Naira
Nigeria to open two Chinese-backed lithium processing plants
UAE joins $25B Nigeria-Morocco pipeline project
How UAE is shifting gears to lead Middle East’s EV revolution
The next frontier for African telcos
How Starlink is stitching together a pan-African strategy, now operational in 18 countries
India's new regulations for satellite internet providers prioritise real-time tracking and border surveillance
The energy crisis in Zambia is undermining the Lobito Corridor’s potential
Recent developments and risks in the Lobito corridor
Health
Red Teaming Pandemics - A New Approach for WHO and countries
How to Fill the America-Shaped Hole in Global Health
WHO - 2025 World report on social determinants of health equity
The Economics of Life-Saving Diagnostics - Incentivising diagnostics to address antimicrobial resistance
CGD - Children Are Being Poisoned Because of Bureaucratic Inertia
Nature - Antimalarial-treated bed nets could stop parasites developing in mosquitoes
The Global Innovation Fund and PATH launched Thrive, a $120m health-climate impact fund
Deena Mousa looking at the development of real-time airborne pathogen detection systems. A shift from reactive outbreak response to proactive prevention
With Gavi, Zipline has delivered 22+ million vaccine doses across Africa, at $0.66 per additional fully immunised child
Flying malaria vaccines reach isolated Nigerian communities
Our distribution centre, serving sites across a 38,000 square-km radius, has drastically reduced stock-outs to below 1%
Deliveries now arrive within 15–45 minutes, regardless of weather or terrain, significantly improving coverage and timeliness
A New Advance Market Commitment to Combat Neonatal Sepsis
Science Direct - Reimagining India's National Telemedicine Service to improve access to care
Measles vaccines save millions of lives each year
Africa Health Ventures Updates
South African HearX announced $100 million in new funding
HearX make hearing aids more accessible to low-income communities
Also many health events and funding opportunities
Digitalisation is revolutionising Mozambique’s malaria response
Campaign duration reduced from 7-14 days to 5 days
Stablepharma begins trial of fridge-free vaccine
Once a leading killer, tuberculosis is now rare in rich countries
Improving practices at Bangladesh’s brick kilns
Reductions in emissions by traditional kilns are achievable, even in the absence of stronger regulations, if they can be made financially attractive to private kiln owners
WHO trims top management ranks amid financial crunch
OWID - Where in the world are babies at the lowest risk of dying?
Clean water in India: Is delivering water a viable solution?
Bill Gates arguing that data improvements represent the Gates foundation most transformative breakthrough in reducing child mortality
Executive Order to Lower U.S. Drug Prices Could Hurt the Poorest Countries
Alex Tabarrok - Econ 101 is Underrated: Pharma Price Controls
The lengths to which health workers go to deliver vaccines
GiveDirectly - Is unconditional cash the missing link in maternal and child survival?
Child stunting in India and Bangladesh
Energy & Climate
Introducing the Climate Adaptation Tech & Innovation Lab - Unlocking investment for climate adaptation
W. Gyude Moore - Africa's Energy Poverty is an Existential Crisis
Bolt is rolling out electric tricycles in Lagos
Zainab Usman - How African Countries Can Harness the Global Policy Reframe from Energy Transition to Energy Security
How Electricity is Powering Value Addition in Tanzania’s Villages
Studies show rural electrification has little near-term economic impact (but could have large impact long term)
Vox Dev
Literature review on weather and climate adaptation
Heat hurts teamwork before it slows individuals
Bright Simons - How to rethink climate finance for Africa
What the Data Tells Us About the Future of Off-Grid Solar
Zambia - The Ministry of Energy has reduced the approval period for solar project applications from over six months to 48 hours
Zambia Greenlights $270m Power Link to DRC
Electricity Access Reaches over 97% in Nepal
Kenya has more than doubled electricity access, from 37% in 2013 to 79% in 2023
Podcast with Sugandha Srivastav about the hidden political economy of electricity in developing countries
How opaque power purchase agreements, regulatory capture and poor procurement practices drive high costs and unreliable supply
Agriculture
CGD - The Famine Early Warning System is Back Online
World Bank
Acute hunger has grown in 2024 for the sixth consecutive year
295 million people are now facing high levels of acute food insecurity
Food inflation higher than 5% in 87.5% of low-income countries
Improving Transport Connectivity for Food Security in Africa
37% of locally produced food is lost or wasted due to inadequate storage
African food supply chains are 4 times longer than those in Europe and account for up to 45% of the price of some basic commodities
Unleashing the potential of agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa
Famines kill far fewer people today than in the past, but remain a major threat
Mariangela Hungria, whose biological seed treatments helped make Brazil a global breadbasket, named 2025 World Food Prize Laureate
VoxDev
How misinformation and mismatched expectations reduce adoption of improved seeds
How peer learning improved agricultural technology adoption in Tanzania
Nutrition for Growth: A Crossroads for Ethiopia's Healthy Future
People in richer countries spend more on food, but it’s a smaller share of their overall spending
Education
SSIR - Is Data Driving or Hijacking Education Policy in India?
Emaan Siddique - Menstruation matters (for keeping girls safe in schools)
Ken Opalo - What does the rise and decline of STEM enrollment in Kenyan universities tell us about the Kenyan economy?
Morocco’s TARL Program Lifts Learning for 1.3m Students in 3 Years
Math scores quadrupled; Arabic doubled; French tripled, per government data
Evaluating the Impact of Generative AI on Learning Outcomes in Nigeria
Cost-effectiveness analysis revealed large learning gains from 6 weeks of AI schooling, equating to 1.5-2 years of ‘business-as-usual’ schooling
Conflict, Corruption & Crime
Making a market for evidence in peacebuilding
The Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK, is ending its war against the Turkish state
UN - Illegal gold mining poses global threat
Terrorists use food as a weapon: how Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab exploit hunger
Ahmed Askary - For the first time in over half a century, a ‘Sunni Corridor' is uniting the region
Are multinational enterprises fuelling conflict in Africa?
World Bank - Accelerating Digital Transformation in Fragile and Conflict Affected Situations
Africa’s Urbanisation is Shifting the Security Landscape
Rural areas remain the epicenter of organised armed conflict in Africa. In 2024, 74% of organised armed violent events occurred in rural or semirural areas
Preventing conflict diamonds from entering world markets could reduce armed conflicts in Africa
Migration
Brain drain or brain gain? Effects of high-skilled international emigration on origin countries
Challenges with the WHO's Red List policy
Africa has approximately 1 million unemployed nurses
The WHO approach treats this as a zero-sum 'lump of labour' problem, ignoring supply responses, remittances, return migration, and that families (not governments) often fund nursing training in Africa
Evidence & Data
MIT to launch center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work led by Daron Acemoglu
What broad lessons have we learned from 115 studies on unconditional cash transfers?
Deena Mousa - How much do you value a year of life?
JPAL - The Evidence Effect highlights examples of programs that warrant more attention, investment and consideration for scaling
Fast internet might reduce FGM
Reshaping women’s broader identity with less stigma
Insights from the inaugural Evidence for Development Conference
The challenges of reducing informal employment: Evidence from Mexico
Rescaling and The Easterlin Paradox
A mixed method impact assessment of the use of aerial logistics to improve maternal health and emergencies outcomes in the Ashanti Region of Ghana
Antenatal visits increased 20%
Deliveries increased 26%
Maternal deaths decreased 56%
Innovation & Metascience
Cutting the NIH - The $8 Trillion Health Care Catastrophe
Andrew Gelman - Who cares when a research claim is found to be in error? Peer-reviewed journals do their best to deflect and dilute legitimate criticism
Eric Gilliam - What history can teach us about doing better science
Introducing the Historical Tech Tree
Meri Beckwith - How not to waste a billion dollars (on your clinical trial)
David Roodman - Appeal to Me: First Trial of a “Replication Opinion”
David acting as an independent judge to resolve academic disputes about research validity
Stuart Buck & Christopher Steven Marcum - Let Unfunded Grant Applications See the Light of Day
Renaissance Philanthropy - Seeking Project Ideas on How to Advance Humanity's Health
Quanta - How Paradoxical Questions and Simple Wonder Lead to Great Science
Tyler Cowen podcast with Jack Clark on AI's Uneven Impact
Meta releases new data set, AI model aimed at speeding up scientific research
A prominent paper on AI's effects on materials science R&D was withdrawn after MIT's internal review concluded they had no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data
new research suggests government R&D, particularly non-defence spending, generates substantially higher returns than private R&D
Frequently Asked Questions About US Government Funding for R&D
Nonprofits & Foundations
Open Philanthropy - How we use back-of-the-envelope calculations (BOTECs) in our grantmaking
Advancing seasonal malaria chemoprevention: Key learnings from the SMC Alliance Annual Meeting
How Should Bill Gates Spend $200 Billion?
Web Summit and Founders Pledge: Unlocking $280m for high-impact charities
SSIR - Helping NGOs and Funders Make the ‘Big Shift’ to Working With Government
Probably Good has a new filter on their job board specifically for roles at Ambitious Impact organisations
Other Links
A new online course - Making a Difference Ⅰ: Evidence-based Impact
Aeon - The decline of birthrates throughout the world poses a serious threat. What is to be done?
The End Kidney Deaths Act
Abi Olvera - Traffic Fatalities Are a Choice
OWID - What are international dollars?
Good News
In 2023, vaccinations saved at least 1.8 million lives in Africa
Trachoma eliminated in Mauritania and Papua New Guinea
Kerala Set to eliminate Rheumatic Fever
Between 2018 and 2023, Indonesia’s childhood stunting rate dropped from 30.8% to 21.5%
Uganda’s poverty rate declined to 16% from 20% in 2020
For more good news check out Fix The News & Human Progress