September 2025
Solar, Homicide and Weight Loss
Top Posts
Ken Opalo - There will be no economic take off in Africa without lots of large (private sector) firms
Unlike most charts I share, this one doesn’t go up or down Gates Foundation pledges $2.5 billion to women’s health initiatives
~70% - research and development
~10% - market introduction of new technologies/generating better data
~4% - manufacturing
~3% - advocacy
The Demographic and Health Surveys Program has secured funding for continuing selected, but not all, services. As well as a 3 year, $25 million grant from the Gates Foundation to stabilise the DHS program
How generic weight loss drugs could save 2-3 million lives per year
Maybe not a ‘top’ post, but I’ve made an article looking at recent trends in global homicide
Of 12 countries with 2025 data, 10 showed decreases larger than 5%.
US down 20%
Jamaica down 42%
Mexico down 16%
~400k annual homicide deaths exceed deaths from conflict, terrorism and natural disasters
The Launch Sequence - a collection of 16 essays describing concrete projects that use AI to accelerate scientific breakthroughs
Ember - The first evidence of a take-off in solar in Africa
Alexander Berger - “Open Phil is funding this Metaculus forecasting tournament on the future budgets and spending of NIH and NSF, and surprised that forecasters are expecting basically no cuts”
Raised $415m, an increase of $60m from 2023
Directed $397m
68% directed towards malaria prevention
14% - Vitamin A supplementation
4% - Tuberculosis
3% - Vaccine promotion
2% - Livelihoods
9% - Other areas
Berk Özler - A paper finds that large ‘unconditional’ cash transfers given to poor people reduced infant mortality by close to 50% in Kenya. Although it looks like the reported effects were conditional
It relied on the transfers:
Overlapping with the birth month (neonatal period)
Were given to people who lived close to a physician-staffed facility
Were given to people who lived in high-saturation cash transfer areas (i.e., in villages surrounded by other villages who also received cash transfers)
The intervention also happened during a severe drought, elevating infant mortality
WHO - Progress on Household Drinking Water and Sanitation 2000–2024
Jacob Trefethen - What does AI progress mean for medical progress?
Jobs
Gates Foundation - Principal Scientist, AI and Large Language Models
Ambitious Impact - Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program
Spiro - TB Shield work in Pakistan
Malengo - Chief Investment Officer
Lead Exposure Elimination Project
Senior Manager (MENA Programs)
Senior Manager (Asia Programs)
Probably Good Job Board
Mainly NGO roles
Aid
DevEx - The EU’s draft budget calls for a 75% increase to its Global Europe fund, but also shows a move toward realising a “Europe First” ideology
CGD - The High Cost of Pausing Life-Saving Aid
Can cutting development aid help Africa’s fragile states, or make things worse?
Charles Kenny
There’s a lot we don’t know about the status of US assistance delivery. That should worry congress
Fixing the spending crisis at the Department of State
Unlock Aid - “We’re publishing a Solutions Index to surface the next generation of organisations that should have a seat at the table…the new (US) Administration wants to know who they should be working with.”
State Department to send $93m in food aid to 13 nations
Despite the sweeping cuts to financial assistance there has been surprisingly little protest from the continent’s nations
Magatte Wade - Why USAID cuts force the conversation Africa has been avoiding for 60+ years
Growth
India delivers surprise 7.8% GDP growth rate in Q1
What can India do to industrialise?
Industrial Disputes Act restricts workforce adjustments for firms >300 employees, encouraging firms to stay small or use contractors
Difficult agricultural to industrial land conversion increases costs
Scrap rigid employment protection and introduce unemployment insurance (following a Nordic model)
Justin Sandefur - “One positive upshot of the death of the Doing Business index amidst scandal a few years ago: the World Bank has pivoted from expert opinion surveys to an accelerated program of actual firm surveys: tons of new data coming out now”
Yaw - Are my growth predictions for 2030 coming true?
Early winners - Bulgaria, Mongolia and Costa Rica crossed into higher income brackets ahead of schedule
On track - Rwanda, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Türkiye, St. Lucia and China
The setbacks - Bangladesh and Egypt
Slept on - Morocco and Cape Verde
UNCTAD - The State of Commodity Dependence 2025 (via Africa Brief)
85% of countries are commodity dependent
Export earnings shrank 5.6% over the past decade, led by oil declines in Nigeria, Angola and Algeria
IFC - A small number of firms accounts for two-thirds of all new jobs
East Africa economic outlook 2025
Africa's fastest-growing region this year
Ethiopia: 7.2% growth (down from 8.1% in 2024)
Kenya: 5.3% (up from 4.7% in 2024)
Tanzania: 6%
Uganda: 6.9%
McKinsey’s Hiding in Plain Sight report claims that Africa’s fastest path to new jobs and growth may be in services
Services already drive 50%+ of GDP in many African economies
Hotspots: Tourism, cloud, fintech, SME lending, e-commerce and creative industries
Governance & Policy
Japan has pitched a new “Indian Ocean–Africa economic zone”
Pledged $5.5b in loans with AfDB for sustainable development
Extended $169m financing to Kenya for industry and power upgrades
Promoted low-cost loans as alternatives to Chinese debt, recycling repayments to African borrowers
Committed to help train 300,000 African workers with Japanese firms
Africa's small business tax burden tops global averages at 27.5% (2022 data)
Middle East (17.9%) and Europe (16.2%) offer the lowest averages
Todd Moss - How to Get S*** Done in Washington DC - 8 steps for think tanks to turn an idea into policy change
On June 11, the World Bank announced an end to its ban on nuclear. The Energy for Growth Hub played a part
DevEx - State Department email outlines US demand for a leaner UN and a return to “founding principles”
Successful UN 80 reform requires relentless focus on results
Tanzania's ban on foreigners operating small businesses sparks Kenyan backlash
Africa cannot develop a tourism economy without Africans
Trade
Nigeria's exports of goods other than oil surged nearly 20% in the first half of the year, driven by high demand for cocoa and urea
Indonesia and Peru signed a free trade agreement - They have imports/exports of ~$480m
Nigeria banned the export of shea nuts to boost local refining. Nigeria provides ~40% of the world’s supply, but accounts for only 1% of the $6.5b global market
Navigating US tariff hike: A look at India's strategy ahead
$90b US export market at risk, potentially losing $45b (half of total exports)
Labour-intensive sectors hit hardest: garments could lose $7-9bb production, 700,000-950,000 jobs
Major exporters are already relocating (Pearl Global moving to Bangladesh, Vietnam, etc)
The 10% tariff advantage Bangladesh enjoys over India in EU markets demonstrates price sensitivity. Bangladesh exports $30b apparel to EU vs India's $6b despite similar capabilities
Development Finance
World Bank - Foreign direct investment inflows have fallen to 2% of GDP, less than half the level at the peak in 2008
CGD
Populist Rhetoric, Poverty Realities: Lessons from ABCDE 2025
Five Human Capital Takeaways from the Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics 2025
VoxDev - Why doesn’t global capital flow to where it’s most productive, in developing countries?
Oliver Kim
Does China Underconsume?
Whither Central Bank Independence?
World Bank approves $150m financing to boost jobs and private sector growth in Paraguay
The Millennium Challenge Corporation’s board held its first meeting of the new administration - They added Fiji and Tonga as eligible
S&P upgrades Kenya's credit rating to 'B' on easing liquidity risks
London is building a pipeline for more African IPOs
Financial Times with several articles focused on development in Africa
Japan eyes low-cost debt to mitigate Africa blow from aid cuts
The main obstacle to raising agricultural yields is ‘African governments’
African public lenders are accessing markets to diversify their funding
The UAE is cementing its position as Africa’s largest investor, surpassing China in 2024
The UAE and Angola signed a trade and economic partnership agreement with the aim of boosting annual trade fivefold, to $10 billion by 2033
Emerging Tech & Development
World Bank has launched AVA, an AI tool built on a library of development research (‘Available for serious work’)
From scripts to systems: where health chatbots add value
Bolivia looks to El Salvador for help building its crypto regulatory framework
Rohit Shinde - No, AI is NOT coming for your Job
Dawa Mkononi - Using apps and data to fix rural medicine shortages in Tanzania
Rest of World
Big Tech’s “AI for good” spending increases in Africa
China’s vision for a driverless future is miles ahead of everyone else’s
How can AI help us improve aid effectiveness?
The UAE plans to become the world’s testing ground for autonomous vehicles
Conference - AI for Development and Impact 2025 - October in Barcelona
Satellite Imagery
Google DeepMind's new geospatial model explained intuitively
AlphaEarth Foundations is different from previous models because:-
It uses more data sources (satellites, field measurements, climate records, etc.) and includes time, not just static snapshots
It works at high resolution, down to 10m²
It generalises well and reduced errors by ~24% compared to the next-best methods
It seems to be able to estimate continuous biophysical variables
Evapotranspiration: The amount of water evaporated and transpired from land (important for agriculture, hydrology and climate)
Emissivity: How much heat is radiated from Earth’s surface (important for energy balance and climate monitoring)
Satellite imagery in Senegal assists in property tax collection
Space42, Microsoft and Esri sign MoU to enhance mapping capabilities across Africa
Over the next five years, the initiative will map 54 countries
Startups & Business
Vizier - After turning Türkiye into a drone superpower, the Bayraktar family is building an ecosystem to socially engineer a culture of technological innovation
Jumia is capitalising on the U.S.-China trade war as Chinese vendors are exploring new avenues to route their products into markets such as Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire
Africa’s most valuable fintech company Flutterwave reported a boom in transactions in East Asia this year
Airtel bets on AI with $120m data centre set to go live in 2026
Sturgeon
Key sectors on the new silk road
Financial Services - Largest addressable market. State banks dominate in Uzbekistan (69% of assets vs Kazakhstan's 11%), creating SME lending gaps
Natural Resources - Major economic driver. Kazakhstan/Azerbaijan have established multinational presence
Logistics - €10b pledged by European institutions in 2024, Kazakhstan invested $35b over 15 years. World Bank projects freight volumes will triple to 11mt by 2030, travel times halving from China to Europe
Agriculture - Large but inefficient. Over 40% employment in Tajikistan, family farms dominate
SMEs - Up to 60% of GDP, 75% employment in Uzbekistan. Historically underserved, mostly paper/Excel-based operations
Why we invested (in an Uzbeki inventory management, sales processing, client management, financial oversight and marketing tools startup)
The South African Reserve Bank has announced a path for non-bank fintechs to access the National Payment System
Africa Health Ventures - Goodlife delivers landmark healthcare exit
Syrian tech workers who fled during the civil war are returning home and launching startups
How Chowdeck plans to succeed where Jumia Food failed
Lincoln Quirk - The anti-fragile culture
Airtel targets network expansion, mobile money in Safaricom battle
Realistic Optimist
Infrastructure
Kenya plans to raise up to $4b by securitising an import levy to fund a railway extension
Senegal plans to build an €80m free zone project in Ngogom, (a dry port and logistics hub)
World Bank
Supports São Paulo’s expansion of Metro with $400m
$650m loan to strengthen Istanbul’s emergency preparedness and response capacities for disasters
Africa’s smartphone market grows 7% in Q2
Algeria joins pan-African Payment and Settlement System, supporting cross-border payments
Zanzibar to spend $400m on transformation of port infrastructure
MTN Nigeria has had more than 5,400 fibre optic cable cuts in the first half of 2025, with road construction and vandalism emerging as the biggest threats
Nigeria - “The Federal Government has restated its unwavering commitment to revolutionising the nation’s transportation sector through the construction of a 4,000km high-speed rail network” - $60b funding required and scheduled to be completed within 3 years
African Development Bank to lead efforts to raise $7.8b for new Ethiopian airport
Tanzania and Burundi broke ground on a ~$2b cross-border railway linking East Africa’s landlocked regions to the port of Dar es Salaam
VoxDev - Toxic roads: How infrastructure development can undermine infant health
A competitor to Starlink, Abu Dhabi’s Space42, is eyeing expansion into Africa
Ethiopia has signed an agreement with a unit of Nigeria's Dangote Group to build a $2.5b fertiliser manufacturing plant
Agriculture & Food
Rice prices plunge to eight-year low after record harvests
Uganda’s coffee export earnings almost doubled to $2.22b in the year to June
DevEx - National leadership and innovative financing fuel a school meals boom
8.2% of the world experienced hunger in 2024, down from 8.5% in 2023
Although hunger continued to rise in most regions of Africa and western Asia
Infectious Diseases & Vaccines
Asterisk - Priyanka Pulla - The world’s largest vaccine manufacturer is the Serum Institute of India. How did a struggling horse farm in Pune become one of the most important companies in global health?
Burkina Faso’s government halts Gates Foundation-backed malaria research using GMO mosquitoes after criticism from anti-Western activists
Kelsey Piper responding to questions on 'how much of PEPFAR is currently operational? is there anywhere we can donate as private individuals to preserve the stuff that got cut?'
Gates, Wellcome, South Africa pledge $33m for HIV research
Ghana has approved the world’s first malaria drug for new-borns
Brazil opens the world’s largest mosquito biofactory
Health
The State of Global Health Funding: August 2025
This is looking at development assistance for health, not all health spending (including government & individual)
VoxDev - Workers in African cities are extremely exposed to air pollution
GiveWell podcast - The fragile foundations of global health data
Botswana declared a public health emergency after falling diamond revenues dried up medical funds
CGD Podcast - Saving newborn lives with Rachel Glennerster, Jim O’Neill and Akhil Bansal
OWID - Death rates from cardiovascular disease have fallen dramatically, what were the breakthroughs behind this?
Alex Cohen with a thread - “Last week, some GiveWell colleagues and I spent a few days in eastern Uganda - trying to learn more about how the health system works”
Kenya is planning to increase the minimum age for drinking alcohol to 21
Cigarette sales from 2008 to 2022
Sales decreased 11.6% globally, driven by 41% reductions in the
Americas and Europe
Sales remained stable in the Western Pacific and South-East
Asia, while increasing in the Eastern Mediterranean and
Africa
The Examination - When governments own tobacco companies, who watches out for your health?
At least 17 countries have a stake in the tobacco industry
Over the last 50 years, India has radically lowered the risk of dying young
Energy & Climate
India approves 10 new nuclear reactors
Morocco pitches ambitious Gazoduc pipeline project, a $25b initiative to connect Nigeria’s gas supply to Moroccan and European markets
As US exits Indonesia JETP, Japan pushes competing energy visions
BP makes its largest oil and gas discovery in 25 years, offshore near Brazil
Nature - China reins in the spiralling construction costs of nuclear power, what can other countries learn?
Families or firms first in Africa?
Moussa Blimpo - “...if we are thinking about the role of electricity for job creation, is it household residential consumption and rural poor households that will create those jobs? Or is it firms in industry and transport? What will create the jobs?... It's the firms, right, that will create jobs. So it's straightforward for me…. I think [M300] should focus on providing electricity in order to create jobs and generate economic growth.”
Kenya’s Sun King has secured $156m to enable ~1.4 million households and businesses to access off-grid solar
Indonesia plans to build 100GW of solar and 320GWh of battery energy storage systems across 80,000 villages
World Bank
Over one million Zambians to be connected to electricity by 2030
With an electricity access rate of 84%, Senegal is making progress towards universal energy access
Ghana and Rwanda lead Africa’s race for cutting-edge nuclear
Hannah Ritchie - Population growth or decline will have little impact on climate change
Electric vehicles, China and the industrial strategies reshaping mobility in emerging economies
Education
New evidence that foreign aid increases school enrolment in Nigeria (not just education related aid)
David Pilling on Malawi's experiment in scaling up tablet-based tuition in primary schools
Understanding education policy preferences: Survey experiments with policymakers in 35 developing countries
Conflict, Corruption & Crime
UN - More than 1.3 million return to homes in Sudan
Sudan: Is a rival government splitting the country in two?
Oil theft in Nigeria nearly ended says NNPC
Africa surpasses 150,000 deaths linked to militant Islamist groups in the past decade
Arnold Ventures awards $15m in criminal justice grants
The kids are missing...from the arrest statistics (in US)
“Based upon the average age of arrest, criminal offenders have never been older than they were in 2024. The total rate of arrest peaked at ~32, more than a decade older than is typical (18-19). In fact, people in their early 40s were more likely to be arrested than teenagers”
Evidence & Data
Podcast on advancing GiveWell’s work on family planning, with Elie Hassenfeld and Dilhan Perera
OWID - $3 a day: A new poverty line has shifted the World Bank’s data on extreme poverty. What changed, and why?
On Zambia's cost of living crisis
WorldPop - Study maps malaria risk in Senegal by blending environment and vulnerability
UN report finds United Nations reports are not widely read
Innovation & Metascience
US cancels $500m in mRNA vaccine research
Stuart Buck
Metascience at the NIH
How we could save billions by finding which medical treatments don't work
New R&D policy briefs
A new institute for neglected research
Open Philanthropy - How the Institute for Replication is making social science more robust and reliable
Karthik Tadepalli - The Green Revolution transformed global agriculture. Are its critics right?
“Organised networks are infiltrating the academic publishing system to promote fake science”
OWID - Counting lives saved is difficult, but it can show us the great difference some people have made
Charities & Foundations
Charity Entrepreneurship have launched their ideas for the 2026 February cohort
Increasing access to novel, low-risk loans for smallholder farmers
Reducing diarrhoeal-related deaths through targeted sanitation interventions
Reducing air pollution by improving brick kiln energy efficiency
Strengthening air quality monitoring and advocacy in LMICs
Funding Opportunities - August 2025
Mental Health Funding Circle - Call for Proposals
Joey Savoie - Why philanthropists should be wary of NGOs who will do anything for them
Other Links
Matthew Yglesias - What cash can and can’t do
YouTube is Africa's streaming platform, with over 180 million users
Ken Opalo
On Africa’s “arbitrary” borders and their alleged impacts
How Ethiopia avoided colonization in the late 19th century but then lagged behind in the 20th century
Africa’s wellbeing perception increases
Hostility toward homosexuality remains common in many of the world’s largest countries
Good News
Rubella eliminated as a public health problem in Nepal
More than 8.3 million people pulled out of poverty in Mexico between 2022 and 2024
Iraq - Poverty rate fell from 24% in 2022 to 17.5% in 2024
FGM rate among Egyptian teenage girls drops to 37% in 2021 from 61% in 2014
Tap water coverage crosses 81% in rural India
Argentina’s poverty falls to 7-year low as inflation eases
WHO declares Kenya free of deadly sleeping sickness after decades
For more good news check out Fix The News & Human Progress