Center for Global Development

📣 Interested in securing funding for research on global lead poisoning?

Join CGD and Coefficient Giving for a Q&A webinar on how to apply for up to $5 million in research grants focused on understanding and reducing the global burden of lead poisoning.

The session will cover the application process for the new Request for Proposals and give prospective applicants the opportunity to ask questions directly.

Research Grants to Build Evidence on Global Lead Poisoning: How-To-Apply Guide and Q&A Momentum on tackling global lead poisoning continues to grow. But there’s still too much that we don’t know. We have issued a second Request for Proposals (RfP), jointly with Coefficient Giving, for research that can help understand and mitigate the global burden of lead poisoning.

As official development assistance declines, can philanthropy help address growing financing gaps?

In a new blog, Biniam Bedasso explores what OECD data on $32 billion in philanthropic commitments reveals about where foundations are investing, why some countries attract far more support than others, and how philanthropic funding patterns are evolving.

What Does Philanthropy’s Global Footprint Tell Us About Its Role in a Changing Aid Landscape? The recent decline in official development assistance has given new urgency to a familiar question: can private philanthropy help fill the gap? The likely answer is: not at the scale required. Private foundations cannot replace public aid budgets and should not be treated as a substitute for predict...

How should organizations evaluate whether generative tools are actually improving development outcomes?

A new policy brief by Han Sheng Chia and Tim Ohlenburg introduces CGD’s Evaluation Playbook, developed with input from 30 experts across computer science, economics, gender studies, and development.

The playbook outlines four levels of evaluation and introduces “Minimum Viable Evaluations” that organizations can use as a starting point.

Designed for builders, funders, and policymakers alike, the playbook aims to strengthen how tools are evaluated across low- and middle-income countries.

Generative AI Evaluation Playbook: Policy Brief From math tutors to farmer advisory tools, generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly expanding in low- and middle-income countries. While some evidence shows development gains, other findings point to harm. Evaluations can assess and help address these risks, but there is little agreement on what they should...

Childcare is increasingly being recognized not just as a social policy issue, but as a driver of economic growth, productivity, and gender equality.

On June 16, join CGD and The World Bank Group for a virtual event examining how multilateral development banks are scaling childcare investments, what challenges persist, and what comes next.

Featuring speakers from CGD, the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, IFC - International Finance Corporation, Inter-American Development Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).

🗓️ June 16, 2026
🕘 9:00–10:30 AM ET | 2:00–3:30 PM BST
💻 Virtual

Register here ⤵️
https://www.cgdev.org/event/investing-childcare-multilateral-development-banks-progress-lessons-and-road-ahead

Women are entering international financial institutions in roughly equal numbers to men. But as seniority increases, women’s representation continues to fall.

Eeshani Kandpal and Kelsey Harris reflect on lessons from CGD’s first annual Women in Leadership Conference and explore the structural barriers that continue to shape who reaches leadership positions.

Read more ⤵️
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/pipeline-power-what-we-learned-cgds-first-annual-women-leadership-conference

In a new CGD blog, Tim Ohlenburg and Rikin Gandhi argue that evaluating AI interventions should go beyond model performance or even traditional impact evaluations. As AI tools, products, and users evolve, evaluation must become a continuous process of learning and improvement.

Drawing on Digital Green’s FarmerChat platform, the authors outline a four-level framework for assessing generative AI interventions—from model quality and user engagement to behavior change and real-world development outcomes.

Continuous Improvement Through Evaluation: Building Better and Better Generative AI Interventions How do you evaluate a development intervention based on generative AI, like a tutoring tool or a chatbot to provide advice to farmers? The Generative AI Evaluation Playbook lays out a four-level framework for evaluating generative AI interventions through a process of continuous assessment.

As development finance grows more constrained, the World Bank is betting bigger on guarantees.

A new CGD blog by Karen Mathiasen and Nico Martinez explores the World Bank’s new guarantee framework, which combines lending and risk-sharing tools to help countries reduce borrowing costs and attract private financing.

Read more ⤵️

Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due: A Look at the World Bank’s New Guarantee Framework World Bank Group President Ajay Banga has made the increased use of guarantees a key objective of his reform agenda, committing to a significant uptake in their use and facilitating this uptake by merging all instruments under the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Facility (MIGA), an arm of the Worl...

A few text messages per school, costing less than $1 per student, helped turn a national education reform in Tanzania from one that failed to improve learning into one that succeeded.

By sending school-specific recommendations directly to local education monitors, researchers found that student learning increased by 16 percent compared to the inspection program alone.

The findings offer a powerful reminder that improving how programs are implemented can sometimes make all the difference.

A $24,000 Text Message Tweak Made a National School Program Work A few text messages per school, costing under $1 per student, turned a national education program in Tanzania from one that failed to improve learning into one that succeeded.