Poverty

The momentum seems to be building for a goal to “eradicate poverty by 2030.”   Reducing poverty is a noble goal, one to which I fully subscribe.  But the “eradicate poverty” campaign is actually only focused on “extreme” poverty which is an absurdly...

Over the past few months, quite a bit of high-level rhetoric has surrounded World Bank funding of coal projects in developing countries. On one side, Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, stated that “it is no longer necessary ...

My guest on the Wonkcast this week is New York Times columnist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof. Nick’s incisive reporting on the lives of poor and vulnerable people has led millions of his readers to empathize with people facing difficulties they could otherwise hardly imag...

The United Kingdom has been a stalwart funder and innovator in foreign assistance for almost 20 years. In 2011, it created the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) to report to Parliament on the country’s growing aid portfolio. ICAI is a QUANGO in Brit-speak –...

What do Obama and Bono have in common? Both have proposed that the world should seek to end extreme poverty over the next twenty years or so. Obama said so in his annual state of the union address (here) and this week Bono said the same (to be posted here by TED soon) in an interesting...