Masood Ahmed Named as the New CGD President

Representatives confirmed on Sept. 6, 2016, that Masood Ahmed would begin serving as the new Center for Global Development (CGD) president in early 2017. Current President Nancy Birdstall announced the end of her 15-year tenure with the organization last November. Now that the CGD has found an equally accomplished replacement, she is thrilled to welcome a leader of Ahmed’s caliber to the team.

The CGD works to change practice and policy in wealthy nations in a way that alleviates global poverty. Per the organization’s website, “We are a policy crucible where world-class scholars use independent, rigorous research to develop new knowledge and practical solutions.”

Because the organization has a proven track record of influencing developmental policy worldwide, finding a new CGD president with global reach was paramount. After conducting an intensive search, the selection committee chose Ahmed for his impressive record of service for the world’s poor.

Here are five facts about Masood Ahmed’s career that will position him for success as the new CGD president.

1. Ahmed has multiple degrees from the London School of Economics (LSE).
   LSE is one of the world’s leading universities. Students and faculty alike regularly produce groundbreaking research in social sciences, economics, politics, sociology, anthropology, accounting and finance. The institution boasts a roster of top researchers and Nobel Prize winners. Ahmed excelled to such a degree that he took a position as lecturer at LSE after completing his postgraduate work.
2. He has held senior positions within the World Bank.
   In 1983, Ahmed began working with the World Bank, which provides low-interest loans to aid programs in developing nations. Over the course of his career with the organization, he carried out emergency response, water management, flood protection and hydropower projects in nations across the globe. He also led the HIPC Debt Initiative, which provided 36 developing nations with $76 billion in funding since its inception in 1996.
3. He redefined International Monetary Fund policies.
   Most notable of all, perhaps, is Ahmed’s extensive work with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The organization is a collaborative effort among 189 member countries. Like the World Bank, IMF focuses on poverty reduction by way of strategic funding and the creation of financial stability in developing nations.
   Ahmed joined IMF in 2000 to serve as deputy director of the Strategy, Policy and Review Department. In that seat, which he held for three years, he oversaw the organization’s conditionality guidelines. In 2005, he played an instrumental role in redrafting those guidelines for the first time in 32 years. Such guidelines focus on internal evaluations of how funds are appropriated. These principles also set up safeguards that ensure all IMF funds are repaid once recipient nations reach financial stability.
4. Ahmed took on global poverty from a government seat.
   Between 2003 and 2006, Ahmed served as director general for Policy and International Development of the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID). This branch of British government is the driving force behind the United Kingdom’s global development efforts.
   DFID directors are tasked with ensuring that the U.K. cooperates to the fullest extent with U.N. development goals, enhancing the efficacy of British foreign aid by increasing transparency and improving international development policy.
5. He led developmental efforts in the Middle East and Central Asia as an IMF director.
   Ahmed’s current position, which he has held since November 2008, is IMF director of the Middle East and Central Asia Department. Christine Lagarde, IMF managing director, said that Ahmed has been a “visionary leader” in overseeing operations in the region. He will vacate this post in 2017.

Over the course of a brilliant career, the new CGD president has helped create meaningful, sustainable change in the developing world by working with some of the most influential agencies on Earth. The upward mobility of his career is indicative of a mind people trust and a voice those working for the world’s poor want to hear.

“CGD occupies a prime position in the development, policy and research worlds; in my career these have also been my worlds,” Ahmed said. While serving as the new CGD president, Ahmed will flex strategic muscles built by a lifetime of outstanding global service.

– Madeline Distasio

Photo: Flickr

Global Fund for Vaccines

One lesson that health care workers and medical teams learned from the Ebola crisis in Africa was “that disease prevention should not be held back by lack of money at a critical juncture when a relatively modest, strategic investment could save thousands of lives and billions of dollars further down the line.” That is why a $2 billion global fund has been proposed to create and research vaccines for priority killer diseases such as West Nile Virus, Ebola and MERS.

The point is to invest money up front to have these vaccines ready when outbreaks occur. People could be vaccinated before the outbreak became extremely critical in the case of the recent Ebola crisis. Thousands of lives would be saved, as well millions of dollars. The Ebola case is reported to have cost $8 billion, if not more, in an attempt to control the spread. If vaccines had been readily available at the outbreak, then millions could have been saved from treating and burying victims.

The global fund would pay for the production of the vaccine as well as early and mid-stage testing of the vaccine. Thus, the money would close an existing gap between research done at universities and large-scale clinical trials that take vaccines to the market. In the case of Ebola, several successful vaccines that showed positive signs in animal testings. If the funds had been in place at the beginning of the outbreak, testing could have been moved to initial human field-testing and vaccines would have been available to stop Ebola.

The $2 billion would come from governments, foundations, pharmaceutical industry and any other industries willing to donate. In return, the donors would sit on a panel with scientists to determine which proposals for vaccines to fund.

Any vaccine project is welcome to apply for financial aid, as it costs about $500 million or more to develop one vaccine. This is a chance for vaccines for diseases not targeted by governments, the World Health Organization or the U.N. to get funding for developing cures. This also provides the chance for older vaccines to be updated and become more effective.

– Katherine Hewitt

Sources: Reuters, CIDRAP
Photo: Flickr

Top Global Healers of 2013

Each year, Foreign Policy compiles a comprehensive list of the most prominent figures in various areas of global thinking–artists, decision-makers and advocates alike–honoring them for their respective accomplishments. This year, widely known names such as Edward Snowden, Rand Paul and Vladimir Putin appeared on the list, all claiming their earned places within modern day history.

Following are all the selectees from the “Healer” category, each with a sentence description – as presented on the Foreign Policy website – and a short motivation for why these people deserve to have their names on the list. Here are the top global healers:

Dr. Caroline Buckee – “for using metadata to fight disease.”

Buckee pioneered the idea of using cellphone data in order to track human movement in malaria-infested zones, thus helping understand the epidemiology of the disease. In modern day society, mobile phones are spreading across the third world, making for an efficient and easy marker. Buckee’s research, published in 2013, covers crucial data collected from over 15 million cellphones.

Anand Grover – “for going to the mat with Big Pharma.”

A human rights lawyer and United Nations affiliate, Grover won a case against the Swiss company Novartis, which was at the time attempting to patent its cancer drug Glivec for consumption in India. Thanks to Grover’s efforts, the generic version of this effective, leukemia-battling treatment can be acquired for a price 92 percent cheaper than previously marked, thus introducing affordable medication for the poorer Indian population.

Michael Faye, Paul Niehaus, Jeremy Shapiro and Rohit Wanchoo – “for trusting the poor to spend their money wisely.”

Four economists co-founded the organization GiveDirectly, which focuses on allocating funds directly to those in need. With headquarters in Kenya, GiveDirectly transfers donations received online into pre-selected, poverty-stricken households. Rather controversial in nature, this approach has so far witnessed success.

Hannah Gay, Katherine Luzuriaga and Deborah Persaud – “for bringing us closer to a cure for HIV.”

A pediatrician and two researchers who developed an aggressive treatment which, for the first time in history, managed to cure a newborn child of HIV. Their work is the basis potentially eradicating the death sentence of HIV in the future.

Homi Kharas – “for charting a path to the end of poverty.”

Lead author in a post-Millennium Development Goals regime panel, the former World Bank economist has put tremendous efforts into anti-poverty planning. Kharas and his peers are currently aiming to end extreme global poverty by 2030.

Erica Chenoweth – “for proving Gandhi right.”

Arguing for the success rate of non-violent conflict, Chenoweth has compiled a data set ranging from the years of 1945 to 2006 that examines effectiveness of various political strategies. Applying the data to current events such as the issues with Syria, she is pioneering a revolutionary approach to political issues.

Sanjay Basu and David Stuckler – “for warning that austerity can be deadly.”

Epidemiologist and physician at Stanford and political economist/epidemiologist at Oxford respectively, these two men have come together in analyzing the effects of economic rigidity on public health in recent times. Compiling large amounts of data, they published the book “The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills.” Their argument supports better funding of public health during economically severe times.

Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir – “for showing how scarcity changes the way you think about everything.”

Harvard economist and Princeton psychologist, these two men co-authored the book “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.” Raising empathy for the poor, the book discusses the “scarcity trap,” and how not having enough resources changes the way people think.

– Natalia Isaeva

Sources: Foreign Policy, MIT Technology Review, Managing Intellectual Property, Times Higher Education, The Washington Post, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Give Directly
Photo: World Bank

Poverty Affects Brain Power, Study Shows

Many people believe that poor decisions lead to poverty. A new study, however, finds that exactly the opposite might be true: that poverty leads to poor decision-making skills.

Published in the journal Science, the study concludes that those who live in poverty are so consumed with the worries that accompany with destitution that few mental resources are available to make decisions regarding other important activities such as education, job training, and time management.

“Previous views of poverty have blamed poverty on personal failings, or an environment that is not conducive to success. We’re arguing that the lack of financial resources itself can lead to impaired cognitive function. The very condition of not having enough can actually be a cause of poverty,” said University of British Columbia professor Jiaying Zhao, who co-authored the study as a Princeton University graduate student.

Conducted in a New Jersey mall with 400 subjects chosen at random, the first set of experiments divided participants into a “poor” and “rich” group, depending on their annual income. They were each given different financial problems to solve – such as handling a sudden car repair – that ranged from easy to hard. In addition to these trial scenarios, the subjects also performed regular intelligence and cognition tests.

The results showed that when given easy financial problems to solve, those in the low-income group performed just as well as the high-income participants. When given hard financial problems to think about, however, the “poor” group performed significantly worse on the cognitive tests compared to the “rich” group.

In order to carry out the experiment in a natural context, 464 sugarcane farmers in India were also tested for their cognitive abilities. Since at least 60 percent of their income comes from their annual harvest, the farmers were tested before the harvest, when they are considered “poor”, and after the harvest, when they are considered “rich”. The results indicated that the farmers performed significantly better on both cognition tests after the harvest compared to before the harvest.

These findings, concludes Zhao, indicate that pressing financial concerns have an immediate impact on a person’s cognitive capabilities. On average, a person preoccupied with money problems exhibited a drop of as much as 13-point dip in their IQ, the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep.

Co-author Eldar Shafir, Princeton professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, explains that the experiment was controlled in such a way that the difference in performance could not be attributed to time available, nutrition, work effort or stress.

If accurate, the paper’s findings would have profound implications for public policy and services to the poor. Eliminating confusing and time-consuming forms, providing flexibility in terms of absenteeism, and giving more assistance in training and educational programs could be some of the ways to begin modifying existing aid programs, suggested the researchers.

– Nayomi Chibana
Feature Writer 

Sources: Princeton University, Science Magazinze, The Huffington Post

Child Sponsorship Works

 
When people ask how to help the poor, child sponsorship often is suggested. Indeed, for a small amount of money each month, organizations allow individuals to sponsor a child and help to provide education, food, and clothing for them. In return, the sponsors get a picture of the child and quarterly or annual updates from the organization regarding their child.  It has long seemed like an easy way to make an impact. The question many people ask, however, is does it really work? One development economist decided he was going to find out.

It seemed no one had ever been interested in finding the answer despite the fact that 9 million children are sponsored worldwide and more than $5 billion dollars per year is invested in child sponsorship programs. For organizations, obviously the stakes were high. If they allowed researchers to study the effectiveness of their programs, what would they do if they came back ineffective? After several years, one organization decided to allow themselves to be studied under one condition: anonymity.

The study initially looked at individuals in Uganda, studying 809 individuals including 188 who were sponsored as children. The results from the first study were any economist’s dream. The data clearly showed large and statistically significant impacts on the educational outcomes of sponsored children. It appeared the program was actually working! To solidify the results, the study was conducted in six other countries: Uganda, Guatemala, the Philippines, India, Kenya and Bolivia. Data was obtained on 10,144 individuals and the results were consistent with the first study. 27 to 40% more sponsored children complete secondary school and 50 to 80% more complete a college education. In addition to effects on education, the study found that sponsored children were also more likely to gain meaningful employment.

As a result of the study, the sponsorship organization removed the anonymity clause. Compassion International was the organization that allowed its program to be scrutinized; the results were clear that child sponsorship works. It helps lift kids and families out of poverty and provides them with hope. For more information about child sponsorship, visit Compassion International at www.compassion.com.

– Amanda Kloeppel
Sources: Christianity Today, Compassion International