Development

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering April 22 to April 29, was compiled with support from Anne Connell, Becky Allen, and Alexandra Eterno. Islamic State atrocities against women in Iraq                             Kurdish news outlets reported this week that the self-proclaimed Islamic State group summarily executed 250 women and girls in Mosul for refusing marriages and sexual relationships with combatants. These reports follow a December 2014 estimate from Iraq’s Ministry of Human Rights that over 150 women had been killed for refusal to participate in what has been termed “sexual jihad.” Over the past two years, rights groups have documented thousands of cases of Yazidi and other ethnic minority women in Syria and Iraq being held in sexual slavery and brutalized by the extremist group, leading to a recent announcement by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that the sexual atrocities committed against Yazidi women amounted to acts of genocide. In Kurdish regions, a number of organizations now provide psycho-social support to women and girls who have escaped captivity and face significant challenges reintegrating into their communities. Legal rights for women Saudi Arabia                                                                                  In a recent interview, Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia signaled that he would support increased legal rights for women, potentially opening the door for women’s right to drive. The Prince allegedly told a former senior U.S. military officer that “[i]f women were allowed to ride camels [in the time of the Prophet Muhammed], perhaps we should let them drive cars, the modern-day camels.” However, the Prince subsequently hedged his comments, suggesting that reforms require public support and could not be rushed. Discussion surrounding women’s right to drive in Saudi Arabia has dovetailed with the Saudi cabinet’s endorsement of an ambitious set of economic and social reforms under the country’s new Vision 2030. The unprecedented agenda acknowledges the relationship between gender equality in the labor force and economic growth and calls for an increase in women’s labor force participation from 22 to 30 percent by 2030. Many express hope that Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 will hasten economic and legal reform to advance women’s rights in a country that currently ranks near the bottom of the 2015 World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index. Women leading earthquake recovery in Nepal                                                                 This week marked the one-year anniversary of the devastating back-to-back 7.8- and 7.3-magnitude earthquakes that killed nearly 9,000 people in Nepal. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), women and children were the most vulnerable populations among displaced Nepalis in the direct aftermath of the quakes, affected by both devastated health systems and disrupted access to safe water and sanitation. The destruction of water systems continues to pose significant burdens for women: in remote rural areas that have seen little or no reconstruction—due in part to political gridlock and corruption that have hampered investment—many women spend up to five hours a day fetching water. Scores of households lost their sole breadwinner and land owner, leaving many women across the country without resources to rebuild permanent homes. Reports suggest, however, that women in some districts are leading recovery efforts—rebuilding housing, installing water tanks, building solar power infrastructure, and receiving skills training in economic empowerment programs. In the district of Sindhupalchowk, where nearly 90 percent of structures collapsed, aid organizations have financed female-owned businesses and trained women in masonry and carpentry skills. Post-disaster investment in women has been shown to yield broad gains in reconstruction and contribute to community resilience.

Coauthored with Naomi Egel, research associate in the International Institutions and Global Governance program at the Council on Foreign Relations This year, the global environmental outlook is sunnier than last Earth Day. To be sure, Earth faces dire threats, as global warming, desertification, and deforestation continue unabated. The world has hit record temperatures each of the last eleven months. Ninety-three percent of the Great Barrier Reef’s coral is now bleached. Biodiverse jungles in Indonesia are being burned to make way for palm oil plantations. And half of the world’s population will live in water stressed areas by 2025. And yet the news is not all negative. Over the past year, the world has collectively taken significant steps to fight these alarming trends, suggesting that we are not wholly incapable of caring for our planet. Three accomplishments in particular provide welcome glimmers of hope. The Paris Agreement The most prominent example of humanity’s collective will to tackle environmental challenges was the breakthrough Paris Agreement reached in December at the twenty-first meeting of the Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Delegates pledged to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, buttressed by countries’ individual Intended Nationally Determined Contributions. They also established a new five-year review cycle and committed to ratchet up their ambitions for emissions reductions in each period. They further expanded financing mechanisms to facilitate sustainable development and compensate vulnerable states for loss and damage, while extending to 2025 their previous $100 billion pledge for climate finance from developed states. Overall, the Paris Agreement provides a promising platform on which to accelerate climate action in the future—provided that domestic politics do not derail countries’ commitments to meeting their pledges. The Sustainable Development Goals Environmental conservation featured prominently in six of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted at the United Nations on September 25, 2015. This marked a welcome change from the previous Millennium Development Goals, which gave short shrift to the global environment—and the invaluable “ecosystem services” that a healthy and resilient planet provide to the world economy. In adopting SDGs 13-15, countries committed themselves to conserve the terrestrial environment (including by fighting deforestation, combating desertification, and preserving endangered species); to sustainably manage marine ecosystems (including though better coastal zone management and more sustainable fisheries); and to combat climate change. Goals 6, 7, and 11, meanwhile, commit parties to sustainably manage water resources, promote clean energy, and make the transition to sustainable cities and communities. To be sure, the SDGs are highly ambitious and their implementation will require follow-through by UN member states. Still, they send an unprecedented and promising signal by placing environmental considerations at the heart of the global development agenda. Restarting negotiations on a high seas biodiversity agreement Becalmed for years, UN negotiations have finally started on a treaty to protect marine life on the high seas—the vast expanses of water more than 200 miles from shore that constitute approximately 64 percent of the ocean and cover 50 percent of the Earth’s surface. A preparatory committee, which will meet from April 2016-April 2017, will aim to develop a foundation for a treaty text. The intended High Seas Biodiversity Convention will fill a huge gap in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which addresses only marine areas within countries’ exclusive economic zones (EEZs), which extend just 200 miles. Prospects for this ambitious treaty improved markedly when Obama administration, which had been on the fence, announced last year that it would enter multilateral negotiations. As the rapporteur report from a December 2014 CFR workshop noted, U.S. participation will be extremely important for the success of a high seas biodiversity treaty, given its naval dominance, economic interests, and leading role in advancing conservation. Moreover, joining the negotiations from the beginning will allow the United States to shape the treaty text (including potentially problematic clauses related to resource sharing). Another reason for optimism: when it comes to treaty ratification, conventions to preserve marine resources are among the few to escape notorious gridlock in Washington. Although the Senate has approved U.S. ratification of only five multilateral treaties during President Obama’s tenure, four of these protect ocean wildlife and combat illegal fishing. Taken together, the Paris Agreement, the SDGs, and the negotiations for a High Seas Biodiversity Convention are hopeful indicators. They suggest that the world’s leaders, and their constituents, are waking to the realization that there is no Planet B. But driving this agenda home will require vigorous leadership from the United States, including from President Obama during his last months in office, and from whoever succeeds him next January. One of the United States’ greatest strengths is its ability to actively engage in and to drive the agenda in nearly every multilateral body on Earth, and to bring unmatched resources and issue-specific technical and scientific knowledge to bear on global problems, not least environmental ones. During President Obama’s remaining tenure in office, the administration should draw upon this unparalleled U.S. capacity and work to enhance coordination and partnership among various environmentally-focused bodies. Such an approach is far from glamorous. But improving institutional capacity to tackle the greatest collective challenge we face is necessary to save the planet in the long term. The president has done the country and the world a great service by placing environmental sustainability at the heart of U.S. national security, foreign policy, and development assistance. Here’s hoping that the next occupant of the Oval Office builds on this legacy so that the planet has a better chance of surviving its race against time.

This post features a conversation with Audrey Choi, chief executive officer of Morgan Stanley’s Institute for Sustainable Investing and managing director of its Global Sustainable Finance Group. Choi talks about the evolving $20 trillion sector, including important U.S. policy changes and her thoughts on where sustainable investing is headed. 1) What does sustainable investing mean, and how has it evolved in recent years? There has been an evolution in sustainable investing over the past five to ten years in both definition and practice. Investors have moved away from predominately avoiding—or divesting from—industries and companies considered harmful toward taking a more proactive approach as well. They are pursuing positive social and environmental impact while also expecting competitive financial returns. Traditionally, there was a tendency to divide investing and philanthropy, using the first to build wealth and the other to make a positive social difference. Sustainable investing, which includes values-based, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) integration, thematic investing, and impact investing approaches, allows investors to align their values or mission with their investment portfolio. Another shift has been the increase in research addressing the misconception that doing good requires a financial trade-off. Harvard University and Brookings compared a portfolio of companies that performed poorly on sustainability with a portfolio of companies that performed very well on the same issues. One dollar in the low performance portfolio grew to $14.46 between 1993 and 2014. The same dollar in the high performance portfolio rose to $28.36 over the same period. And at Morgan Stanley’s Institute for Sustainable Investing, we examined ten thousand mutual funds across seven years of performance, comparing sustainable to traditional investing strategies. We found that 64 percent of the time, sustainable strategies performed either the same, or slightly better, than traditional ones. Meanwhile, volatility for those strategies was the same, or slightly less, 64 percent of the time. Finally, the University of Oxford conducted a meta-analysis of over two hundred studies and found that incorporating ESG business practices resulted in better operational performance, lower cost of capital, and better stock price performance. We’re also seeing a shift in how sustainability factors into stock and company valuations. More and more investors and analysts are asking how to incorporate ESG into existing models of valuation. Whether a multinational company disposes of waste responsibly, monitors its water usage, and recycles increasingly matters. Sustainability efforts are more than corporate reports—they are considerations that can be materially relevant to core business practices and results. 2) How is “sustainability” measured, and what counts as sustainable investing? We take the broad view that sustainable investing encompasses both financial sustainability and environmental and social sustainability. As part of the sustainable investing evolution, there has been a great deal of work in the field to better understand the type of sustainability considerations that can have both real business and investment impact. The United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (UNPRI) and the Sustainable Accounting Standards Board (SASB) are two important examples of increasingly-recognized bodies developing standards and frameworks for measuring and reporting on sustainability. UNPRI has not only established what responsible investment should entail, but as a membership organization, it is a platform for signatories (asset managers, owners, and service providers) to express their commitment to a more sustainable global financial system. And SASB has created standards for ESG considerations across eighty industries, helping public corporations disclose material issues to investors.  As part of its standard-setting work, SASB found that climate change alone affects seventy-two of seventy-nine industries—each in specific and different ways. That’s 93 percent of the capital markets, or $33.8 trillion dollars. 3) How does sustainable investing compare to philanthropy or development aid, through NGOs and others? Are there some areas that should be left to private donors rather than investors? Ultimately, driving large-scale positive social and environmental change requires government, philanthropy, and investment dollars to work in common cause. Tax dollars and philanthropy alone are not sufficient to fix the world’s problems. Private investment can play a crucial role in filling that gap. Still, sustainable investing should not be seen as a replacement to philanthropy. Indeed, there are critical situations when philanthropy and government aid should be the first resort, such as when an immediate response is required, as in humanitarian efforts and disaster relief. Aid is critical in these instances where financial returns, cannot, or should not, be expected. But governments and philanthropies also play critical roles as catalytic investors. They provide the visionary risk capital to enable discovery and innovation, setting the stage for future markets. For example, microfinance began as a donor-led space, eventually growing to a robust field where private sector investment has enabled scale and reach. 4) What are the U.S. rules and regulations that have helped, or hindered, sustainable investing? In the U.S. context, one of the most important recent changes was the revision to U.S. Department of Labor guidance around ESG investing for Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) plans, announced late last year by Secretary Thomas Perez. Employee retirement plans, such as pension funds or 401(k)s, are bound by the ERISA, which sets a fiduciary duty, or legal obligation, for managers to act in the interest of plan participants. In October 2015, Secretary Perez and the Department of Labor issued a clarification that “environmental, social, and governance factors may have a direct relationship to the economic and financial value of an investment.”  Rather than an external and separate consideration, ESG factors could now be considered relevant in evaluating an investment’s economic qualities. This clarification went a long way in addressing the perception that ESG consideration might be at odds with fulfilling fiduciary duty. Globally, another important development was the Paris Climate Conference (COP21) agreement that set binding targets to limit global emissions. It sent a clear signal of change that may open new conversations on ESG and sustainable investing, as well as the inclusion of climate change-related risk as a material financial consideration. 5) Looking ahead, what is the outlook for sustainable investing, in the short and long term? Within ten to fifteen years, we believe sustainable investing should be perceived as a redundant term. Sustainability considerations will be a part of a best-in-class investing thesis, rather than being a separate analysis. Just as political and cyber risk has become a core part of the risk and return analysis, so too do we believe that sustainability factors will become a core part of risk and return analysis. There has already been impressive growth in the field. In 2012, the U.S. Sustainable Investing Forum reported one out of every nine dollars invested in the United States had some type of sustainable mandate to it. From 2012 to 2014, that figure grew by 76 percent to one out of every six dollars. Though the starting point was small, we are seeing rapid growth, with more than $20 trillion dollars now invested in the sector globally. Another driver of change in sustainable investing is the influence of millennials. Compared to other generations, millennials are three times as likely to pick an employer based on their ESG performance. They are also twice as likely to check product packaging for sustainable sourcing information before they choose a product. And this philosophy carries over to their investing decisions. Millennials are twice as likely to check a mutual fund or equity investment and choose it because of sustainability, and twice as likely to divest—or walk away—because of objectionable corporate activity. As this generation is set to inherit more than $30 trillion in the United States over the next thirty to forty years, it will be significant how they integrate their sustainability priorities into their investment decisions going forward.  

This week thousands of government officials, journalists, academics, and private sector and civil society representatives convene in Washington for the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. But the most important event for global economic governance occurs later this year. And it won’t be in the United States. In September, China will host the eleventh summit of the Group of Twenty (G20) in the eastern city of Hangzhou, one of the country’s ancient capitals. The choice of location is appropriate. Hangzhou is a potent symbol of China’s meteoric rise—and of its grand ambitions. Eight centuries ago, it was the terminus of the Silk Road, described by Marco Polo as “the most beautiful and prosperous city in the world.” Today Hangzhou, which has seen its population swell from 2.4 to 8.9 million since 2000, is the headquarters of the internet giant Alibaba. President Xi Jinping is using the summit—and this year’s G20 chairmanship—to showcase China’s emergence as the world’s most dynamic economy and, alongside the United States, its most important leader. As at past G20 summits, the main focus at Hangzhou will be how to promote sustained global growth, which has proven elusive since the sluggish recovery from the global economic crisis that began in 2007-2008. Stimulating aggregate demand is increasingly important in the face of a slowdown in Chinese growth (to a still-enviable 6.9 percent), anemic performance in the EU and Japan, and contractions in other major economies including Brazil and Russia. At the G20 summit in Brisbane in 2014, leaders committed to add another two percent to the collective G20 GDP by 2018. In Hangzhou, they will assess progress toward this goal. But the G20 summit also offers China an opportunity to advance international cooperation on three urgent priorities. These include closing a yawning gap between the global demand for and supply of infrastructure financing; ensuring that G20 members not only implement but also ratchet up the climate change commitments they made in Paris in December; and advancing the world’s ambitious sustainable development agenda. Meeting global infrastructure needs. Satisfying the voracious global demand for airports, railroads, seaports, power plants, electricity grids, housing, waste management, and the like will require investments on an unprecedented scale. It will also necessitate massive technical assistance to help developing countries formulate “bankable” projects and to help ensure that infrastructure investments not only deliver growth but also contribute to positive political, social, and ecological outcomes. China’s main contribution to date has been promotion of its One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative—a modern-day “Silk Road” that promises vast investments in Asian infrastructure to connect national economies to global markets. The OBOR is to be underwritten by bilateral assistance and anticipated funding from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) whose creation Beijing spearheaded last year. However, meeting global infrastructure needs—estimated at $100 trillion over the next two decades—will require far more than the public funding available from wealthy donors and multilateral development banks (including not only the AIIB, but also the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and others). Moving “from billions to trillions” will entail leveraging private finance, including from traditionally cautious institutional investors, who must be convinced that massive projects with up-front risks and uncertain, long-term payoffs are feasible and sustainable and that they will enjoy a measure of protection if things head south. China can begin to square this circle by working with its G20 partners on a financing model that meets infrastructure funding needs over the short, medium, and long term, including through co-investment by bodies like the International Finance Corporation and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, as well as the development of infrastructure finance as a distinct asset class. Such a pragmatic, multilateral approach would also help the United States and China put last year’s AIIB kerfuffle behind them. Fulfilling—and exceeding—the Paris pledges. Hangzhou will be the first G20 meeting since the breakthrough twenty-first conference of parties (COP-21) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), at which countries abandoned the fruitless quest for a legally binding successor to the Kyoto Protocol for a less formal “pledge and review” process. But these “intended nationally-determined contributions” (INDCs) offer little grounds for euphoria, and averting a global ecological calamity will require parties to the UNFCCC to ratchet up their commitments significantly before 2030. The G20, collectively responsible for three quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions, must use the Hangzhou summit to reaffirm their commitment to full implementation of the Paris accord—and to signal their determination to take additional, dramatic steps. In a promising sign, China has signaled that it is prepared to do precisely that. Meeting with President Obama on the margins of the Nuclear Security Summit on March 31, President Xi pledged to make climate change a major focus of the Hangzhou summit. He also promised, along with President Obama, to ratify the Paris Accord on Earth Day, April 22. Since its creation, the G20 has focused overwhelmingly on traditional financial and economic issues, restricting its involvement in climate to the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies. What Xi, Obama, and other leaders now recognize is that future growth must be “green growth,” and that the G20 will be critical in building the global political will to transition to a low-carbon economy. Underpinning this reorientation is the awareness that the shift toward climate-friendly policies and technologies can simultaneously advance innovation, competitiveness, and the health of both citizens and the planet. In the run-up to Hangzhou, the Xi government should mobilize G20 action on climate financing, which will require many multiples of the $100 billion that wealthy donor governments have committed to provide the Green Climate Fund by 2020. This will ultimately include new financial instruments, including green climate bonds, capable of attracting institutional investors, to support projects from reforestation to clean power plants. Sustaining global development. Since the economic reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, the Chinese government has managed to bring some 680 million people out of extreme poverty. China’s dramatic transformation has reinforced the Xi government’s intent to place global development at the heart of the Hangzhou agenda. The timing, certainly, could not be better. Last autumn, the UN General Assembly unanimously endorsed a set of seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), intended to drive development policy and investments through 2030. Achieving these ambitious objectives, however, will require high-level political attention of the sort only the G20 can provide. The G20 has already dipped its toe in development waters, of course, beginning with the Seoul summit in 2010. Indeed it has helped shift the development conversation away from official assistance—the traditional preoccupation of the Western Group of Seven (G7) donors. At Hangzhou, China and its G20 partners should endorse the core message of last July’s UN Financing for Development summit in Addis Ababa, which emphasized domestic resource mobilization—that is, funds from public and private sectors in developing countries themselves—to achieve the SDGs. Finally, China can use the Hangzhou summit to share its own experiences with urbanization. At the heart of China’s development has been massive migration from villages to cities. This pell-mell urbanization is increasingly the global norm. By 2030, the number of cities of more than a million will rise to 650. On balance, these trends are positive: cities tend to be hubs of innovation and generators of wealth. But the mega-cities of tomorrow may exacerbate inequality and spawn teeming slums, posing extraordinary challenges to governance and security. To help the G20 tackle this urban agenda, China should invite to Hangzhou the C40, a transnational network of major cities that former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg helped create, to share lessons of how to manage the transition to an urban planet. Such a leadership role can also build political momentum going into HABITAT 3—the third UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development—scheduled to take place in Quito, Ecuador, in October. To be sure, the G20’s priority on promoting global growth is well-placed. But as G20 summits have evolved in scope (and expectations have evolved in step), host countries can no longer afford to focus on a singular issue. Nor can global growth be addressed in isolation from other global challenges. The Hangzhou summit offers an opportunity to make progress on a host of issues that can facilitate sustained and sustainable growth over the long run.

Emerging Voices highlights new research, thinking, and approaches to development challenges from contributing scholars and practitioners. This post is from Dr. D. Michael Shafer, president and founder of Warm Heart Worldwide and professor emeritus of political science at Rutgers University. Warm Heart is a community-based development organization dedicated to building socially- and economically-sustainable communities in rural areas of northern Thailand. Though a monumental step forward on climate change, the Paris Agreement fails to recognize one of the biggest climate change issues for developing countries: agriculture. Poor farmers’ dependence on unsustainable planting, cultivating, and harvesting techniques make them unwitting contributors to global warming by emitting black carbon and greenhouse gases (GHGs). This problem extends beyond China and India (the Paris deal’s focus) to places as diverse as Indonesia, Cameroon, and Iran. By burning field wastes, poor farmers release up to twenty-five percent of the world’s total of “black carbon”—clouds of smoke that count as the second-largest warming source after CO2—emitting 330,000 metric tons every year. And rice growers in impoverished and densely-populated areas produce high levels of methane, a hydrocarbon gas twenty-five times as warming as CO2. Traditional flooded paddy techniques account for up to fifteen percent of total GHG emissions from agriculture. These agricultural practices are bad for the environment; they are also bad for people. Degraded soil yields barely enough to feed a family. To double the global food supply by 2050—necessary to avoid shortages and malnourishment, especially in developing countries—traditional farmers will need to improve land use and water management, and adopt new seed, harvesting, and storage technologies. The good news is that solutions to reduce poor farmers’ global warming footprint and improve productivity already exist. First, they can learn to convert their agricultural waste into biochar and then into biochar fertilizer. Agricultural biochar is a “super charcoal” made by pyrolyzing (charring) rice straw, corn cobs, or maize stalks at high heat without any oxygen, a clean process that is also carbon negative—meaning it removes CO2 from the atmosphere and cools the earth instead of warms it. Making biochar is low-cost and low-tech, and its positive effects go beyond climate change mitigation to food security and health more generally. Poor farmers can use biochar as an additive to improve soil’s water penetration and retention—essential as drought conditions spread—to reduce acid levels, and to boost soil fertility. Biochar also aids in decontaminating soil near landfills, toxic waste dumps, and mines—areas where poor farmers are often relegated. For families lacking clean water access, biochar works as a natural water filter. Second, rice growers can switch from standard flooded paddy techniques to a method known as “system for rice intensification,” or SRI. Rather than flooding the paddy for an entire growing season, SRI involves regularly draining and drying out the paddy, refilling it only when the rice begins to wilt. And instead of transplanting seed bundles from the nursery to flooded paddy mud, rice growers plant individual seedlings in orderly rows. Though SRI requires more labor than traditional rice cultivation, it pays more dividends. Because SRI paddies are mostly dry, they reduce the methane released into the environment. SRI can also increase a farmer’s yields by as much as fifty percent, and reduce water needs by forty percent. Yet many poor, rural farmers are not aware that these solutions exist, for several reasons. They may be skipped over by development programs that test innovative projects in select locations—often those most likely to yield results. Others are distrustful of “development” advice from outsiders, so that even when biochar or SRI programs make it to their villages, they fail to take off. So what can work? Agricultural development in poor, rural farming communities that is spread by example. Farmers are more likely to try something when they see another’s success. Grassroots programs such as Digital Green do this by producing short, instructional videos that film poor farmers using simple, easily-replicated, and low-cost techniques. With little more than a tiny, battery-powered projector, Digital Green then shares the videos with women’s co-ops and other community members—ninety percent of whom adopt the innovation, compared to a ten percent adoption rate for expert-led trainings. From a climate change perspective, the benefits of cleaner, more productive, and more sustainable agriculture in poor, rural areas will be striking and immediate. Switching from burning field waste to making biochar would significantly reduce the amount of black carbon and CO2 equivalent released into the atmosphere each year, as well as their warming effects. And switching from flooded paddy to SRI could cut total methane emissions from rice production by between twenty-two and sixty-two percent. Converting just a quarter of Asian rice growers, who produce roughly ninety percent of the world’s rice, could reduce GHG emissions by 3.8 percent annually—nearly Japan’s annual contribution to global GHG emissions. From a human development perspective, the changes will also be immense, helping to feed the estimated 2.5 to 3 billion people the world will add by 2050. Most importantly, limiting poor farmers’ global warming contribution and improving the health and wellbeing of millions will not require expensive overheads, long-term aid interventions, or complicated, high-tech innovations. But it will require considering agriculture as vital to any climate change solution.    

This is a guest post by Gabriella Meltzer, Research Associate in Global Health for the Council on Foreign Relations Studies program. El Niño was first discovered in the 1600s when fishermen noticed that in some years, water temperatures in the Pacific became warmer than usual. Hence, according to the National Ocean Service, El Niño today refers to “large-scale ocean-atmosphere climate interaction linked to a periodic warming in sea surface temperatures across the central and east-central Equatorial Pacific.” These anomalous weather patterns vary across regions, ranging from heavy rainfall and flooding to severe drought. The El Niño of 2015-2016 has thus far proven itself to be the worst on record because of its interaction with global climate change, where higher atmospheric temperatures due to greenhouse gas emissions lead to a higher frequency and greater intensity of the extreme weather events characteristic of an El Niño year. Perhaps no country has felt this more than Ethiopia, which is experiencing its worst drought in roughly half a century. The country has faced three consecutive failed rains, the most intense and recent being in June 2015 with the arrival of El Niño to its doorstep. The primary rainy season from June through September is critical to Ethiopia’s agricultural sector, which contributes 42.3 percent of the country’s GDP and employs roughly 73 percent of its labor force. Ethiopia has suffered from chronic food insecurity for over thirty years as a result of intense population growth whose overcultivation of small landholdings has put immense pressure on the soil in an already fragile environment. Yet, the drought occurring now has brought a level of devastation that, according to the United Nations, could rival the major famine in 1984 that killed upwards of 900,000 people. As of February 2016, 75 percent of harvests have been lost, one million livestock have died, and ten to fifteen million people require emergency humanitarian food assistance, with 430,000 children experiencing severe malnutrition. Between 2004 and 2012, Ethiopia’s economy grew at roughly 11 percent annually, outperforming the 7 percent annual growth required to achieve the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving poverty by 2015. Ethiopia is frequently touted as a sub-Saharan Africa success story in development circles due to government investments in healthcare, agriculture, education, and infrastructure. Yet as of February 1, the Ethiopian government and its aid partners have announced that they need a total of $1.4 billion in 2016 to address the current drought-induced crisis, and have only received roughly one-third of this amount thus far. The World Food Programme has said that $500 million of this request is urgently needed by the end of this month to extend aid efforts through April. With the political urgency surrounding the current crisis in Syria, organizations like Save the Children have found it challenging to garner public attention and fiscal support for this equally severe humanitarian situation. Despite its efforts to present itself to the world as leading sub-Saharan Africa’s economic renaissance, Ethiopia remains desperately poor, with a human development index of merely .442 (on a scale of 1.0), ranked 174th in the world. The country only reduced poverty by one-third by the close of the MDGs, and nearly 90 percent of the entire population of 96.5 million is living in multidimensional poverty. Despite all of this, the Ethiopian government has still funded 46 percent of its humanitarian requirements. Through its flooding, record snowfalls, and droughts, El Niño has proven to be a far greater threat than any nation could have anticipated. This is particularly the case for a resource-poor country such as Ethiopia, whose communities rely on subsistence farming for survival. Ethiopia is justified in its pleas for help, and donor countries should act quickly to aid the many potential victims of famine. However, the adverse effects of climate change will continue to exact an outsized toll on countries like Ethiopia, and in addition to the rapid mobilization of resources in a time of crisis, there needs to be a forward-looking plan to help vulnerable nations build resilience.

Rachel Brown, Lincoln Davidson, Sungtae “Jacky” Park, Ariella Rotenberg, Gabriel Walker, and Pei-Yu Wei look at five stories from Asia this week. 1. South Korea tells China to back off on THAAD. This Wednesday, Jeong Yeon-guk, South Korea’s presidential spokesperson, said that the decision to deploy the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system was “a matter to be decided in accordance with security and national interests.” The statement was in response to Chinese Ambassador to South Korea Qiu Guohong’s unusually brash comments that the deployment of the system “could destroy bilateral relations in an instant.” THAAD is an anti-ballistic missile system designed to destroy short- to intermediate-range ballistic missiles during their terminal phase. The United States and South Korea are considering the system’s deployment on the Korean peninsula in response North Korea’s continuous development of nuclear and missile capabilities. If deployed, THAAD would complement the existing Patriot system in Korea to provide a layered defense against incoming missiles. Given the limited capacity and the terminal-phase interception design, THAAD, by itself, would not affect China’s nuclear deterrent vis-à-vis the United States. Given the potential for dual use of THAAD to monitor missile launches from both North Korea and northeastern China, Beijing perceives potential introduction of the system as initial steps by Washington to build a broader, regionally integrated missile system aimed at China. China’s nuclear arsenal needed to deter multiple countries (the United States, India, Russia, and even North Korea in the future) is relatively small and is based on a flawed triad of bombers that will never reach the United States, vulnerable land-based missiles, and nascent submarine-based capabilities vulnerable against U.S. nuclear submarines. China still has no right to meddle in South Korea’s sovereign decision-making with regard to national defense, particularly when Beijing is enabling Pyongyang’s development of its nuclear and missile capabilities. 2. Xi Jinping visits state media. Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping, also the president of China, visited the Beijing offices of official television station China Central Television (CCTV) last weekend, where he gave a speech on “news and public opinion work,” CCP code for propaganda. Xi also spoke with staff at CCTV America, the state TV station’s English-language branch in the United States. Party media responded in full force, launching a veritable avalanche of articles exhorting Chinese to “study the spirit of Xi’s important speech,” “grasp the proper political direction,” and “be innovative in increasing the quality of public opinion work.” The message is clear: the Party comes first, truth comes second. 3. Plane crash in Nepal kills twenty-three. A small plane crashed in Nepal on Wednesday, killing all twenty-three people on board including two foreign nationals and two children. Operators lost contact with the Tara Air flight eight minutes after it took off on what was supposed to be a nineteen-minute flight. After the army was alerted to sightings of the crash, rescue teams later found the wreckage in the western district of Myagdi, a mountainous area around 130 miles from Kathmandu. Though hampered by both bad weather and difficult terrain, rescuers managed to recover all twenty-three bodies by Thursday. Investigators believe that an avalanche the day before, which blanketed the area in a huge dust cloud, could have caused the accident, although weather conditions at the flight’s origin and destination were both favorable and the flight was cleared for takeoff on Wednesday. Today, another small plane carrying eleven people crashed in a field in the mountains of Kalikot district, also in western Nepal. Two have been reported dead, and investigations of the cause are still underway. This week’s fatal crashes are the fourteenth and fifteenth that Nepal has suffered since the turn of the century. In 2013, for safety reasons, the European Union banned all Nepalese planes flying to its territory. 4. Chinese investor buys Australian dairy company. The sale of Australia’s largest dairy farm, Van Diemen’s Land in Tasmania, was approved after consideration by Australia’s Foreign Investment Review Board. Lu Xianfeng, a Chinese billionaire who runs the investment firm Moon Lake Investments, purchased Van Diemen’s Land. The deal, worth $200 million, is expected to create up to ninety-five new jobs in Tasmania and will require Moon Lake to adhere with local tax laws. The acquisition generated controversy in Australia over food security and the effect it could have on dairy and infant formula prices. A 2008 scandal involving tainted milk powder in China led demand for foreign formula to soar, and some Australians worry that much of the milk produced by Van Diemen’s could now be shipped abroad. The sale of the Australian dairy farm comes at a moment both when Chinese firms are increasingly looking to acquire agricultural assets abroad and of growing concern over Chinese acquisitions of American companies. 5. Tajikistan discusses bailout package with the IMF. Tajikistan and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are currently discussing a possible bailout program for the country worth as much as 500 million dollars. Tajikistan is Central Asia’s poorest country and is suffering economically now more than ever due in large part to Russia’s recession. As of mid-week, the Tajikistan government had not yet decided whether to make a formal request for assistance from the IMF but their leadership was quoted as saying it was “in a dialogue with the fund.” Tajikistan’s economic troubles indicate the ripple effect of collapsing commodity prices worldwide, especially for oil. While Tajikistan itself is not oil rich, it benefited from the Russian oil boom as an estimated half of Tajikistan’s working-age men flocked to Russia for oil-industry jobs and sent money back to their families in Tajikistan. According to the IMF, such remittances account for 45 percent of the country’s GDP. The U.S. dollar value of those remittances fell by 32 percent between January and June of 2015. A report released by the IMF regarding the economic situation in the country calls for swift action by Dushanbe—the Tajik capital—and a gloomy outlook for what is to come. Bonus: Guide dogs a rare breed in China. This week, the kidnapping and subsequent return of Qiaoqiao, a Chinese guide dog, drew a great deal of attention to the current state of guide dogs and the visually impaired throughout the country. Although by one count there are at least 12 million visually impaired people living in China, guide dogs only number between seventy and one hundred, ten of which reside in Beijing. The city temporarily allowed the use of guide dogs during the 2008 Paralympic Games, but the country as a whole did not legally permit them in public places until 2012. Training the dogs, which can cost upwards of $20,000 a year, has proven prohibitively expensive. Nearly 300 visually impaired people in China have submitted applications for guide dogs, but the waiting period is more than a few years because of the lack of availability. The country’s first and only guide dog training center has eighty dogs currently in training and twenty more puppies expected to be starting soon.

Central America’s Anticorruption Support The presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras were in Washington to discuss plans for the $750 million that Congress authorized to help their nations take on violence and boost economic development. The outlay comes in the wake of a record uptick in Central American migration to the United States. Nearly 3 million people have fled their homes and neighborhoods, including 100,000 unaccompanied minors who arrived at the southern border between October 2013 and July 2015. The U.S. funding requires Northern Triangle governments to address myriad domestic problems, including strengthening legal systems, protecting human rights, and rooting out corruption. U.S. anticorruption efforts will be met with broad civil society and multilateral support, dovetailing with grassroots campaigns against graft and high-level impunity in Honduras and Guatemala, and furthering the resolve of multilateral-backed bodies such as Honduras’s new Mission Against Corruption and Impunity (MACCIH). The UNDP at Fifty The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the multilateral’s agency dedicated to reducing poverty and inequality, turned fifty on Wednesday. Since its founding, the number of poor dropped from one in three to one in eight people globally. UNDP helped spur these positive changes through its work in 170 countries and by rallying members to make ambitious commitments through the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But development aid is changing. Though worldwide government spending reached a $134.7 billion peak in 2013, it is far short of the UN’s 0.7 percent of gross national income (GNI) target, with a rich-country average closer to 0.39 percent. And Western governments are increasingly turning their attention and dollars to security assistance. The OECD recently widened the definition of aid to include military spending in fragile countries, and the United States is allocating more foreign assistance to programs such as Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). UNDP and other believers in traditional economic and social development worry this shift will not only slow, but undermine decades of gains. Foreign Bribery Actions Up Though only settling two Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) cases last year, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is ramping up foreign corruption prosecutions. Dedicated staff will rise by 50 percent from nineteen to twenty-nine prosecutors this year, and an assistant attorney general recently announced many pending cases. Meanwhile, foreign authorities are also upping their actions. The UK just convicted its first corporation under the five-year old Bribery Act, finding Sweett Group guilty of paying bribes to secure construction contracts in the UAE. The $3.3 million fine follows a $25.2 million settlement with the British outpost of South Africa’s Standard Bank last December for illegal payments in a Tanzanian infrastructure project. The UK law goes even further than the FCPA in scope, holding companies accountable not just for giving or taking bribes, but also for failing to prevent bribes, as Sweett Group discovered.  

Voices from the Field features contributions from scholars and practitioners highlighting new research, thinking, and approaches to development challenges. This article is authored by Tania Del Rio, Cultural Bridge Fellow with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program. Every January, 157 notable guests arrive in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, or SRE) in Mexico City. Many of them share valuable skills and qualities. They are knowledgeable about Mexico’s economy, its politics, and its people, and they are deeply invested in the country’s progress. They will meet with key figures in government, civil society, business, and academia over the course of a week. They are Mexico’s Ambassadors and Consuls, who represent and assist Mexicans all over the world. But they share one additional trait that often goes unmentioned: 75 percent of them are men. In 2006, the Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women of the UN Convention on the Elimination and Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), recommended that Mexico “accelerate efforts to promote women to positions of leadership, including in the Foreign Service,” after noting with concern the small number of women in decision-making positions in those areas. Since then, the Ministry has made efforts to address this issue with some notable results. This January, during the 27th Meeting of Ambassadors and Consuls, Minister Claudia Ruiz-Massieu announced that the next batch of ambassadorial appointments would be 50 percent female. This is an encouraging first step, but much remains to be done. As a Cultural Bridge Fellow with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program, I worked closely with the ministry in recent months, using data to identify the reasons why there are so few women in the top echelons of Mexican diplomacy. I built a dataset that tracks active Foreign Service Officers throughout their careers to see what stages present increased risk of career stagnation for women. What I found was surprising. It turns out that, despite efforts to create an open and fair process for selecting officers to become Mexico’s next diplomats, the entrance examination is a significantly more difficult hurdle to clear for women than for men. Since 2002, when the examination in its current form first came into use, 7,982 people have applied to become Foreign Service Officers. Of those, 4,096 (51.3 percent) were women. A total of 277 were selected to enter the Foreign Service in that time span; of those, only 101 were women (36.4 percent). For every year except 2014, a much higher proportion of women applied than was admitted. This is puzzling, as the exam is supposedly an unbiased evaluation of skill. It consists of three multiple choice tests on general culture, Spanish and English language, and a third language, as well as two interviews, a written essay, and a psychological examination. The drop off for women came in the general culture and Spanish multiple choice tests. There may be several possible explanations for this. We could hypothesize that the Mexican school system is not preparing men and women equally academically, or that the SRE is attracting a set of female candidates that is not sufficiently prepared for the test, or that men and women are equally prepared, but that the test is inherently biased in some way. The next step for the SRE is to test each of these hypotheses and parse out whether the best way to tackle the problem is through better recruiting, revising test questions and interview formats, or helping train potential test takers. Uneven performance in entrance examinations explains a large part of the gender gap among diplomats, but not all of it. Women in the Foreign Service are promoted less than their male peers, especially if the share of women among officers with the same seniority level is higher than 30 percent. Promotions are awarded through exams similar to those in the entrance process, combined with self and supervisor evaluations. Additional points are awarded for high responsibility posts and posts in places where officers are likely to endure additional hardship, such as war-torn regions, or locations where there is limited access to basic necessities or high rates of crime. The data on the promotion exam results show that men and women perform equally well in the exams, but that women are 45 percent less likely than men to ever be posted to places of hardship, which award an extra point in the evaluation process. Women are more likely to be assigned to lower responsibility posts, amounting on average to .18 points less in their overall exam scores. In an exam where the difference between promotion and career stagnation can result from variances in hundredths of points, this seemingly small variance in fact matters greatly. The Ministry should reevaluate the way it allocates officers to posts of different responsibility levels to ensure that women are not disproportionately assigned to less challenging work—the current allocation may reflect deep-seated gender bias about women’s abilities to be successful in hardship posts. In the same vein, the Ministry should actively recruit more women to occupy hardship posts, while taking the necessary steps to guarantee the safety of all officers stationed to difficult places. More broadly, using data to diagnose the sources of a problem like gender underrepresentation in decision-making roles is a highly effective way to create solution-oriented interventions. It can help an institution identify the most critical pressure points to attack the issue. And data is vital in benchmarking the performance of new policies and measuring progress. With this dataset in place, for example, the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs can evaluate the effect of policies it implements moving forward, and concentrate on further developing the most effective ones. Through this effort, the Ministry will continue to demonstrate that Mexico is fully committed to promoting gender equality—not only in rhetoric, but in action.

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post, covering February 11 to February 18, was compiled by Anne Connell and Becky Allen. Women in the Syrian peace talks                                              Despite months of civil society activism, women have largely been excluded from participation in the formal Syrian peace process, and talks set to begin next week show no signs of breaking this pattern. The December convening of global leaders in Paris to create a roadmap for the peace talks involved no women in positions of influence. Since then, United Nations Syrian Envoy, Staffan de Mistura, invited Syrian women and civil society representatives to contribute to the talks through an independent Women’s Advisory Board—a promising move, though the board remains isolated from direct stakeholder negotiations. Advocates for more inclusive negotiations argue that women could play a pivotal role in conflict resolution and the creation of durable peace in Syria: a 2015 study of 182 peace agreements shows that accords reached with women involved in direct talks are 35 percent more likely to last at least fifteen years. Indian court elevates women’s equality                                                                                 The Indian Supreme Court acknowledged that, while there is “a long way to go” for women to attain in practice the equality with men granted to them by the Indian constitution, the issue is the “need of the hour.” In a thirty-eight-page written ruling on a case of gender-based discrimination brought by an Indian police sub-inspector denied a promotion, the court recognized the relationship between women’s empowerment and broader economic development in India. In its ruling, India’s top court cited a study by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and wrote that “…empowerment can accelerate development. From whichever direction the issue is looked into, it provides justification for giving economic empowerment to women.” The ruling suggested that advancing the rights of women in India is not only a matter of fundamental human rights but also a strategic imperative to promote the country’s prosperity and stability. UN promotes role of women and girls in science                                                            The United Nations (UN) held the first International Day of Women and Girls in Science on February 11 in an effort to highlight the critical role of women and girls in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. The aim of the new UN day, adopted last December, is to strengthen science education, encourage greater participation of women and girls in STEM careers, and promote the achievements of women in all scientific fields. Irina Bokova, director-general of UNESCO, marked the day with a call to close the substantial gender gap in science research: only 28 percent of scientific researchers worldwide are women. Bokova also emphasized that empowering women and girls in science is an essential step towards achieving the goals laid out by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.    

Helani Galpaya is CEO of LIRNEasia, a pro-poor, pro-market think tank working on ICT and infrastructure regulatory and policy issues in the Asia Pacific. You can follow her @helanigalpaya. It’s done. The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of India, the country’s telecom regulator, has effectively banned telecommunications providers’ ability to charge different prices based on the content customers consume, a practice known as differential pricing. One of the more notable instances of differential pricing was Facebook’s Free Basics, where Facebook and its supporters argued that providing certain content for free would entice Indians to buy data packages to access the Internet.  According to the company, 50 percent of Free Basics users purchased a data package with their cellphone provider within thirty days of joining. This is an impressive conversion rate, considering fewer than 20 percent of Indians are online decades after the telcom market was liberalized and despite having among the lowest connectivity prices in the world. Other research showed zero-rated content increased adoption overall, even on WiFi networks. But for many, this “Free Basics as an on-ramp to the Internet” argument wasn’t enough to mitigate the perceived danger that users (particularly the poor, who have never used the Internet) might think Facebook is the Internet and never venture outside Facebook’s walled garden. It seemed that no amount of evidence could convince them. It turns out that the poor are using the text-only version of Facebook on Free Basics to save money by using it as a substitute for voice and SMS communication, like many African countries, and therefore saving money. Detractors also didn’t seem convinced that merely using Facebook could increase democratic participation as in Myanmar, where whole campaigns were conducted on Facebook, or allow people to exercise their right to freedom of assembly. This was cast as a battle of good versus evil—millions of concerned netizens of India and net neutrality advocates supporting a ban on differential pricing on one side, and bad telecom companies and Facebook on the other. Facebook, however, certainly didn’t help its case. Its tone-deaf response to the issue and battle with the regulator in the past few months can also serve as a case study on how not to do public relations. This was also a case of the already-connected (and therefore able to send an email to the regulator) having their say on something that primarily affects the as yet unconnected. For those who care about public participation in policy processes, it was moment to behold. The Indian telecommunications market is incredibly competitive. Indian providers face low average revenue per user, high competition and lack of spectrum thanks to artificial scarcity created by policymakers. In light of the regulator’s decision, they’ll need to find a way to set themselves apart other than differential pricing. There’s a risk they could turn to network quality and that could lead to a whole host of issues. As Tim Wu and others who have pointed out, Internet service providers have incentives to discriminate on data speeds and other indicators of quality to increase the speed of their own content or to slow the speed of other content. This has the same effect as steering users towards certain content as differential pricing. Although the regulator banned Free Basics-style schemes with the bluntness of a sledgehammer, it left the door wide open for telcos to start throttling traffic to promote their content or that of their partners. As one walled garden comes down, another could easily go up. And there’s no reason to think that a telco-based walled garden will be as open as Facebook’s, which eventually allowed anyone to develop an app for Free Basics given it met certain technical guidelines. Net neutrality advocates have argued that there are much better ways to give free Internet access to the poor. Of course they are right. For example, watching ads in return for access to the open Internet is being trialed in Bangladesh. No one was stopping these other solutions from competing with Free Basics to connect India’s poor. But with Facebook’s Free Basics essentially out of contention, it is time for others innovative actors to step up. For the sake of India’s unconnected millions, let’s hope these alternate solutions that don’t violate net neutrality principles are successful.

This post features a conversation with Dean Karlan, professor of economics at Yale University, president and founder of Innovations for Poverty Action, and founder of ImpactMatters, a newly-launched organization that assesses how well nonprofits use and produce evidence of impact. 1) How have development economics and the study of poverty evolved in recent years? Until about fifteen years ago, there were two different strands of development work, both with limitations. The first asked a big, monolithic policy question—“does aid work?—and compared how aid affected development outcomes across countries. But the cross-country research lacked the necessary data and an understanding of critical micro-level mechanisms, or the obvious first step of why some countries get more aid than others. It led to big debates, but failed to determine causality. The other strand in academia focused on understanding markets and decision-making at the individual and household-level, an approach that was valuable for understanding the world, but was often fairly removed from policy implications. Then, we saw major shifts with the availability of cheaper and better data, and intensified pressure on development economists to deliver policy prescriptions. These shifts allowed us to rigorously evaluate specific projects to find out what was working, what was not, and what to do about it. Perhaps as a byproduct of the cross-country data debate, development economists started focusing on asking when aid works, not whether aid works. The point being: there is no simple answer. This led to a blossoming of work using randomized control trials (RCTs) to test specific policies on the ground with NGOs, the private sector, and governments. We also began to see academic analysis that was more prescriptive than descriptive, and could help to guide policy.   2) In your randomized control trials (RCTs), what were some surprising findings about what’s working and what’s not? Several hot development debates have led to surprises. But, of course, since these were “hot debates,” some were surprised while others were not. Microcredit is a perfect example. Some oversold microcredit as the tool to fight poverty and to increase income for the world’s poorest, benefiting low-income households, which would ultimately lead to better healthcare and education. On the other side, critics claimed that it led to negative outcomes, such as suicides among poor farmers who could not repay loans. Despite anecdotal evidence, there was equally bad analysis on both sides and neither could establish causality, or prove what would have happened if people had not received the loans. There was no counterfactual, as economists call it. Wading into the debate using evidence, we saw strikingly similar results from seven RCTs across seven countries, several of them conducted by researchers with Innovations for Poverty Action. The punchline: microcredit loans were not typically reaching world’s poorest, and they were not increasing income on average. So, they were not meeting their main goal (though they were not causing much harm either). Once we saw the evidence, we said: “we’re a fan of microcredit, but as it’s currently done, it’s best for private investors, not for donors.” Donors should either look elsewhere or use their charitable dollars to push for more innovation, to figure out how to improve the microcredit model.   3) So what is an effective investment for donors? After we found that microcredit is not reaching the world’s poorest, donors asked us: what might? Through RCTs we found one approach that works quite well to move people out of poverty: a graduation program. At its core is the transfer of a “productive asset”—a way to make a living that has a positive impact on household consumption, savings, income, food security, and other life outcomes even years after the initial asset transfer. We have completed six RCTs on graduation programs in six countries (Ethiopia, Ghana, Honduras, India, Pakistan, and Peru). Other researchers completed a seventh in Bangladesh, and there are several similar studies from Uganda. The program first gave the asset, along with training on how to use it. We also set up a savings account, provided healthcare access, offered life coaching, and supplied food for up to six months (so recipients wouldn’t be forced to kill and eat livestock right away). Because graduation programs are expensive, at around $1,000 per person, our research focused on cost effectiveness. We had no doubt the program would create a bump in income, but would it last? In six of the seven RCTs we found strikingly similar results proving both cost effectiveness and a sustained impact—up to three years after assets were transferred in all of our RCT sites. In one of the sites, India, where we now have seven years of results, the effects are getting bigger over time rather than dissipating. This trend suggests that those in the graduation program were previously stuck in a poverty trap, and that a holistic and integrated approach combining income with social and economic support helped to get them out of it.   4) What have you found on cash transfers, another area of growing interest and investment? The most prominent study Innovations for Poverty Action did on unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) was with GiveDirectly, a nonprofit that does exactly what it says. They donate 91 cents of every dollar to poor households using mobile money for the transfers, which makes for a low-cost, lean operation. People critical of this approach at first were concerned that money would be used for alcohol and tobacco, rather than for food and other necessities. We said, “let’s go get the facts,” and set up a carefully-designed study. Our randomized evaluation found that households receiving cash transfers spent them on food, education, and medical expenses, as well as on family obligations, resulting in higher assets and better psychological well-being. There was no increase on alcohol and tobacco spending. Yet even with evidence of positive outcomes, we are seeing that cash transfers work best for short-run problems—catastrophes or conflicts where the challenge is not long-term development. They work best for helping people in a moment of need.   5) What do you say to RCT critics who argue they are too expensive, or take too long? First, it is critical to note that randomization is not the reason RCTs can be expensive (and I’ll explain why they are not always). Costs are driven by tracking and surveying people over time to see if the program affected lives, which is necessary even for non-randomized studies. While RCTs are more expensive than simple studies that ask beneficiaries—“were you happy with the program?”—I would argue that overall they are far cheaper than non-RCT evaluations, because they allow us to zoom in on what is working and what is not much faster and more accurately, ultimately saving money on bad measurement and ineffective programs. RCTs allow the testing of multiple versions of a program at once, too. For example, in Uganda we tested four variations of a classroom savings program, and found that three that did not work, but one did. The variations shed insight into why the program was working. Regarding timing, it is also critical to point out that an RCT need not be a long-term study, nor does it need to be expensive. We have done cheap, rapid-fire tests on getting people to save more by sending text messages reminding them to save, and a few months later, comparing savings rates for those that received the messages versus those that did not. Many operational questions, such as how to enroll people in a program, can and should be rapid-fire studies to give immediate feedback that improves operations. For example, MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab just released a toolkit that helps organizations run RCTs through data they may already be collecting. Full, long-term RCTs aren’t always appropriate. But when they are, getting good data that both establishes causality and illuminates why something works can put programs on the right track to maximize impact, and save money in the long run.