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Global Development & Economic Advancement · Apr 6, 2026

April 2026

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Global Development & Economic Advancement · Global Development & Economic Advancement

  • OpenAI Foundation plans to spend at least $1b over the next year across four areas including:

    • Life sciences (Alzheimer’s, open health datasets, underfunded high burden diseases)

      • Run by Jacob Trefethen (ex-Coefficient Giving)

    • Jobs/economic impact

  • Ken Opalo - African policymakers should be clear-eyed about Iran war impact

  • World Bank - The right way to do industrial policy

    • The Bank published a 276 page report reversing its 1993 position that industrial policy usually fails outside East Asia, arguing it is now far more replicable than previously thought

  • Todd Moss - Death to the policy report - Think tanks should spend precious time on more useful activities

  • Global terrorism falls to a decade low (the lowest level since 2007)

    • Deaths down 28% to 5,582

    • Incidents down 22% to 2,944

  • Oli Hanney - There is no randomising a technological revolution

    • Development economics is failing to address AI questions

  • GDEA Extra - Under-5 child deaths fell to 4.9 million in 2024

    • But revised UN population estimates added 209,000 deaths to the 2023 baseline, meaning the 2024 figure is only slightly different from last year’s published number

    • Nigeria (+89,000) and DRC (+76,000) account for most of the revision - countries that haven’t held a census since 2006 and 1984 respectively

    • India (-35,000), Ethiopia (-26,000) and Pakistan (-11,000) drove the biggest improvements

  • Impactful Policy Careers - EU global health policy accelerator

    • A fully-funded accelerator in Brussels that prepares professionals to influence global health governance and development aid through European policy

  • Coefficient Giving (CoGi) - Global aid policy - Associate program officer

  • Evidence Action - The AI Access Initiative - Program lead

  • Gates Foundation - Senior research scientist, eradication & elimination

  • Prevail Fund

    • Talent acquisition partner, senior associate (philanthropy), manager (philanthropy)

  • GiveWell

    • Salesforce administrator, recruiter, project manager, research analyst, researcher, senior malaria researcher

  • Hi-Med Career Planning course - Pathways to impact in medical careers

  • Probably Good Job Board

  • Hannah Ritchie - UK aid budget cuts - falling to 0.3% of GNI by 2027, the lowest in 25+ years; effectively ~0.24% after domestic refugee costs

  • Sam Anschell -What questions do policymakers ask about foreign aid?

    • Insights from Japanese and Korean lawmakers; only $1-2 spent on advocacy per $1,000 of ODA disbursed

  • Semafor - The challenge and opportunity with America First global health agreements

    • Signed deals represent a ~49% drop in annual US support vs 2024

    • Zambia rejected $1b+

    • Zimbabwe suspended $367m

    • Kenya’s $1.6b frozen

  • MW Muiru - Dissecting the US-Africa health agreements

  • SSRN - Aid cuts increase demand for government services and taxation

    • Evidence from halting USAID funding

  • Unlock Aid - Funding pathways innovators should know about

  • Devex - From aid to investment - reshaping Africa’s path to growth

  • VoxDev - Special economic zones - why they succeed or fail

    • Over 7,000 SEZs globally

    • Vietnam’s shifted workers from informal agriculture to formal manufacturing, but Indonesia’s KAPET programme showed no measurable effects

  • Uzbekistan emerges as one of Europe and Central Asia’s fastest-growing economies, ~6.2% GDP growth in 2025, vs 2.4% regional average

  • Botswana’s economy shrinks 5.4% in Q4 - mining output fell 47% as global diamond market weakened

  • Karthik Tadepalli - The institute behind Taiwan’s chip dominance

    • ITRI started with $16m and 400 employees in 1973, eventually spawning TSMC

  • Can Asia still deliver the development miracle?

    • Asia’s share of global GDP rose from 13% (1960) to 31% (2023), but over 100 million still live in extreme poverty and ~1.3 billion work informally

  • OECD - Iran war erases global growth upgrade, fans inflation

  • India’s economy growing faster than previously believed - GDP expanded 7.1% in FY2024-25, up from an earlier estimate of 6.5%, after a methodological update

  • PIIE - India’s 20 years of GDP misestimation

  • Ideas in Development - Raghuram Rajan on India’s growth prospects in the age of AI - argues India’s cost advantage persists even when both countries adopt AI

  • Shruti Rajagopalan - Podcast with India’s Chief Economic Advisor on strategic resilience, financial markets and capital formation

  • Nicholas Decker - Do developing countries still need manufacturing? - India’s service led growth challenges the traditional model

  • Ideas in Development - How does technology diffuse? - Adoption lags behind innovation due to organisational constraints, not lack of knowledge

  • Rwanda becomes first country with nationwide autonomous drone delivery network

  • Agency Fund Accelerator - Year One Update

  • India shouldn’t build frontier models, it should build plumbing - focus on data centres, advanced packaging and rare earth processing

  • Rethink Priorities - What does AI progress mean for health systems in LMICs?

  • AfDB commits $80m to DRC's first census in over 40 years

  • Ideas in Development - The future runs through African cities - By 2050, 900 million more people will live in African cities

  • Al Jazeera - India begins world’s biggest population count - Last census was 2011

  • Alice Evans - Demographic overstretch - When population growth outruns state capacity

  • VoxDev - Malaria is an economic crisis

  • GAVI - Kebbi malaria vaccination rolls back hospitalisations and deaths - weekly malaria admissions dropped from 12 to 4

  • India launches its largest HPV vaccine drive - targeting ~12m teenage girls annually

    • India accounts for roughly a quarter of global cervical cancer cases

  • India has made progress against rabies

    • Dog bite incidence fell from 17m to 9.1m

  • Ozempic is about to go generic for billions of people - patent expired March 22nd

    • Prices could drop to ~$15/month

  • IFC - €1b in financing to Aspen to expand local manufacturing of essential medicines and vaccines in Africa

  • Aspen targets Mounjaro approval in sub-Saharan Africa this year

  • The GPI - Democracy wins, even on growth

    • Countries transitioning from nondemocracy to democracy achieve about 20% higher GDP per capita over 25 years

  • Open PEA - Why does Malawi keep choosing maize over cash - The practical politics

  • CSIS - Nepal’s election marks generational break and new strategic moment in the Himalayas

  • DevPolicy - Rethinking Indonesia’s reliance on more rules, units and systems - 251,000 applicable laws and 27,000 government digital platforms, yet regulatory quality lags far behind Malaysia and Singapore

  • Prosperiti - Vietnam’s 2021 labour law reforms made it complete orders 23% faster and 18% cheaper than India and worker earnings are up 53%

  • Kenya gains zero-tariff access to China for agricultural exports from May

  • The Diplomat - Africa gets duty-free access to China, but Chinese companies win on both sides

  • UK and Nigeria sign £746m ports deal

  • Kenya and Rwanda sign fintech licence passporting agreement - second such deal after Ghana-Rwanda in 2025

  • Semafor - South Africa’s debt expected to peak this fiscal year after nearly two decades of increases

  • Nigeria’s banking sector attracts $13.5b in foreign inflows in 2025 - a 93% increase from 2024, driven by recapitalisation

  • South Africa - Private investment plans triple as reforms advance

  • Devex

  • World Bank aims to give Mozambique $6b in financing over five years

  • Debt funding in African startups went from under $300m in 2021 to $1.2b in 2025, growing from 7% to 38% of total disclosed funding

  • More than 50% of sub-Saharan African public debt is now domestic - reduces currency exposure but rollover risk rises with ~8.8% borrowing costs

  • AfDB macro outlook 2026: Africa grew 4.2% in 2025, hosting 12 of the world’s 20 fastest growing economies, East Africa leads at 6.4%

    • Public debt hit $1.9 trillion

    • Between 2022-2024, countries paid $450b more in debt service than they received in new financing

    • USAID cuts amount to ~$4b across 44 African countries (via Africa Brief)

  • GiveWell - Investing in information for greater future impact

  • JAMA - FDA releases draft guidance permitting Bayesian methods in clinical trials, allowing sponsors to incorporate historical data and abandon traditional type I error control

  • Lant Pritchett - Low-bar poverty lines: Ending the Reign of Error

    • Argues the dollar a day poverty line was too low to be the goal of development, and proposes replacing it with a prosperity gap measure and an upper bound poverty line that better reflect what we actually care about

  • VoxDev - North Korea’s economy: a study of economic black holes

  • Gallup - World Happiness Report 2026

    • In 85 of 136 countries, under-25s are happier now than 20 years ago

    • Youth happiness has declined in English speaking nations

  • Sunbeth Global Concepts raises $118.4m through commercial paper to expand cocoa exports

  • Realistic Optimist

  • Rest of World - Can Africa succeed where India failed with the $40 smartphone?

  • Connor Tabarrok - The trillion-dollar bill on the sidewalk

    • Water infrastructure returns $21 per dollar invested but fails due to institutional design

  • Bloomberg - World Bank plans $500m to upgrade Kenya’s commuter rail

  • World Bank - Ports and jobs - Supporting maritime development in Senegal, Timor-Leste and Comoros

  • Semafor - Africa’s mobile money market hits $1.4 trillion in transaction value, roughly doubling in four years, with sub-Saharan Africa accounting for three-quarters of the global total

  • ISAAA - 73 countries have now adopted genetically modified crops since 1996 - 44 through cultivation, 29 through imports

  • Egypt reports $11.5b in agricultural exports for 2025, reaching 167 countries, and launches first ag-dedicated PE fund

  • Nigeria exported just $1.8m of cassava in 2024 vs Thailand's $518m - despite being the world's largest producer at 60m tonnes/year

  • Ghana to reduce palm oil imports by $200m with new China deal

  • Dangote strikes $4.2b deal with Chinese firm to power East Africa’s agriculture

  • Devex - ADB gets moving on its $40b commitment to food systems

  • World Bank grants $216m to Burkina Faso to boost agriculture

  • For more African agriculture news check out Ag Safari by Hannatu Asheolge

  • Todd Moss - Africa has a nuclear bros problem

  • Devex - Mission 300 sends energy fellows into governments across Africa

  • The energy security fallout - From fossil fragility to electric independence

  • VoxDev - A ray of hope: the rise of solar energy in China

  • Rockefeller Foundation and Global Energy Alliance invest more than $100m to expand electricity in Africa

  • Hannah Ritchie - Will Africa still be energy-poor in 2050?

  • Ken Opalo - Conflict in the Horn of Africa isn't inevitable

  • Over 300,000 farmers in Nigeria displaced by armed groups, leaving fertile land idle ahead of rainy season

  • CEGA - How much peace can a dollar buy?

  • Chris Ogunmodede - The lessons of the war in Iran for the Horn of Africa

  • Semafor - Conflict threatens Gulf investment to Africa

    • Gulf states may reduce $100b+ in regional capital flows due to Middle East conflict costs

  • Rafael Proença - Which countries are most exposed to economic shocks due to war

  • Renaissance Philanthropy launched SCI PHI - A new publication on science and philanthropy

  • Pop-Up Journal - The Griliches Question: how much does R&D actually return

    • Five year NBER project to establish reliable estimates. US government spends 0.6% of GDP on R&D but estimates range from $2 to $20 per dollar invested

    • Accepting ~$250k grant proposals

  • Anthropic launches science blog - AI-assisted discoveries and supports AI for Science programme providing API credits

  • Alexander Kustov - Academics need to wake up on AI

  • Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham - Research in the time of AI - LLMs compress the research timeline but the hard part is still knowing where to walk

  • Tom Kalil - Philanthropic moon shots and how to fund them

    • Philanthropists should fund ambitious goals that risk averse government peer review won’t touch

  • Abhishaike Mahajan - Coming up with drug candidates isn’t the bottleneck on finding new treatments. Can AI help with the things that are?

  • Abundance & Growth

    • Clinical trial reforms that once seemed radical - preregistration, RCTs and mandatory results reporting are now standard. Individual patient data sharing is the next frontier

    • A directory of living literature reviews - 11 continuously updated research syntheses

    • Who will program manage the program managers?

  • Cosmos Institute - Science needs scientists

    • AI will revolutionise discovery but understanding requires human engagement

  • Research on Research Institute - Why metascience matters

    • India spends 0.6% of GDP on R&D vs 2.5% for competitors and argues India’s science policy is not evidence based

  • Macroscience - Virtue metascience

    • Proposes evaluating science through virtue ethics rather than outcomes

  • David Oks - How citations ruined science

  • Astera Institute - Announcing Radial, a new life sciences division

  • Latin America and the Caribbean advances in eradicating hunger - 6.2m fewer people experiencing hunger

  • Chile becomes first country in the Americas verified by WHO for the elimination of leprosy

  • WHO validates elimination of trachoma in Libya

  • US adult smoking rate drops below 10%

  • India’s murder rate halved since 1991 - from 4.6 to 2.0 per 100k

  • For more good news check out Fix The News & Human Progress

Read the original on gdea.substack.com ↗

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