RSS Amplifier

Global Development & Economic Advancement · Feb 3, 2026

February 2026

Read inOriginalenesdefrptjaittr
0
Sign in to vote or save

Global Development & Economic Advancement · Global Development & Economic Advancement

  • Ken Opalo - Africa in 2026 - The 11 trends & factors that will shape African affairs

  • Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argues that AI’s rapid expansion threatens to permanently displace human labour across all skill levels, necessitating real-time economic monitoring and radical policy interventions

    • He also discusses other topics but I’ve linked to the section related to economic disruption

  • Todd Moss - What is Think Tank impact? (And what is it not?)

    • Impact is defined by specific policy mechanisms and real world rule changes, not by internal outputs like reports or media mentions, which are merely tactical tools

  • US lawmakers have agreed on a $50b foreign assistance package for 2026, a 16% cut, but less severe then the previously proposed ~47% reduction

  • David Oks

    • GDP numbers in poor countries are usually fake

    • A lot of population numbers are fake

      • I agree with most of this but I don’t think it all evens out globally

  • US House passes 3 year extension of African Growth and Opportunity Act (and passed the Senate as a 1 year extension before going back to the House)

    • 3rd February update - Deal is tentative at best

  • The Circle Foundation and the UN announced an expansion of blockchain based aid to 15 UN agencies

  • The US and Côte d’Ivoire signed a $937m health memorandum of understanding requiring $450m in domestic investment to transition health programmes toward self-reliance

  • UN, US sign $2b humanitarian funding agreement for 17 crisis-hit countries

  • Ken Opalo - The international development community isn’t adapting fast enough to official aid cuts

  • Semafor - Trump advisers refine their Africa strategy

    • Focus on critical minerals and supply chain resilience rather than attempting to match China’s infrastructure spending

  • Semafor - The flaws of ‘trade not aid’

  • Sects, Money and Global Health - How foreign aid can help countries develop systems of local health research and knowledge…and not inadvertently create an elite cabal

  • Think Global Health - 1 year post-USAID, global health funding stuck in limbo

  • VoxDev and Oliver Hanney are launching a new podcast “Ideas in Development”

    • Vietnam’s economy: The remarkable story of the last 50 years

    • The nuts & bolts of economic growth - with Kartik Akileswaran, the co-founder of growth teams

    • Unlocking high-value agriculture in Peru

    • Economists vs Technologists on AI - with Deena Mousa (from CoGi)

  • World Bank

    • Despite steep tariff increases and high policy uncertainty, global GDP growth in 2025 is set to come in at 2.7%

    • Unlocking women’s economic potential: Cutting edge evidence from Latin America and the Caribbean

  • How Côte d’Ivoire rebuilt itself after chaos, and quietly became West Africa’s most dependable growth story

  • Rohit Shinde

  • What are some of Colombia’s problems?

  • UNU WIDER - Trade in Tasks

    • Argue that understanding trade, growth and development today requires a shift in perspective, from what countries export to what they do within global value chains

  • Prosperiti Insights - Markets without prices - Price caps can reduce access to third-party markets in India

  • India’s economy is projected to grow at 7.4% in 2026, 0.9% higher than last year

  • World Bank

    • New guidebook presents evidence based strategies for designing effective labour programs

      • The most effective programs in LMICs deliver earnings and employment improvements four to five times greater than the average

    • How Brazil is redefining the first step onto the jobs ladder

  • VoxDev - Why is female labour force participation still so low in Egypt?

  • Windfall Trust

  • US completes withdrawal from World Health Organization

  • Global Health Insights

    • The US leaves WHO - What could motivate its return?

    • Global health trends in 2026

  • Rowena Luk - The state of healthcare investments in Africa in 2025

  • Saloni Dattani - The golden age of vaccine development

  • Novo Nordisk launches weight loss pill in US

    • Set to accelerate a price war, given that it is priced significantly lower than the jab-based versions

  • Hannah Ritchie

    • Child deaths outnumber homicides in the United States, but get far less public attention

    • Diabetes is growing much faster in South Asia and Africa than in Europe or North America

  • Malaysia is an outlier: richer than its neighbours but doing worse on child nutrition

  • Tinubu has signed four laws to overhaul Nigeria’s tax system, introducing a 30% capital gains tax and expanding the tax base to reduce the nation’s fiscal reliance on oil exports

  • Tax dealings – state and private sector relations in Somalia

  • Rachel Glennerster - Reflections on the World Economic Forum: AI, Geopolitics, and Biothreats

  • DevEx - Taxing smarter is the key to thriving in an era of declining aid

  • WEF - The Global Cooperation Barometer reveals strong pressures on multilateral institutions are causing global cooperation to evolve rather than stop

    • While multilateral forms of cooperation declined, smaller coalitions of countries and companies were instrumental in maintaining overall cooperation levels

  • DevEx - The US Trade and Development Agency has survived development cuts by pivoting toward national security and private-sector trade

  • India and EU announce a free trade deal affecting billions

  • Mexico’s new tariffs hit Shein and millions of local resellers

  • China’s $113b free-trade experiment on Hainan Island

  • EU countries approve Mercosur trade deal after 25 years of talks

    • Set to create the world’s largest free trade area, covering ~700m people

  • African trade has been vastly underestimated

  • IMF approves $442m financing package for the DRC

  • Zimbabwe has year-on-year inflation falling into single digits, hitting 4.1% for the first time since 1997

  • Grieve Chelwa - Zambia ditches the IMF...for now

  • China pulls back on funding African projects

  • GiveWell - AI red teaming at GiveWell: what we’ve learned (and where we’d welcome your input)

  • Schmidt Sciences awards ~$3m to study AI’s impact on jobs

  • AI for Good: Cross-sector analysis

  • Alex Imas - What is the impact of AI on productivity? - Reconciling the micro and the macro evidence

  • OpenAI have launched ChatGPT Health - Designed for health and wellness

  • Gates Foundation and OpenAI launch $50m AI partnership to strengthen healthcare systems in Africa

  • Probably Good - Economics, biology, and anti-malarial apps: An interview with Arnon Houri-Yafin

  • Jesús Fernández-Villaverde - The 2024 Revision of World Population Prospects from the UN Population Division has serious credibility problems, both in data accuracy and in projection plausibility

  • Nature - No meta-analytical effect of economic inequality on well-being or mental health

  • Introducing the World Bank Land Data Map

  • Have environmental microplastics levels been overestimated?

  • VoxDev - Common misperceptions: What people get wrong about the world and why it matters

  • Ipsos - 71% of global citizens are optimistic 2026 will be better

    • Across 30 countries

  • The Economist - Humanity will shrink, far sooner than you think

  • Africa Investment Report 2025

    • African startups raised $3.8b, a 32% increase in funding volume

  • Realistic Optimist

  • African tech firms normalise debt as capital source

  • Moniepoint’s transaction volume jumps to 14 billion, worth $294b

  • Airtel Africa hits 179m customers, surpasses $210b in mobile money transactions

  • The collapse of KOKO, Kenya’s bioethanol clean cooking start up

  • VoxDev - How climate change could trap workers in agriculture

  • Thousands of Kenya’s smallholder coffee farmers risk losing EU market as deforestation law takes effect

  • Will genetically modified crops be adopted in agriculture in India?

  • How to raise agtech funding in 2026

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

  • Ghana settles $1.47b energy sector debt to restore power stability

  • The majority of oil marketers are no longer importing petrol into Nigeria as the Dangote refinery is now providing adequate supply

  • Acumen announced its Hardest-to-Reach initiative secured a total of $250m to expand clean energy access across sub-Saharan Africa

  • Indonesia’s shift to cleaner cooking fuels has greatly improved air quality and health

  • Senegal plans to connect 3,637 additional localities to the national electricity grid in 2026, expanding access to 113,654 households

  • W. Gyude Moore - Who designs Africa’s power future? The missing politics in Mission 300

  • Nat Bullard - Annual presentation on the state of decarbonisation

  • Growing evidence of countrywide massacres in Iran

  • The US continues to move assets near to Iran

  • Syria’s government says it has struck ceasefire deal with Kurdish-led forces

  • Fatima Abo Alasrar - Yemen’s South between the Gulf Rift and the Southern Cause - The STC gambit collapsed in five days. The question now is what survives it

  • MacKenzie Scott had a twelvefold increase (from $94m in 2024 to $1.2b in 2025) supporting organisations working in LMICs, targeting climate resilience and grassroots empowerment

  • Raising Impact - “Aims to maximise the impact of philanthropic capital in India and across Asia. We provide analytically anchored, regionally rooted, bespoke philanthropic advisory service to bridge the persistent gap between philanthropic intent and measurable outcomes”

  • GiveWell podcast

  • CEARCH - Deep report on effective giving in Asia

  • Joey Savoie - Are philanthropic advisors too specialised or not specialised enough? I think both

  • Nick Laing has started a blog - 5 Ways to better charity work in 2026

  • Ben Yeoh podcast with Deena Mousa - How much is a life worth? Effective philanthropy, AI for good & global health

  • Alexander Kustov - The uncomfortable truths about immigration

  • Hannah Ritchie - Many people are individually optimistic but think the world is falling apart

  • Rose M. Mutiso - Africa treats its diaspora like a bank account, not a brain trust

  • Alice Evans - Cultural leapfrogging: swiping past tradition

  • Authorities in Togo are investigating lead contamination from battery recyclers

  • Book Summary: Seeing Like A State by James C Scott

  • Global population requiring interventions against trachoma falls below 100 million for the first time

    • There were 1.5 billion people estimated to be at risk in 2002, dropping to 97 million as of November 2025, a 94% reduction

  • Uzbekistan maternal mortality has declined by nearly 4.5 times over the last 30 years

  • Pakistan - Stunting among children under two has decreased by 6.4%, while within the 6-month age group, stunting has declined by 20%

  • Globally, 2025 had one of the lowest annual death rates from extreme weather in history

  • Poverty drops to 17.3% in Buenos Aires City

  • Middle class Mexicans now outnumber those in poverty

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

Read the original on gdea.substack.com ↗

Comments

Nothing yet. Say the first thing.

    Sign in to join the conversation.