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Global Development & Economic Advancement · Jan 2, 2026

January 2026

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Global Development & Economic Advancement · Global Development & Economic Advancement

I’ve compiled a list of hits-based giving opportunities for donors open to higher-risk global development bets.

There’s extensive research for GiveWell-style cost-effective interventions but far less for those wanting to take bigger swings. The post covers economic growth, health, meta and a few other topics. Although it is an unvetted initial list, you’ll have to do your own investigations to see if any options fit into your giving plans.

  • Coefficient Giving

  • Marco Rubio - Restoring America’s global health leadership

    • The US is overhauling its global health strategy by bypassing NGOs in favour of government partnerships, recently signing $8b+ in bilateral agreements with nine African nations

  • Alexander Kustov - Immigration is not one thing that has effects

    • Deliberate policy changes, not varied abstractions, drive outcomes we care about

  • Ken Opalo - 2025: Year in Review

  • Joey Savoie - My career plan: Launching Elevate Philanthropy!

  • Ambitious Impact - Announcing four new charities

    • First Embrace - ‘Kangaroo Mother Care’ wards in Nigerian hospitals

    • Better Season Project - Asset-collateralised loans to Kenyan smallholder farmers

    • Opal Health - Learning and action groups in rural Uganda to reduce maternal and neonatal mortality

    • Better Futures Guide - Will create a GiveWell-style evaluator for livelihood programmes

  • Seema Jayachandran - The case for counterfactual thinking in nonprofit fundraising

  • GiveWell - Progress on issues we identified during top charities red teaming

    • $37m extra grants made and ~$20m avoided due to identified issues

    • Single-source reliance had led to 20-25% overestimation of net cost-effectiveness, misallocation across Nigerian states and missed opportunities in Chad

    • They want to spend less time fiddling with models and more time on ground-level checks, data collection, expert conversations

  • IHME - GBD 2023 revised sub-Saharan Africa mortality estimates sharply upward (87% higher for ages 5-14, 60%+ higher for women 15-29) after abandoning 60-year-old model life table methods that borrowed mortality patterns from high-income countries

  • NSF announces a $1 billion initiative to launch a new generation of transformative independent research organisations to advance breakthrough science

    • Caleb Watney on why this could be a big deal

      • $10-$50 million/year awards per team (rather then per project)

      • 5+ year commitments

      • Measuring impact through advancement up the Tech Readiness Level scale rather than papers published

      • Supporting research orgs outside traditional university structures

  • Sweden and Germany slash aid budgets to focus on Ukraine and defence spending

    • £800m from Sweden and £920m from Germany

  • Norway to increase support for African Development Fund

  • Charles Kenny and Justin Sandefur - Update on lives lost from USAID cuts

    • Cuts may cause 500k-1.6m additional deaths annually, with limited compensating response from other donors

  • United Nations cuts its 2026 emergency aid budget in half

  • America first global health strategy

    • Expanding faith-based healthcare in Nigeria

      • The US has signed a five-year, $2.1b health partnership with Nigeria that conditions aid on $3b domestic co-investment and prioritises funding for Christian faith-based clinics

    • Strengthening health ties with Uganda and Lesotho

    • USs and Kenya sign five-year, $2.5b health cooperation framework

  • LessWrong - I tried reproducing that Lancet study about USAID cuts so you don’t have to

  • Most Irish foreign aid never leaves the country

  • DevEx - Rethinking development funding means making it matter to the median voter

  • Launch of the UK government’s new approach to Africa

    • Shifting from a ‘donor-recipient’ model to an ‘investor-partner’ strategy

  • Nature - Economic inequality does not equate to poor well-being or mental health

    • A meta-analysis of 168 studies covering ~11 million people

  • Latin America reached its lowest ever poverty rate in 2024

  • Oliver Kim - According to satellite data, North Korean GDP per capita grew at around 3% per year from 1999 to 2013, contradicting the Bank of Korea’s estimates of decline

  • Brian Albrecht - GDP still wins - The only number that really matters

  • Brazil: The heart of the ‘zombie’ economy in emerging markets

    • Brazil has roughly 2.3x the emerging market average of zombie companies (firms whose debt interest exceeds profits), at ~17% vs ~8%

  • How Kerala eliminated extreme poverty

  • Noah Smith - I think India can do it

    • India is poised to become a developed nation within decades as sustained ~8% growth, driven by a booming manufacturing sector and financial reforms

  • Dev Patel, Justin Sandefur & Arvind Subramanian - We were wrong about convergence

    • Several years ago, we celebrated a new era of unconditional convergence of global incomes. Since then, the trend has reversed

  • IHME - Nearly one in five child deaths linked to child growth failure

  • Saloni Dattani - Medical breakthroughs in 2025

  • WHO World Malaria Report estimates 610k deaths in 2024, up slightly from 597k in 2023

  • Gates Foundation - 2025 Goalkeepers report

  • Nigeria closes factories linked to US auto industry amid lead poisoning inquiry

  • Kenya pushes back as US eyes more African health deals

  • Headache disorders affect 3 billion people worldwide - nearly one in every three people, ranking sixth for health loss

  • Global Health Insights - Universal Health Coverage: The Emperor has no clothes

    • UHC coverage has been essentially flat since 2015, yet successive UN reports frame this stagnation positively

  • Measles deaths down 88% since 2000

  • 2024 was among the worst years for measles outbreaks since the early 2000s

  • Isha Malhotra - India’s labor law overhaul: snapshot of key changes

  • Dan Lewis - The worst policies in the developed world

  • Bhutan pledges up to 10,000 Bitcoin (~$1b) to build new ‘mindfulness’ city

  • Cryptocurrency trading now legal in Ghana

  • World Bank

    • Tracking welfare in real time: How can data keep policy one step ahead?

    • Innovation in development: Lessons from World Bank experience

      • An analysis of 7,576 Independent Evaluation Group project evaluations from 1998 to 2025 reveals that innovative development projects consistently outperform standard interventions, prompting the World Bank to institutionalise experimentation through a dedicated Department for Innovation launched in 2024

  • DevEx - Can the US-Africa trade program AGOA be resurrected?

  • Africa in Brief - According to signals from major carriers, a partial reopening of the Red Sea route as early as 2026 could drive shipping costs sharply lower, easing global supply chains

  • China’s critical minerals strategy in Africa

    • China has gained a dominant position in Africa’s critical minerals sector through long-term investments in mining and refining capacity, making it challenging for African countries to advance up the value chain

  • African Development Fund secured record $11b for 2025-28, 23% above previous replenishment

  • Kenya & US DFC to proceed with $1b debt-for-food swap

  • DevEx

    • US DFC reauthorisation bill would expand spending cap from $60b to $205b, extend authority to 2031, allow high-income country investments

    • As the World Bank’s outcome-oriented approach takes hold, aligning incentives will ensure this shift is a durable one

    • World Bank backs nuclear revival while gas stays a political fault line

  • OPEC Fund approved $600m across 15 projects in LMICs

  • IMF - Ghana’s fifth ECF review

    • Inflation down to single digits for first time since 2021

    • Public debt trajectory improved from 79% to projected 57% of GDP

    • Primary surplus of 1.5% on track

  • CGD - DFC, critical minerals and peace in DRC?

    • The US is pivoting from aid to trade by using the DFC to challenge Chinese mining dominance in the DRC

  • Equiano - Frontier 2025 - a curated review of breakthroughs and deployments across Africa’s AI landscape

  • GoogleDeepMind - 1,001 real-world AI use cases

  • James Ransom - Will AI eat India?

    • The characteristics that made India attractive for human-performed cognitive tasks (routine, rules-based, digitally mediated work) also define the task categories most amenable to AI substitution

  • Windfall Trust

    • AI’s 2025 labour market impacts

      • AI slowing white-collar job growth and reducing entry-level hiring in exposed roles, but no clear aggregate employment or wage effects yet, with adoption still under 10% of US firms

    • If AI stays “jagged”, it could be good news for workers

  • How AI can detect faults in broken WASH infrastructure

  • GoogleDeepMind

  • What does AI mean for data analysts in government (and beyond)?

  • AI agents could transform Indian manufacturing

  • Semafor - UAE blockchain project eyes Africa growth through M-Pesa deal

  • Agricultural drones are taking off globally, saving farmers time and money

  • As India pushes drone deliveries, gig workers fear added insecurity

  • WeRide and Uber launch Middle East’s first fully driverless robotaxi commercial operations in Abu Dhabi

  • Chris Paxton - Where the Horses Went - An optimistic case for robotics and what that means for the rest of us

  • Rose Mutiso - Why one of the year’s biggest AI-for-development stories isn’t actually about AI

    • India’s AI monsoon forecasting success (quarter of 38m farmers changed planting decisions based on accurate 4-week predictions) worked because AI amplified decades of existing infrastructure, institutional relationships and delivery systems rather than creating impact from scratch

  • Nature - A database of 2.75 billion buildings could help scientists to monitor urban planning, climate change, disaster risks and corruption.

    Credit: Zhu et al./ESSD

  • $1.57b share sale hands Vodafone majority control of Safaricom

  • How Jumia lost its way

  • Building trust and transparency via text message: how digital receipts change smallholder markets

  • PayPal plans Africa global digital wallet launch in 2026

  • Realistic Optimist

  • Africa’s industrial growth needs abundant power

  • India to open nuclear power industry to private sector

  • Ken Opalo - Firms or Families? Another instalment in the Mission 300 electrification debate

  • Semafor - Nuclear energy poised to rise sharply in Africa’s power mix

  • Hannah Ritchie - What happened on energy and climate in China this year?

  • VoxDev with a literature review of education technology

  • Oliver Kim - In an experiment with 684 developing-country education policymakers, “dutiful citizens are worth nearly 50 percent more to officials than children learning how to read.”

  • World Bank - Is the learning crisis partly a motivation crisis?

  • Aliko Dangote’s foundation pledged ~$688m to fund STEM education, girls’ schooling and teacher training

  • BCG - Global talent mobility is slowing and shifting

  • ~28% of intra-African travel is now visa-free, up from 20% in 2016

  • Lauren Gilbert - Immigration and Innovation

  • Laurenz Guenther - Why immigration research is probably biased

  • Alexander Kustov- Do people like refugees more than economic immigrants?

  • Dan Lewis - Nine major conflicts we have ignored for Ukraine and Gaza

  • Syria after Assad: A year in numbers

    • 1m+ refugees returned since regime fell

    • World Bank forecasts 1% GDP growth in 2025

  • ACLED - What’s driving conflict today? A review of global trends

  • Semafor - Timing of Guinea-Bissau coup raises key questions

  • Peter Evans - The scale of aid resources put into ‘Democracy and Governance’, and the effect of the abrupt end of such aid

  • Landmine casualties hit four-year high as treaty setbacks deepen

  • A critical assessment of ECOWAS’ role in safeguarding democracy in West Africa

  • Uganda stops granting refugee status for Eritreans, Somalis and Ethiopians

  • Ten African security trends from 2025

  • Karthik Tadepalli- Ideas aren’t getting harder to find

    • Allocative efficiency has declined. More productive firms aren’t gaining market share over less productive ones

  • PaperTrails - A GoodReads for papers, posts and research

  • Frontier of the Year 2025 - A list of 200+ events and scientific results

    • How did the world change this year? Which results are speculative? Which are biggest, if true?

  • Andrew Gerard - Relaunching Macroscience

  • The Good Science Project

  • Alex Tabarrok - Innovations in health care

  • Noah Smith - China has invented a whole new way to do innovation

    • Extreme vertical integration

  • Taiwan has achieved its hepatitis C elimination targets ahead of schedule

  • Prasanna Viswanathan - India’s poorest households just lived through a decade of historic upgrade

    • Rural vehicle ownership jumped 6%→47%

    • Urban poorest owning bikes/cars grew 20%→60%

    • Fridges, not long ago considered a luxury, now reach 46% rural and 58% urban among the poorest

    • Mobile phones are now universal with 94%+ even among the bottom 40%.

  • Brazil eliminates mother-to-child transmission of HIV

  • Human Progress - 1,084 reasons the world isn’t falling apart

  • Fix The News - All the news the headlines missed in 2025

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

Read the original on gdea.substack.com ↗

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