RSS Amplifier

Global Development & Economic Advancement · Mar 1, 2026

March 2026

Read inOriginalenesdefrptjaittr
0
Sign in to vote or save

Global Development & Economic Advancement · Global Development & Economic Advancement

I‘m working with a small team on a new project to produce independent population and GDP estimates for African countries. Published figures for many countries are outdated, modelled from sparse data, or rely on censuses that are decades old1. These numbers underpin many development metrics and funding decisions, and we think there’s good reason to assume some are significantly off.

The plan is to combine satellite imagery, administrative data and other sources to produce estimates with explicit uncertainty ranges, published on a public website with full methodology.

We already have a few interested funders and advisors, but we’re looking for more people to get involved (paid or volunteer). If any of the below sounds like you, fill out this short form.

  • Research

    • Satellite/geodata experience, population estimation, economics, or your own ideas about how to estimate these figures

  • Project management

    • Coordinating across researchers, funders and comms

  • Comms/marketing

    • Helping the output reach the people who could find it useful

  • Funding

    • We have early donor interest but are open to more

  • Just want updates

    • Happy to keep you in the loop

  • Reviews of How Africa Works by Joe Studwell

    • Oliver Kim

      • Compelling but incomplete application of the East Asian development playbook

        • The inverse farm size-yield relationship may not be universal

        • Africa’s manufacturing prospects face headwinds (automation, Asian competition) that Studwell underweights

    • Saarthak Gupta for Works in Progress

      • Agricultural case is the book’s strongest element, but manufacturing pillar is thin, none of the four case studies validate it convincingly

      • Global conditions that enabled East Asian industrialisation (US absorbing exports, large wage differentials, labour intensive manufacturing) no longer hold

    • Feyi Fawehinmi and Tobi Lawson

      • Studwell’s demographic determinism is overstretched, arguing his low population density thesis underweights agency, wage dynamics and policy choices

    • Charlie Robertson

      • Studwell underweights education as a driver of development and is overly bullish on Ethiopia/Rwanda’s industrialisation prospects

  • Berke - Effective charity ≠ effective development (global health edition)

    • I may be biased but I think this is a great post

  • Joey Savoie - I wrote a book about philanthropy: Twice As Good!

  • Karthik Tadepalli - AI could give everyone a 40% raise by reducing the cost of living

  • Gavi - After a year of challenges, Gavi delivered a record 300 million vaccine doses in 2025

    • Exceeded HPV vaccine targets and expanded malaria vaccine coverage to 24 countries, despite a $2b funding shortfall

  • GiveWell’s 2025 Grantmaking

    • Approved a record $418m across 131 grants, with $53m addressing USAID cuts

    • They are targeting $500m+ in 2026

  • CGD - How African governments responded to the 2025 aid shock

  • The Gates effect: funding shifts in global health

    • The study reveals a ‘crowding-in’ effect, where donors increase their funding for the same disease areas within the same countries

  • The US launched the Sudan Humanitarian Fund with raised pledges of $1.5b ($200m from the US)

  • The Guardian - UK to cut climate finance to poor countries by a fifth

  • Devex - the problem with ‘zombie funds’

    • Nearly a year after its launch, the Cali Fund has raised just $1,000, highlighting how global funds can linger for years without delivering results

  • CGD - BII’s problem isn’t ambition, it’s capital - and here’s how to fix it

  • DIV Fund - Testing bright ideas, scaling what works

    • With $48m in philanthropic backing, a division of USAID relaunches as a nonprofit

  • Unlock Aid - Building a Food Security and Nutrition Solutions Index

    • Seeking organisations that can absorb $5m-$50m+ in capital across agricultural productivity, nutrition, supply chains and market access

  • Zimbabwe withdrew from a $367m bilateral health deal with the US over data-sharing concerns

    • Zambia also renegotiating a $1b+ deal

  • Economic anxiety is the top concern in sub-Saharan Africa

  • Joe Studwell in conversation with Tyler Cowen

  • Laos on track to graduate from Least Developed Country status in 2026 (along with Nepal and Bangladesh)

    • Bangladesh has asked to defer graduating from LDC for 3 more years

  • Nigerian stock market adds $21b, outpacing peers

  • Egypt - Inflation fell from 38% in late 2023 to ~12% in January 2026

  • VoxDev - Global poverty trends from a new lens

  • Rest of World - How cheap Chinese phones catapulted Kenya into the global digital economy

  • World Bank - Sector-targeted skills development as industrial policy - Costa Rica’s coordinated training with Intel grew semiconductor exports to 17-20% of total exports

  • Brian Albrecht - Price controls cause chaos

    • During the 1970s US price freeze, farmers destroyed livestock because it was cheaper than raising them at controlled prices

  • South Africa private investment plans triple as reforms advance

  • Ideas in Development - The economics of AI as a tool vs AGI as a worker

    • Even if economies as a whole become richer under AGI, workers can lose badly, making distribution the decisive question

  • Matthew Yglesias - We may miss the sweatshops

    • Argues AI automation could destroy the manufacturing led development pathway poorer countries have traditionally relied on

  • David Oks - Why I’m not worried about AI job loss

  • Clay Wren - Why I’m worried about AI job loss

  • Adam Ozimek - AI and the economics of the human touch

    • Argues demand for human provided services persists despite automation (live musicians outcompeted player pianos)

  • Jan Kulveit - Post-AGI economics as if nothing ever happens

    • Argues most post-AGI economic modelling is misleading because it assumes away the hardest questions

  • Anthropic and Rwanda have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to bring AI to Rwanda’s education, health and public sector systems

  • India to invest $200b in AI infrastructure

  • Rethink Priorities - Where can frontier AI make a difference in global health

  • Oliver Hanney - Three ways India is using AI for development

    • In courts, education and agriculture

  • The state of the self-driving car in 2026

  • 80,000 Hours - Using AI to enhance societal decision making

  • Joseph Levine - Millions of people are using LLMs who have never Googled anything

  • Ideas in Development - Can AI take off in Africa?

  • Windfall Trust - The case for a global push on pro-development AI

    • Wealth redistribution alone is insufficient

  • Shruti Rajagopalan - India’s AI Summit promises a revolution. The electricity grid, the tax code and the literal ground beneath the chip fab have other plans

  • World Bank - 1.2 billion young people will enter the workforce over the next 10-15 years, but only 400 million jobs are projected - an 800 million jobs gap

  • Tracking historical progress against slavery and forced labour

  • GiveWell podcast

  • Effective Mental Health is a new group doing field-building in global mental health and is running a fellowship program

  • Wolbachia mosquitoes achieved a 71% reduction in dengue infections in a Singapore RCT

    • Positivity rates fell from 21% to 6%

  • How LEEP is eliminating lead paint one country at a time

    • In Malawi, lead paint manufacturers dropped from 89% to ~10% in four years

    • 7.5 million children protected across 40+ countries at under $2 per child

  • WHO - Measles cases dropped 75% in Europe and Central Asia in 2025

  • India cuts healthcare burden as out-of-pocket costs drop sharply

    • From roughly 64% of total health expenditure in 2014 to about 39% in 2022, a drop of nearly 25 percentage points

  • Rowena Luk

    • Big Tech is in the room - OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are aggressively entering healthcare with AI tools

    • How the fight against breast cancer is changing in Africa

  • Works in Progress - Should everyone be taking statins?

    • Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, but also one of medicine’s biggest success stories

  • India’s Ministry of Statistics have built an official server that lets AI platforms directly query India’s statistical databases

  • UNU-WIDER

    • The Panopticon taxman – How digital surveillance is impacting tax compliance in Uganda

    • Why digital taxes struggle to raise revenues – and what can be done about it

  • Prosperiti - The warehouse next door

    • India’s restrictive land use regulations force quick commerce dark stores away from customers. Argues reclassifying them as retail would enable a denser network and safer deliveries

  • Rohit Shinde - A solution to the freebie problem in Indian politics

    • Proposes replacing in kind subsidies (free electricity, fertiliser, MSP guarantees) with direct cash transfers via a negative income tax

  • Transparency International - Corruption Perceptions Index 2025

    • Global average drops to a record low

  • US signs one year AGOA extension preserving US-Africa trade program, but they want more US benefits longer term

  • Ken Opalo - African policymakers should prepare for the coming commodity boom

  • Indonesia and US firms sign $38.4b in trade and investment deals

  • US and India seal trade deal - US reduced tariffs on Indian goods from 25% to 18%, India agreed to eliminate tariffs on American imports

  • Devex

  • Ghana’s cocoa buyers owe banks up to $750m

  • South Africa recalibrates after US tariff ruling

  • China scrapping tariffs on imports from 53 African countries (all except Eswatini) from May, expanding from a deal with the previous 33 countries

  • South Africa won its first credit upgrade in two decades

  • Reuters - Afreximbank lines up $8b of financing for new member South Africa

  • S&P Global - Africa credit rating trends 2025 in review

    • Seven of the sovereign upgrades in Africa in 2025 were driven primarily by improving growth prospects and reform momentum

  • Semafor - South Africa’s debt projected to peak this fiscal year

  • Cato Institute - COVID-19 slowed but couldn’t stop the fall in global inequality

  • WorldPop

  • Alice Evans - Can women walk home safely?

    • 98% of Singaporean women report feeling safe walking alone at night vs just 24% in South Africa

    • Argues that analyses of gender equality focus too much on employment and politics while omitting violence

  • ScienceDirect - Measuring the intrinsic value of choice

    • Separate from outcome based utility

  • Was the global decline of extreme poverty only due to China?

  • India’s Jal Jeevan Mission increased rural household tap water connections from 17% to 82% in six years

  • Vizier - A new corridor in the Middle East

    • Turkish-Saudi bilateral trade went from near zero to $8b annually

    • Gulf committed $28b to Syrian reconstruction

  • VoxDev - Rural electrification a decade on

    • Rural electrification had limited effects on incomes and employment

  • Semafor - Nigeria’s energy sector revamp begins reaping returns

    • Companies now control assets producing over 50% of oil output

  • Madagascar lifts 16-year ban on new mining permits, excludes gold

  • Compendium of Africa’s strategic minerals 2026

  • The USDA is investing $100m in innovation for screwworm control and eradication

  • Nigeria launches largest agricultural mechanisation programme in Africa, targeting 1.2m farmers

  • Devex - How a global cold-chain revolution can boost food security

    • Sustainable cooling market projected to double to $600b by 2050

  • Chasing counter seasonality - How Peru went from minimal blueberry exports to the world’s leading exporter in ~15 years

  • Ghana’s unpaid cocoa farmers are forced to go hungry

  • West Africa unveils $345m regional plan to combat livestock theft

  • Nigeria extends ban on raw shea nut exports to spur domestic production

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

  • Italy will offer African countries the chance to suspend debt repayments when hit by extreme climate events

  • Tomas Pueyo

    • Peak oil is coming - If solar, wind, batteries and EVs continue current exponential growth, global oil demand could peak in the early 2030s

    • The resource cliff - As demand for oil and gas dries up, the countries that most depend on their sale will have to reinvent themselves. But how successful have countries been in doing this?

  • World Bank - Which protects against climate change better, experience or income?

  • Ethiopia’s new GERD dam more than doubled the country’s installed generation capacity

    • A new crypto mining industry now absorbs 30% of national electricity demand (via Justin Sandefur)

  • Hannah Ritchie - Four minutes of air conditioning

  • Chad shuts border with Sudan

  • Murder rates drop in Brazil for the fifth year in a row - down 11% in 2025

  • Crime Forecast - Everyone is wrong about the crime decline

    • Argues the decline is primarily driven by youth behavioural changes away from unsupervised peer interaction (smartphones) rather than policing or policy

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

  • Dan Lewis - 5 top successes of foreign intervention

  • Can India reset ties with a BNP led government in Bangladesh?

  • Vizier - Syria moves towards a political settlement

    • Damascus consolidated control over Kurdish held northeast by combining military pressure with concessions like citizenship rights and Kurdish language recognition

  • Most Syrian cities saw a clear increase in night time lights in 2025

  • Venezuela is left in a dangerous in-between state

  • Burkina Faso’s junta dissolves all of country’s political parties

  • The Syrian civil war has killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions and caused poor health and widespread poverty

  • The Research on Research Institute has a new Substack - Diagnosing wasted effort in research funding is harder than it looks

  • Works in Progress - Europe’s cutting edge firms are falling far behind the American frontier because of restrictive labour laws

  • Good Science - Venture Capital has lessons for government and philanthropy

    • Funding should adopt VC’s approach of backing people over rigid proposals, enabling faster decisions and tolerating higher failure rates

  • Good Science - A reality-based view of government funding of science

  • Learning Health - Introducing the Clinical Trials Efficiency project

  • Samy Sekar - What I learned trying to find the most effective democracy charities

  • Measured Life - Diversifying grantmaking: ten regrantors or two staff?

  • ACTRA - First-year learnings

  • Max Ghenis - Interactive replication of GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness model

  • GiveDirectly has launched an evidence-backed Zakat fund in Mozambique

  • AIM have announced four new charity ideas for the next incubation cohort

    • Sugar tax advocacy

    • Palliative care opioid access in LMICs

    • Digital guided self-help for depression

    • Mobile contraceptive clinics

  • DevEx - DevEx Power 50 - Who is shaping this historic new era of development?

    • Coming in at number 4 is Alexander Berger, CEO of Coefficient Giving

    • I don’t know if there is anyone else tangentially related as I don’t have a DevEx pro account

  • Oliver Hanney - The future of communicating science

    • Science communicators must master curation and build personal platforms as Google search declines and AI proliferates research output

  • David Oks - Africa doesn’t have large firms because it doesn’t have social trust

    • Argues African societies have intense kinship ties but rank among the lowest for impersonal trust, preventing firm scale up

1

Nigeria’s last census was 2006, DRC’s was 1984

Read the original on gdea.substack.com ↗

Comments

Nothing yet. Say the first thing.

    Sign in to join the conversation.