iDSI, the International Decision Support Initiative, is a network of expert organizations that helps policymakers make effective, efficient, and ethical decisions about how to prioritize limited resources – and it began at a CGD working group. The chair of that group, Amanda Glassman, explains the importance and challenges of priority setting for global health. 

Which country’s aid is the best? And who is giving what to whom? Recent statistics from the OECD tell us that the amount of aid given to poor countries was at an all-time high in 2014 – but the proportion of aid going to the poorest countries has fallen. CGD Senior Fellow and Europe program leader Owen Barder reflects on the figures and discusses what else countries should be doing beyond aid to improve development.

An entire Global Goal has been dedicated to greater gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. The question now is how to achieve that goal. Susan Markham, USAID Senior Coordinator for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, offers some suggestions on this week’s podcast.

This is the start of a new year and CGD’s 15th anniversary year. What better way to kick off than to invite our president Nancy Birdsall to cast her gaze back to 2015 and forward to 2016? Birdsall shares her wishes on migration, climate, inequality, and more. 

The African Development Bank is widely praised these days as one of the premier financial institutions in Africa. The past decade saw it place much greater emphasis on infrastructure financing, a change brought about in part by the instincts of its former president Donald Kaberuka. In this week's podcast, Kaberuka discusses how the AfDB’s success came about.

Befitting the holiday theme, we asked a veritable choir of CGD experts to weigh in on what has been the stand-out moment in development in the last twelve months; and, as we enter the post-2015 development era, what they hope to see in 2016 and beyond.

There have been major gains in development in many parts of the world, but hundreds of millions of people still suffer the dangerous consequences of poverty. How can we improve health systems to make them more effective, as well as less wasteful and more accountable? One way, CGD experts Amanda Glassman and Anit Mukherjee tell me in this podcast, is to focus on how health budgets in developing countries are spent.

How do rich countries' policies affect the world's poorest people? The results are in on CGD's 2015 Commitment to Development Index, which highlights strengths and opportunities in national policies on aid, environment, technology, and more. Owen Barder discusses this year's rankings.

Next week, nations gather in Paris for the 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) with the goal of establishing a global plan to address climate change. CGD Senior Fellow Frances Seymour discusses what's on the agenda in Paris and what success might look like.

At CGD's report launch event, Dr. Nathan Sheets, US Under Secretary of Treasury for International Affairs, called for banks and policymakers to address the problems that anti-money laundering laws create for developing countries. I sat down with him afterwards to record this interview.