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Figure of the week: Education participation rates in Africa increase, with some caveats

Figure of the week: Education participation rates in Africa increase, with some caveats | Speevr

On September 18, the African Union, in collaboration with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) released the report, “Transforming Education in Africa,” an evidence-based overview of education in the region. The report highlights progress the continent has made on education indicators, such as participation rates, while also illustrating challenges that remain. As Africa has the youngest population in the world—nearly 800 million Africans are under the age of 25, with 677 million between ages 3 and 24—accelerating investment in education is vital for countries to take full benefit of their human capital.

Overall, the report reveals both progress and regression when it comes to education in the region. For example, although Africa has made progress in increasing children’s participation in school (Figure 1), the authors speculate that the absolute number of out-of-school children has actually increased since 2010, given rapid population growth.
Figure 1. Share of out-of-school children in Africa, by age group

Source: “Transforming Education in Africa,” African Union, 2021.
More specifically, according to the report, approximately 42 million children of primary and secondary school age are not enrolled in school. Regionally, western Africa accounts for the highest number of out-of-school children: 2 out of 5 out-of-school children in sub-Saharan Africa live in western Africa (Figure 2). Eastern Africa follows with 34 percent of Africa’s out-of-school children.
Figure 2. Distribution of out-of-school children of primary and secondary school age in Africa by region

Source: “Transforming Education in Africa,” African Union, 2021.
More specifically, in western Africa, 27 percent of primary school-age children, 37 percent of lower-secondary school-age children, and 56 percent of upper-secondary school-age children were not enrolled in school in 2019.
The report states that bottlenecks and barriers to improving education include broader educational policies and legal frameworks and conflict and security. Specifically, within policies and legal frameworks, the authors state that, although basic education is usually compulsory, legal measures for implementation are lacking, which creates a disconnect between expected learning outcomes and effective implementation of cost-effective interventions. Demand barriers, such as the imbalance between education and labor needs can prevent children attending school on a regular basis, hindering education improvement. On the supply side, teacher shortages can lead to large class sizes where child-centered learning is difficult. Finally, conflict and insecurity situations, especially when learning institutions are targeted, inhibit children from having access to learning.

Related Content

To combat these barriers the authors recommend, among other actions, investigating the underlying reasons individuals fail to participate in education to design policy, investing in development of more resilient education systems, and improving education data and management information systems. The authors state that a substantial number of students drop out of school. Investigating the reasoning behind this could aid in policy creation that motivates students to stay in school. To address lack of resiliency in education systems, the authors say that taking a well-rounded approach that includes assessment, management, and monitoring and evaluation tools will aid in making sure that education systems function continuously. Finally, the authors state that evidenced-based information is key to education systems making progress, and so encourage further research.
For the full report, see here. Also check out “Improving learning and life skills for marginalized children: Scaling the Learner Guide Program in Tanzania” by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education for more on innovations in education in the region.

6 job quality metrics every company should know

6 job quality metrics every company should know | Speevr

Today’s labor shortages make it an auspicious moment for companies ready to measure and improve labor conditions. To do so, corporate boards and management need a clear way to manage retention by understanding its link to job quality.

The economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic has created a uniquely tight labor market with millions of unfilled job postings.1 Though shutdowns and business restrictions hit low-wage workers especially hard, evidence suggests that, in this recovery, they have options.2 Many low- and high-wage workers alike have seized the moment and quit their jobs in search of higher quality work and economic mobility.3
Employers who have seen workers leave and who have been unable to rehire feel the costs of attrition. For example, one large food distributor found the labor crunch reduced their ability to respond to customers’ demand, which led to cuts in production, distribution routes, and ultimately lost market share. Stories like this show how dramatic costs can explicitly result—in a short timeframe—from poor working conditions and high turnover.
As a result, many companies find they are playing catch-up to their competitors who made employee retention and well-being a priority years ago.4 Beyond the promise of higher returns to companies with positive culture and high rates of retention, forward-looking companies may benefit from taking steps now in anticipation of the growing call for SEC mandated human capital disclosures.5
Additional disclosures, by way of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) indicators, are meant to hold companies accountable toward socially beneficial goals—from reducing carbon footprints to promoting economic inclusion. The indicators proposed here are ideal contributors to the “S” in ESG, social impact, as they track companies’ progress in countering trends that have eroded workers’ well-being: a lack of good paying, stable jobs, and limited and inequitable mobility.

Related Content

This report provides simple, evidence-based outcome metrics that promote good quality jobs. Different companies will tackle the metrics differently depending on their industry structure and creativity of their management. Regardless, an important starting point is clarity about which metrics matter when it comes to improving job quality and how to measure progress against them.
In the U.S. labor market, many workers churn from one low-paid, low-quality job to the next.6 Despite their willingness to work hard, workers find it difficult or impossible to advance. And across all sectors of the economy, historical inequities continue to drive down wages and economic mobility of female, Black, and Hispanic workers.7
Data gathering can help determine whether progress toward these challenges, captured in these metrics, also leads to cost savings in hiring, retention, and overall performance. This way, progress at the firm level can also lead toward greater shared prosperity; the metrics below are a first step in that direction.
Key metrics: Job quality, mobility, and equity

Metrics overview and rationale
Job quality
In the last decades, low wage work has become increasingly pervasive and precarious, and at the same time stagnant wages have left many full-time workers unable to afford basic living expenses, forcing them to work multiple jobs. Many have little cushion for emergencies, leading to constant churn and short job tenures.
To track their social impact on job quality, companies can measure the share of their workforce paid living wages and with healthcare. The living wage depends on the cost of housing, health insurance, childcare, and other necessities. The national living wage is $16.54 an hour.8 We estimate that in 2019, 29 percent of workers earned a living wage, accounting for geographical differences in the cost of living.9
Likewise, unexpected health-related expenses can spell disaster for uninsured workers. Healthcare is an important component of job quality as it promotes stability and facilitates mobility. Nine percent of workers in 2019 did not have health insurance.10
Improving wages may seem like an intractable proposition in tight margin industries. However, some companies have made bold commitments, such as Bank of America, which last year raised its minimum wage to $20 an hour.11 The bank and other companies such as Google and Microsoft have also shown willingness to raise wages of workers employed by their vendors, allowing companies that provide food and janitorial services, for example, to pass on the cost of wage increases to their more community focused customers. Other companies are experimenting with profit sharing agreements for employees across the wage spectrum.12 Profit sharing strategies can increase worker engagement particularly when workers already earn more than a living wage. Whatever the strategy, and despite perceived limited flexibility when it comes to wages, measuring outcomes can help identify strategies for progress that also make business sense.

Job quality metrics

1. What percent of workers earn a living wage, as defined by their geographical location?13 How many have healthcare?

2. How many new jobs are created each year in each quintile with a living wage?

Economic mobility
Many low-wage workers churn from one low-wage job to the next, seeing little wage growth. Research shows that ‘stepping stone’ jobs that have historically helped workers transition from low to high wages are becoming a smaller share of all jobs.14 Companies that have more of these stepping stone jobs are not only contributing to a robust middle class and more stable workforce, but also can benefit from a more diverse pipeline of entry level workers and improved retention. Increasing internal mobility can also be good for a company’s bottom line, since internal hires are often less expensive and more productive than external hires.15
Internal promotions are not the only way workers move up. The organizational structure of a company may make it impractical to expect every frontline worker be able to move up internally. This will be increasingly the case as firms outsource low-wage work to contract firms that can offer little mobility to their workers. Companies that help low-wage workers transition to higher wages even when they leave the company can also make a company more attractive to prospective employees. Walmart’s recent program offering trade skills (among them plumbing certificates) is a bet in that direction.16
Companies can improve mobility rates by paying higher wages, offering training opportunities and unlocking barriers to more promising jobs.17 Doing so can attract talent, alleviate workers’ competing stressors and increase their skillsets; in turn, they can work more autonomously and be more productive.18
Rapidly churning through jobs makes it difficult for workers to accumulate the know-how required for experience to translate to better opportunities. Rapid churn also makes workers expensive to companies. Increasing a worker’s minimum tenure at a company can translate into upward economic mobility—though very long tenures can also result in stagnation. Mobility rates tend to grow over a low-wage worker’s first three years with a company before falling thereafter.19 In turn, lower turnover rates, decreased absenteeism, and lower replacement costs all help a company’s bottom line.20

Economic mobility metrics

3. What percentage of workers that started in the lowest paid quintile (those that make less than $12.31 an hour) moved to above living wage ($16.54 an hour) each year?21

4. What percentage of your lowest paid workers left before the one-year mark? How many left before the two year mark?

Job equity
Gender and racial inequities appear in both the share of workers in high-quality, high-paying jobs and in the share of workers who see economic mobility.
Research into “occupational segregation” has long shown that women, Black, and Hispanic workers are often disproportionately underrepresented in higher-paying occupations. Due to their underrepresentation in the highest quintile of occupations, we estimate that women, Black, and Hispanic workers annually underearn by $106 billion, $153 billion, and $310 billion, respectively.22

Many companies have set representation goals for themselves for diversity at the board and different levels of the organization. But they often find themselves competing for a small pool of diverse talent within their company. Using the right metrics can help by breaking down the problem to look at the talent building process.
For example, to unlock diversity at the top, managers may want to look at mobility rates in their company across demographics. Across the economy, we find race and gender mobility gaps hold some workers back. When female, Black, and Hispanic workers switch occupations, they move up less often than their male, white, and Asian counterparts. These mobility gaps are only partly explained by workers’ education levels, for the gaps persist even among highly educated workers.

This type of analysis can also help firms diversify their highest paid occupations, specifically if they can diversify the pipeline of entry-level positions and unlock bottlenecks to make sure all workers progress through the company. Our research shows that some barriers to economic mobility exist along specific pathways from one occupation to the next. Even well-traveled pathways from low- to mid- and high-wage work are marked by racial, ethnic, and gender disparities. Pinpointing exactly where these barriers exist within a company is the first step to alleviating them. (See example below.)

How companies can make mobility gaps actionable: Unlocking pathways to high-paying jobs in healthcare

Companies can measure the most frequent sources of promotion for their workforce. For example, a grocery retailer might examine the pathway from grocery bagger to cashier to assistant manager. They can look at the rates of promotion at each step and then compare the rates of different groups. The example below shows a common pathway in the healthcare sector. It shows how mobility rates vary between white, Black, and Hispanic workers as they transition from licensed practical nurses (LPNs) to registered nurses. White LPNs move up to nurses at twice the rate of Black and Hispanic LPNs.

Job equity metrics

5. What is the demographic composition in the company’s high-wage occupations? How does it compare to that of the labor force in your region?

6. What are the mobility gaps in each of the company’s wage quintiles?

The key metrics highlighted above are important for companies to track because they connect directly to labor market trends that affect workers’ access to good jobs, mobility, and equity. Managers that are able to measure and track progress across them are likely to see increased job quality and the engagement and loyalty it engenders. Broad adoption of the metrics will also add to the evidence base for successful practices and their impact on performance—ultimately contributing to an effective human capital disclosure scheme that constantly adapts and improves with the times.
The Job Quality Metrics project includes Ethan Rouen, Natalie Geismar, Jay Garg, and Ian Seyal. It is informed by a working group in 17 Rooms and part of Leadership Now’s Business for Racial Equity Pledge signed by more than 1,000 private sector leaders.
Expanded list of workforce composition questions and company metrics
To get started, below is a tailored set of practical and actionable metrics that most companies can realistically begin measuring and tracking. Compiling workforce metrics will allow firms to track metrics on job quality, mobility, and equity; assess their baseline, measure impact, and set goals accordingly.
Workforce composition metrics

Total number of workers (including full-time, part-time, and contract workers)
Percent of workers, by wage quintile, who are full-time employees, part-time employees, and contract workers
Gender and racial breakdown of employees at each wage quintile
Gender and racial breakdown of employees in each job title, occupation, or job level
Breakdown of educational attainment for each wage quintile
Corporate EBITDA and revenue (to assess impact of metrics on firm performance)

Job quality metrics

Percent of workers, by wage quintile, with a living wage, as defined by their geographical location, and employer-sponsored healthcare benefits
Number of new jobs created by wage quintile.
Number of new jobs created with a living wage and healthcare benefits by wage quintile
Median annual wage, by wage quintile
Median training expenditure per year per employee, by wage quintile
Median training expenditure per employee, excluding job-related trainings (e.g., compliance training), by wage quintile

 Economic mobility and job equity metrics

What percentage of workers that started in the lowest paid quintile (those that make less than $12.31 an hour) moved to above living wage ($16.54 an hour) each year?
What percentage of your lowest paid workers crossed the one-year mark? How many crossed the two-year mark?
Internal promotion rate, by wage quintile, race, and gender
Horizontal job change rate, by wage quintile
Average wage gain per promotion, by wage quintile
Voluntary and involuntary turnover rate, by wage quintile, race, and gender
Number of jobs posted that do not require a bachelor’s degree (BA) and the percentage of those postings actually filled by workers without BAs

Qualitative practices

Presence of rotational or cross-training programs to promote learning new skills
Presence of internship, mentorship, and/or apprenticeship programs
Presence of career development programming, through HR or other sources
Does your company consider the work practices of contracted (B2B) companies and/or vendors? If so, how?
Are open positions promoted internally through internal job boards or other mechanisms?
Tracking common occupation pathways within the company (see the example above on unlocking pathways in healthcare)
Do senior employees participate in creating curricula with external reskilling organizations (community colleges, non-profits, vendors) for entry-level positions or mid-level roles?
Do you follow workers after they leave, did they receive a wage upgrade?

6 job quality metrics every company should know

6 job quality metrics every company should know | Speevr

Today’s labor shortages make it an auspicious moment for companies ready to measure and improve labor conditions. To do so, corporate boards and management need a clear way to manage retention by understanding its link to job quality.

The economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic has created a uniquely tight labor market with millions of unfilled job postings.1 Though shutdowns and business restrictions hit low-wage workers especially hard, evidence suggests that, in this recovery, they have options.2 Many low- and high-wage workers alike have seized the moment and quit their jobs in search of higher quality work and economic mobility.3
Employers who have seen workers leave and who have been unable to rehire feel the costs of attrition. For example, one large food distributor found the labor crunch reduced their ability to respond to customers’ demand, which led to cuts in production, distribution routes, and ultimately lost market share. Stories like this show how dramatic costs can explicitly result—in a short timeframe—from poor working conditions and high turnover.
As a result, many companies find they are playing catch-up to their competitors who made employee retention and well-being a priority years ago.4 Beyond the promise of higher returns to companies with positive culture and high rates of retention, forward-looking companies may benefit from taking steps now in anticipation of the growing call for SEC mandated human capital disclosures.5
Additional disclosures, by way of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) indicators, are meant to hold companies accountable toward socially beneficial goals—from reducing carbon footprints to promoting economic inclusion. The indicators proposed here are ideal contributors to the “S” in ESG, social impact, as they track companies’ progress in countering trends that have eroded workers’ well-being: a lack of good paying, stable jobs, and limited and inequitable mobility.

Related Content

This report provides simple, evidence-based outcome metrics that promote good quality jobs. Different companies will tackle the metrics differently depending on their industry structure and creativity of their management. Regardless, an important starting point is clarity about which metrics matter when it comes to improving job quality and how to measure progress against them.
In the U.S. labor market, many workers churn from one low-paid, low-quality job to the next.6 Despite their willingness to work hard, workers find it difficult or impossible to advance. And across all sectors of the economy, historical inequities continue to drive down wages and economic mobility of female, Black, and Hispanic workers.7
Data gathering can help determine whether progress toward these challenges, captured in these metrics, also leads to cost savings in hiring, retention, and overall performance. This way, progress at the firm level can also lead toward greater shared prosperity; the metrics below are a first step in that direction.
Key metrics: Job quality, mobility, and equity

Metrics overview and rationale
Job quality
In the last decades, low wage work has become increasingly pervasive and precarious, and at the same time stagnant wages have left many full-time workers unable to afford basic living expenses, forcing them to work multiple jobs. Many have little cushion for emergencies, leading to constant churn and short job tenures.
To track their social impact on job quality, companies can measure the share of their workforce paid living wages and with healthcare. The living wage depends on the cost of housing, health insurance, childcare, and other necessities. The national living wage is $16.54 an hour.8 We estimate that in 2019, 29 percent of workers earned a living wage, accounting for geographical differences in the cost of living.9
Likewise, unexpected health-related expenses can spell disaster for uninsured workers. Healthcare is an important component of job quality as it promotes stability and facilitates mobility. Nine percent of workers in 2019 did not have health insurance.10
Improving wages may seem like an intractable proposition in tight margin industries. However, some companies have made bold commitments, such as Bank of America, which last year raised its minimum wage to $20 an hour.11 The bank and other companies such as Google and Microsoft have also shown willingness to raise wages of workers employed by their vendors, allowing companies that provide food and janitorial services, for example, to pass on the cost of wage increases to their more community focused customers. Other companies are experimenting with profit sharing agreements for employees across the wage spectrum.12 Profit sharing strategies can increase worker engagement particularly when workers already earn more than a living wage. Whatever the strategy, and despite perceived limited flexibility when it comes to wages, measuring outcomes can help identify strategies for progress that also make business sense.

Job quality metrics

1. What percent of workers earn a living wage, as defined by their geographical location?13 How many have healthcare?

2. How many new jobs are created each year in each quintile with a living wage?

Economic mobility
Many low-wage workers churn from one low-wage job to the next, seeing little wage growth. Research shows that ‘stepping stone’ jobs that have historically helped workers transition from low to high wages are becoming a smaller share of all jobs.14 Companies that have more of these stepping stone jobs are not only contributing to a robust middle class and more stable workforce, but also can benefit from a more diverse pipeline of entry level workers and improved retention. Increasing internal mobility can also be good for a company’s bottom line, since internal hires are often less expensive and more productive than external hires.15
Internal promotions are not the only way workers move up. The organizational structure of a company may make it impractical to expect every frontline worker be able to move up internally. This will be increasingly the case as firms outsource low-wage work to contract firms that can offer little mobility to their workers. Companies that help low-wage workers transition to higher wages even when they leave the company can also make a company more attractive to prospective employees. Walmart’s recent program offering trade skills (among them plumbing certificates) is a bet in that direction.16
Companies can improve mobility rates by paying higher wages, offering training opportunities and unlocking barriers to more promising jobs.17 Doing so can attract talent, alleviate workers’ competing stressors and increase their skillsets; in turn, they can work more autonomously and be more productive.18
Rapidly churning through jobs makes it difficult for workers to accumulate the know-how required for experience to translate to better opportunities. Rapid churn also makes workers expensive to companies. Increasing a worker’s minimum tenure at a company can translate into upward economic mobility—though very long tenures can also result in stagnation. Mobility rates tend to grow over a low-wage worker’s first three years with a company before falling thereafter.19 In turn, lower turnover rates, decreased absenteeism, and lower replacement costs all help a company’s bottom line.20

Economic mobility metrics

3. What percentage of workers that started in the lowest paid quintile (those that make less than $12.31 an hour) moved to above living wage ($16.54 an hour) each year?21

4. What percentage of your lowest paid workers left before the one-year mark? How many left before the two year mark?

Job equity
Gender and racial inequities appear in both the share of workers in high-quality, high-paying jobs and in the share of workers who see economic mobility.
Research into “occupational segregation” has long shown that women, Black, and Hispanic workers are often disproportionately underrepresented in higher-paying occupations. Due to their underrepresentation in the highest quintile of occupations, we estimate that women, Black, and Hispanic workers annually underearn by $106 billion, $153 billion, and $310 billion, respectively.22

Many companies have set representation goals for themselves for diversity at the board and different levels of the organization. But they often find themselves competing for a small pool of diverse talent within their company. Using the right metrics can help by breaking down the problem to look at the talent building process.
For example, to unlock diversity at the top, managers may want to look at mobility rates in their company across demographics. Across the economy, we find race and gender mobility gaps hold some workers back. When female, Black, and Hispanic workers switch occupations, they move up less often than their male, white, and Asian counterparts. These mobility gaps are only partly explained by workers’ education levels, for the gaps persist even among highly educated workers.

This type of analysis can also help firms diversify their highest paid occupations, specifically if they can diversify the pipeline of entry-level positions and unlock bottlenecks to make sure all workers progress through the company. Our research shows that some barriers to economic mobility exist along specific pathways from one occupation to the next. Even well-traveled pathways from low- to mid- and high-wage work are marked by racial, ethnic, and gender disparities. Pinpointing exactly where these barriers exist within a company is the first step to alleviating them. (See example below.)

How companies can make mobility gaps actionable: Unlocking pathways to high-paying jobs in healthcare

Companies can measure the most frequent sources of promotion for their workforce. For example, a grocery retailer might examine the pathway from grocery bagger to cashier to assistant manager. They can look at the rates of promotion at each step and then compare the rates of different groups. The example below shows a common pathway in the healthcare sector. It shows how mobility rates vary between white, Black, and Hispanic workers as they transition from licensed practical nurses (LPNs) to registered nurses. White LPNs move up to nurses at twice the rate of Black and Hispanic LPNs.

Job equity metrics

5. What is the demographic composition in the company’s high-wage occupations? How does it compare to that of the labor force in your region?

6. What are the mobility gaps in each of the company’s wage quintiles?

The key metrics highlighted above are important for companies to track because they connect directly to labor market trends that affect workers’ access to good jobs, mobility, and equity. Managers that are able to measure and track progress across them are likely to see increased job quality and the engagement and loyalty it engenders. Broad adoption of the metrics will also add to the evidence base for successful practices and their impact on performance—ultimately contributing to an effective human capital disclosure scheme that constantly adapts and improves with the times.
The Job Quality Metrics project includes Ethan Rouen, Natalie Geismar, Jay Garg, and Ian Seyal. It is informed by a working group in 17 Rooms and part of Leadership Now’s Business for Racial Equity Pledge signed by more than 1,000 private sector leaders.
Expanded list of workforce composition questions and company metrics
To get started, below is a tailored set of practical and actionable metrics that most companies can realistically begin measuring and tracking. Compiling workforce metrics will allow firms to track metrics on job quality, mobility, and equity; assess their baseline, measure impact, and set goals accordingly.
Workforce composition metrics

Total number of workers (including full-time, part-time, and contract workers)
Percent of workers, by wage quintile, who are full-time employees, part-time employees, and contract workers
Gender and racial breakdown of employees at each wage quintile
Gender and racial breakdown of employees in each job title, occupation, or job level
Breakdown of educational attainment for each wage quintile
Corporate EBITDA and revenue (to assess impact of metrics on firm performance)

Job quality metrics

Percent of workers, by wage quintile, with a living wage, as defined by their geographical location, and employer-sponsored healthcare benefits
Number of new jobs created by wage quintile.
Number of new jobs created with a living wage and healthcare benefits by wage quintile
Median annual wage, by wage quintile
Median training expenditure per year per employee, by wage quintile
Median training expenditure per employee, excluding job-related trainings (e.g., compliance training), by wage quintile

 Economic mobility and job equity metrics

What percentage of workers that started in the lowest paid quintile (those that make less than $12.31 an hour) moved to above living wage ($16.54 an hour) each year?
What percentage of your lowest paid workers crossed the one-year mark? How many crossed the two-year mark?
Internal promotion rate, by wage quintile, race, and gender
Horizontal job change rate, by wage quintile
Average wage gain per promotion, by wage quintile
Voluntary and involuntary turnover rate, by wage quintile, race, and gender
Number of jobs posted that do not require a bachelor’s degree (BA) and the percentage of those postings actually filled by workers without BAs

Qualitative practices

Presence of rotational or cross-training programs to promote learning new skills
Presence of internship, mentorship, and/or apprenticeship programs
Presence of career development programming, through HR or other sources
Does your company consider the work practices of contracted (B2B) companies and/or vendors? If so, how?
Are open positions promoted internally through internal job boards or other mechanisms?
Tracking common occupation pathways within the company (see the example above on unlocking pathways in healthcare)
Do senior employees participate in creating curricula with external reskilling organizations (community colleges, non-profits, vendors) for entry-level positions or mid-level roles?
Do you follow workers after they leave, did they receive a wage upgrade?

Why we need increased investment in food and agriculture in developing countries and international organizations that support them

Why we need increased investment in food and agriculture in developing countries and international organizations that support them | Speevr

The Sustainable Development Goals are off track. The prospects of the SDGs being realized by 2030 are bleak. The rapid pace of consistent decline in poverty and hunger until 2015 had slowed even before COVID-19. Often overlooked is the fact that much of that reduction in poverty and hunger occurred in China and Southeast Asia. A once-in-a-century global tragedy, COVID has been particularly hard on the world’s poor, compounded by severe impacts of climate change. Migrant labor has returned to rural areas and structural transformation has registered a big setback, particularly in countries in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa already lagging in movements out of agriculture. The result is increasing dependence of vulnerable populations on agricultural and rural employment. Decline in child mortality and other indicators of child poverty have similarly slowed, concurrently with a slower dietary transition in the patterns of food consumption. Incidence of obesity is growing and is associated with consumption of cheap junk food. The consequence is increased incidence of noncommunicable diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.

To address these complex challenges, strengthened international cooperation backed by financial resources is more urgent than ever. Since their establishment, five big international organizations have played key roles in contributing to food and agricultural development: The World Bank and International Development Organization have been the largest source of investment in food and agriculture; the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is the only organization with a holistic mandate for food, agriculture, natural resources, information, norms and standards; the World Food Program is the largest humanitarian organization for emergencies logistics, delivery of food or cash in a situation where the number of displaced people has skyrocketed to 75 million; CGIAR is the largest scientific organization for research on food security (lately including nutrition); the International Fund for Agricultural Development’s investment focus is on marginal populations and women.
But collectively their resources are now miniscule compared to the trillions of dollars needed annually in investments to achieve transformational change in food and agriculture to reduce poverty and hunger. While developing-countries’ own resources are increasingly important, they are also nowhere near sufficient for such transformational change.

Related Content

In a just issued, freely downloadable book, “Food for All: International Organizations and the Transformation of Agriculture” published by Oxford University Press (September 2021), Lele, Agarwal, Baldwin, and Goswami address food and nutrition security issues in two parts.
One part of the book is a historical account of when and how the “big five” major international organizations have contributed to world food needs since their establishment: the flow of their financial resources to developing countries, the evolution in the nature of their activities and impacts on outcomes—food security standards and norms, policy changes, institutions, human capital, and technology. The second part of the book examines how the concept of structural transformation has evolved since W. Arthur Lewis. It pays attention to the role that small/medium- and large-scale farmers are playing in the transformation process, and asks which of the 130 odd countries included in the transformation process have done well, and which have not.
Key findings
Developing countries now have the major responsibility to invest in food and agriculture and related growth-enhancing sectors, including education, health, infrastructure, and research and development. Increasingly a multi-sectoral strategy is needed. Absent such a strategy, in the face of climate change, many countries are facing gross underinvestment in growth-enhancing sectors, slowing agricultural productivity growth, and premature industrialization. Notable exceptions are China, and, for different reasons, Vietnam and Bangladesh. These three countries are also more export-oriented.
While incidence of hunger has increased, the shift to new highly processed forms of food through nutrition transition has reduced dietary quality. Transformative changes are needed in the food systems to achieve nutritious food for all. Current income levels are not sufficient to achieve nutritious food for 3 billion people. The role of international organizations has declined relative to the growing needs because their own resources have not grown commensurately with the needs.
The way forward

Get domestic policy strategy frameworks right and implement them consistently.
Increase domestic human and institutional capacity as the central focus.
Abandon autarchical policies.
Mobilize domestic and international capital in support of employment-oriented sectors.
Support international organizations by understanding their complex financing history.

Why we need increased investment in food and agriculture in developing countries and international organizations that support them

Why we need increased investment in food and agriculture in developing countries and international organizations that support them | Speevr

The Sustainable Development Goals are off track. The prospects of the SDGs being realized by 2030 are bleak. The rapid pace of consistent decline in poverty and hunger until 2015 had slowed even before COVID-19. Often overlooked is the fact that much of that reduction in poverty and hunger occurred in China and Southeast Asia. A once-in-a-century global tragedy, COVID has been particularly hard on the world’s poor, compounded by severe impacts of climate change. Migrant labor has returned to rural areas and structural transformation has registered a big setback, particularly in countries in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa already lagging in movements out of agriculture. The result is increasing dependence of vulnerable populations on agricultural and rural employment. Decline in child mortality and other indicators of child poverty have similarly slowed, concurrently with a slower dietary transition in the patterns of food consumption. Incidence of obesity is growing and is associated with consumption of cheap junk food. The consequence is increased incidence of noncommunicable diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.

To address these complex challenges, strengthened international cooperation backed by financial resources is more urgent than ever. Since their establishment, five big international organizations have played key roles in contributing to food and agricultural development: The World Bank and International Development Organization have been the largest source of investment in food and agriculture; the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is the only organization with a holistic mandate for food, agriculture, natural resources, information, norms and standards; the World Food Program is the largest humanitarian organization for emergencies logistics, delivery of food or cash in a situation where the number of displaced people has skyrocketed to 75 million; CGIAR is the largest scientific organization for research on food security (lately including nutrition); the International Fund for Agricultural Development’s investment focus is on marginal populations and women.
But collectively their resources are now miniscule compared to the trillions of dollars needed annually in investments to achieve transformational change in food and agriculture to reduce poverty and hunger. While developing-countries’ own resources are increasingly important, they are also nowhere near sufficient for such transformational change.

Related Content

In a just issued, freely downloadable book, “Food for All: International Organizations and the Transformation of Agriculture” published by Oxford University Press (September 2021), Lele, Agarwal, Baldwin, and Goswami address food and nutrition security issues in two parts.
One part of the book is a historical account of when and how the “big five” major international organizations have contributed to world food needs since their establishment: the flow of their financial resources to developing countries, the evolution in the nature of their activities and impacts on outcomes—food security standards and norms, policy changes, institutions, human capital, and technology. The second part of the book examines how the concept of structural transformation has evolved since W. Arthur Lewis. It pays attention to the role that small/medium- and large-scale farmers are playing in the transformation process, and asks which of the 130 odd countries included in the transformation process have done well, and which have not.
Key findings
Developing countries now have the major responsibility to invest in food and agriculture and related growth-enhancing sectors, including education, health, infrastructure, and research and development. Increasingly a multi-sectoral strategy is needed. Absent such a strategy, in the face of climate change, many countries are facing gross underinvestment in growth-enhancing sectors, slowing agricultural productivity growth, and premature deindustrialization. Notable exceptions are China, and, for different reasons, Vietnam and Bangladesh. These three countries are also more export-oriented.
While incidence of hunger has increased, the shift to new highly processed forms of food through nutrition transition has reduced dietary quality. Transformative changes are needed in the food systems to achieve nutritious food for all. Current income levels are not sufficient to achieve nutritious food for 3 billion people. The role of international organizations has declined relative to the growing needs because their own resources have not grown commensurately with the needs.
The way forward

Get domestic policy strategy frameworks right and implement them consistently.
Increase domestic human and institutional capacity as the central focus.
Abandon autarchical policies.
Mobilize domestic and international capital in support of employment-oriented sectors.
Support international organizations by understanding their complex financing history.

Key strategies to accelerate Africa’s post-COVID recovery

Key strategies to accelerate Africa’s post-COVID recovery | Speevr

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented disruptions to Africa—reducing earnings and increasing poverty and food insecurity as well as leading the region into its first recession in 25 years. While the global economic effects of the pandemic have started to recede as Western and Asian countries recover, 2021 is still turning out to be a difficult year for Africa. Moreover, the region will face even riskier external and internal environments in the future.

Thus, African leaders must now adopt strategies for a resilient recovery post-COVID-19 as we discuss in our recent report. Resiliency—a country’s capability to recover from shocks and adapt flexibly to stressors—not only protects economic and social gains, but also facilitates economic transformation and sustainable employment. In a “resilient” country, fewer assets are lost when a shock occurs, so more sustained improvements in economic welfare occur for the same amount of investment. Post-COVID-19 African economic development policy needs, therefore, to be centered around both improving resiliency and accelerating transformation to realize sustained economic welfare gains. Strategies for resiliency should build on the COVID-19 experience, helping households, communities, and countries to strengthen coping measures that reduce losses thus allowing for a faster recovery, and investing to adapt to and mitigate the effects of future shocks. Adapting to a “new normal” can help resilient countries to grow and transform at a faster rate.
While successful policies will be context-specific, two key strategies for enhancing a country’s resiliency deserve consideration.
Deregulation for the growth of large firms
Since the entrance and growth of large firms increase a country’s resilient economic transformation—because large firms, with more assets, are inherently more resilient and are better equipped to endure economic storms—policymakers should prioritize policies for facilitating the entrance and growth of such firms, through domestic deregulation and encouraging foreign direct investment (FDI). Notably, large firms in Africa (employing more than 100 people) tend to start large and grow from there. Evidence shows that their use of newer technology, combined with the fact that they pay higher wages and are more likely to export, supports both transformation and resilience, which is why large firms are more likely to survive and grow. A company in a developing country that begins with fewer than 20 employees has a low chance of surviving its first five years, and a less than 1 percent chance of ever employing over 100 people if it does survive.

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Importantly, regulation can stifle innovation, productivity, good job creation, and resilience as a firm is unable to adapt to a changing world economy. Therefore, deregulation can encourage investment by helping large firms receive equal and impartial treatment from the government, which is necessary to grow, create good jobs, and take advantage of scale opportunities.
Support agricultural productivity-led growth and the development of the agro-food system
A second strategy leading to increased resilience and transformation is to improve agricultural productivity-led growth and the development of the agro-food system. African economic strategy and policy discourse have long underestimated the role that agriculture can play in a resilient and sustained transformation. Yet recent evidence shows that, in 2020, the agricultural sector outperformed the broader economy exactly because it was more resilient. This result continued a 20-year trend where the average annual growth rate of Africa’s agricultural production was faster than any other region in the world. Research has clearly demonstrated that, at lower income levels, agricultural sector growth and development is critical for poverty reduction, and less poor households are inherently more resilient.

If Africa can continue this trend, primarily by raising productivity on existing land and increasing climate resilience, the future for African agriculture is bright. As the world’s population grows, demand for food increases: In fact, the African continent will account for 80 percent of the world’s population growth between now and 2050. These new consumers are also expected to be richer, demanding higher-value food products (processed foods, fruits, and vegetables). At the same time, available farmland the world over is diminishing due to urbanization—offering an opportunity for Africa, with its vast quantity of arable land—to step in. Moreover, demand for food within Africa offers significant potential for intra-African trade. The importance of the agricultural sector in building a more resilient economy is clear.
Countries should move quickly to stay ahead of the risks, while building for a more resilient future. Achieving resilient, sustainable growth will not be easy, and will require the following: African food value chains becoming more internationally competitive; raising on-farm productivity; lowering the costs of production and distribution to cities and small towns; facilitating private investments in logistics and processing; reducing nontariff trade barriers between African countries; and, most importantly, successfully implementing appropriate adaptation policies for climate-vulnerable regions.
The African continent will face many challenges in the post-COVID-19 world. Past strategies focused on transformation as a main outcome, but COVID-19 has highlighted the role resilience plays as an equally important economic outcome. Therefore, African countries’ economic development goals need to strive to achieve these dual objectives. These goals can be further advanced by the two key strategies provided in this article. Importantly, success in both of these strategies would improve employment opportunities across Africa and strengthen poverty reduction at a time when progress on both has stagnated.

Key strategies to accelerate Africa’s post-COVID recovery

Key strategies to accelerate Africa’s post-COVID recovery | Speevr

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented disruptions to Africa—reducing earnings and increasing poverty and food insecurity as well as leading the region into its first recession in 25 years. While the global economic effects of the pandemic have started to recede as Western and Asian countries recover, 2021 is still turning out to be a difficult year for Africa. Moreover, the region will face even riskier external and internal environments in the future.

Thus, African leaders must now adopt strategies for a resilient recovery post-COVID-19 as we discuss in our recent report. Resiliency—a country’s capability to recover from shocks and adapt flexibly to stressors—not only protects economic and social gains, but also facilitates economic transformation and sustainable employment. In a “resilient” country, fewer assets are lost when a shock occurs, so more sustained improvements in economic welfare occur for the same amount of investment. Post-COVID-19 African economic development policy needs, therefore, to be centered around both improving resiliency and accelerating transformation to realize sustained economic welfare gains. Strategies for resiliency should build on the COVID-19 experience, helping households, communities, and countries to strengthen coping measures that reduce losses thus allowing for a faster recovery, and investing to adapt to and mitigate the effects of future shocks. Adapting to a “new normal” can help resilient countries to grow and transform at a faster rate.
While successful policies will be context-specific, two key strategies for enhancing a country’s resiliency deserve consideration.
Deregulation for the growth of large firms
Since the entrance and growth of large firms increase a country’s resilient economic transformation—because large firms, with more assets, are inherently more resilient and are better equipped to endure economic storms—policymakers should prioritize policies for facilitating the entrance and growth of such firms, through domestic deregulation and encouraging foreign direct investment (FDI). Notably, large firms in Africa (employing more than 100 people) tend to start large and grow from there. Evidence shows that their use of newer technology, combined with the fact that they pay higher wages and are more likely to export, supports both transformation and resilience, which is why large firms are more likely to survive and grow. A company in a developing country that begins with fewer than 20 employees has a low chance of surviving its first five years, and a less than 1 percent chance of ever employing over 100 people if it does survive.

Related Content

Importantly, regulation can stifle innovation, productivity, good job creation, and resilience as a firm is unable to adapt to a changing world economy. Therefore, deregulation can encourage investment by helping large firms receive equal and impartial treatment from the government, which is necessary to grow, create good jobs, and take advantage of scale opportunities.
Support agricultural productivity-led growth and the development of the agro-food system
A second strategy leading to increased resilience and transformation is to improve agricultural productivity-led growth and the development of the agro-food system. African economic strategy and policy discourse have long underestimated the role that agriculture can play in a resilient and sustained transformation. Yet recent evidence shows that, in 2020, the agricultural sector outperformed the broader economy exactly because it was more resilient. This result continued a 20-year trend where the average annual growth rate of Africa’s agricultural production was faster than any other region in the world. Research has clearly demonstrated that, at lower income levels, agricultural sector growth and development is critical for poverty reduction, and less poor households are inherently more resilient.

If Africa can continue this trend, primarily by raising productivity on existing land and increasing climate resilience, the future for African agriculture is bright. As the world’s population grows, demand for food increases: In fact, the African continent will account for 80 percent of the world’s population growth between now and 2050. These new consumers are also expected to be richer, demanding higher-value food products (processed foods, fruits, and vegetables). At the same time, available farmland the world over is diminishing due to urbanization—offering an opportunity for Africa, with its vast quantity of arable land—to step in. Moreover, demand for food within Africa offers significant potential for intra-African trade. The importance of the agricultural sector in building a more resilient economy is clear.
Countries should move quickly to stay ahead of the risks, while building for a more resilient future. Achieving resilient, sustainable growth will not be easy, and will require the following: African food value chains becoming more internationally competitive; raising on-farm productivity; lowering the costs of production and distribution to cities and small towns; facilitating private investments in logistics and processing; reducing nontariff trade barriers between African countries; and, most importantly, successfully implementing appropriate adaptation policies for climate-vulnerable regions.
The African continent will face many challenges in the post-COVID-19 world. Past strategies focused on transformation as a main outcome, but COVID-19 has highlighted the role resilience plays as an equally important economic outcome. Therefore, African countries’ economic development goals need to strive to achieve these dual objectives. These goals can be further advanced by the two key strategies provided in this article. Importantly, success in both of these strategies would improve employment opportunities across Africa and strengthen poverty reduction at a time when progress on both has stagnated.

1 year in: Our new Center for Sustainable Development takes stock

1 year in: Our new Center for Sustainable Development takes stock | Speevr

What a difference a year can make.  After generating more than 130 public products within in its first 365 days—research papers, journal articles, book chapters, policy reports, blogs, op-eds, podcasts, and public events—the Center for Sustainable Development (CSD) at Brookings celebrated our first birthday this past week, on October 21.

CSD was launched with a vision of providing leading research, insights, and convenings to advance global sustainable development and implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within and across all countries—including advanced economies. In our public launch event last October, we were honored that so many extraordinary leaders from around the world conveyed encouragement and support. We were especially grateful that Ms. Amina Mohammed, U.N. deputy secretary-general, and Dr. Rajiv Shah, president of The Rockefeller Foundation, joined to discuss so many of the world’s frontier challenges of sustainable development. We took to heart the deputy secretary-general’s reminder that “None of us can achieve the SDGs alone,” and her challenge to the center “to strive to be a beacon of inspiration for the pursuit of sustainable development in all countries and communities around the world.”
Some highlights
One year later, as this stock-taking file shows, CSD scholar teams have taken up the challenge with vigor, making contributions across a wide range of sustainable development topics, including:

The SDGs & global sustainable development.
Climate change.
Cities and local leadership.
Workforce of the future.
Global debt crisis.
Ending extreme poverty and deprivation.
Global development cooperation.
S. domestic sustainable development policy.
S. global sustainable development policy.
Gender equality.
The global middle class.

However impressive the volume of CSD outputs might be, our team cares vastly more about the quality and results of its efforts. In the world of research and ideas, it is generally unwise for any single actor to try to claim too much credit, but we are fortunate to have a unique roster of scholars who are contributing in so many exceptional ways.  To share a few examples:

Amar Bhattacharya co-chaired the U.N. Secretary General’s Independent Expert Group on Climate Finance,  which published its seminal report last December on “Delivering on the $100 Billion Climate Finance Commitment and Transforming Climate Finance.” More recently, Amar has been named a member of the World Bank-IMF High-Level Advisory Group (HLAG) on Sustainable and Inclusive Recovery and Growth, co-chaired by Mari Pangestu of the World Bank, Ceyla Pazarbasioglu of the IMF, and Lord Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics. Amar is deeply involved in global climate deliberations in the lead-up to the forthcoming COP 26 U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, U.K., including as adviser to the Coalition of Finance Ministers for Climate Action and adviser to the COP 26 presidency. He and Lord Stern recently co-authored an important op-ed on “Our Last, Best Chance on Climate.”
Marcela Escobari has continued to pioneer the Workforce of the Future initiative at Brookings, bringing extraordinary data richness and rigor to advance opportunities for place- and job-specific worker mobility in geographies across the United States. Her mobility pathway tool, a multiyear team project summarized in a blog with Natalie Geismar, generated important public interest, including high-profile coverage in the New York Times. More recently, Marcela published, along with Ian Seyal and Carlos Daboin Contreras, a Moving Up report that reveals multidimensional hurdles to labor mobility across America, especially for people in low-income occupations. We are very proud that, earlier this year, President Biden nominated Marcela to serve as USAID Assistant Administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean, a position she previously held under the Obama Administration. While awaiting Senate confirmation for the appointment, Marcela is continuing to press forward her research on the role companies can play in improving job quality.
George Ingram drew from his extensive policy experience to publish a series of important papers following the 2020 presidential election, including a prescription for renewing U.S. global partnership in a post-COVID-19 world. George also celebrated a victory for good data in a recent post co-authored with Sally Paxton of Publish What You Fund (PWYF). They noted the fruits of a multiyear collaborative research effort to address conflicting official U.S. aid data, which previously could vary by up to billions of dollars per year across different government websites. USAID and the Department of State recently agreed to consolidate competing aid data dashboards into a single data collection and reporting channel. In July, George partnered with PWYF to convene a public event on transparency in development assistance for gender equality, which generated several new commitments to improve donor reporting on aid for gender equality. He also issued a call for a U.S. initiative to help bridge the global digital divide among low- and middle-income countries.
Homi Kharas has been prolific in contributing to global economic debates during the COVID-19 crisis, with special emphasis on steps to avoid a developing country debt crisis amid the deepest and most widespread global recession in modern history. The U.N. Secretary-General recognized Homi’s paper with Meagan Dooley on “Debt Distress and Development Distress: Twin crises of 2021” as  foundational to his March 2021 U.N. report on “Liquidity and Debt Solutions to Invest in the SDGs: The Time to Act is Now.” Concurrently, Homi and co-authors generated world-leading empirical assessments of extreme deprivation (e.g., here and here), including extreme poverty in the context of COVID-19. He also published, with Raj Desai and Selen Özdoğan, important research on the spatial dimensions of global poverty reduction.  Impressively, Homi was recently named alongside Amar Bhattacharya to serve on the HLAG on Sustainable and Inclusive Recovery and Growth.
Tony Pipa has been advancing a remarkable range of efforts on localized leadership for sustainable development. This includes a City Playbook for Advancing the SDGs, co-edited with Max Bouchet, which captures an inspiring array of insights from across the global SDG Leadership Cities community of practice that Tony launched and facilitates. In parallel, last November, Tony and Natalie Geismar released a key report with recommendations to reimagine U.S. federal policy for U.S. rural development, informed by lessons and changes in U.S. policy and practice for sustainable development overseas. The report’s insights have been influential with Congress and the Biden administration as they develop new approaches to invest directly in rural America, including the proposed $4 billion Rural Partnership Program currently being considered as part of the budget reconciliation process. Meanwhile, Tony has also spearheaded CSD’s partnership with the U.N. Foundation to expand and connect American Leadership on the SDGs in communities across the United States.

We are also extremely proud of our collaboration with leaders of the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at Brookings, who amount to the “education team” for CSD. I never go anywhere on SDG 4 (Ensure quality education) without talking with CUE co-directors Emiliana Vegas and Rebecca Winthrop, who have both made enormous public contributions over the past year.  Emiliana, for example, co-authored a seminal study on the global cost of COVID-19 school closures in earnings and income, while also publishing an important series of reports on the implementation of computer science education in geographies around the globe. Rebecca has meanwhile led a major initiative on family-school engagement and collaboration to transform and improve education systems. She has also been a driving force in the global movement to advance education for tackling climate change.
For my own part, I have been privileged to co-chair the 17 Rooms initiative in collaboration with Zia Khan and our partners at The Rockefeller Foundation. Within the past year, we have made great progress in describing key design principles for this new approach to problem-solving across all 17 SDGs. This has largely been made possible by CSD’s small but mighty new 17 Rooms secretariat team, comprised of Alexandra Bracken, Jacob Taylor, and Shrijana Khanal. All of them have been central to the progress of both the annual 17 Rooms global flagship process and the growing 17 Rooms-X community of practice. We were honored that U.N. Deputy-Secretary-General Amina Mohammed joined the 2021 flagship summit as keynote listener for the second year in a row, commenting on the Room (working group) report-outs that will be published next month in a next wave of action plans and insights. Meanwhile, the 17 Rooms-X efforts are helping universities, communities, regions, and now countries to advance localized action, insight, and collaboration processes for the SDGs. The growing interest in 17 Rooms has helped inform an evolving vision of how the initiative could help fuel a new approach to multilateral cooperation, and even an annual global “17 Rooms Day” for communities around the world.

Related Content

Looking forward
As much as we take pride in CSD’s accomplishments over the past year, we know we are only a small node in a vastly larger global network of contributors to the broader challenges of sustainable development. Over the coming year, we plan to continue our existing core workstreams while ramping up efforts on key priorities, in line with a spirit of networked leadership. We look forward to the culmination of some major research products, including a book on breakthrough technologies for the SDGs, and to launching a major new effort on gender equality and sustainable development. In parallel, we aim to ramp up work on aligning the private sector with the SDGs—in other words, bridging ESG to SDG. We are keen for our center to serve as a neutral platform that helps bring diverse constituencies together. In that spirit, we are also excited soon to be announcing CSD’s first-ever cohort of nonresident scholars. We are enthusiastic to tap into an ever-larger network of experts and allies who can share insights on both the substance of the center’s work and the opportunities for broader stakeholder engagement.

1 year in: Our new Center for Sustainable Development takes stock

1 year in: Our new Center for Sustainable Development takes stock | Speevr

What a difference a year can make.  After generating more than 130 public products within in its first 365 days—research papers, journal articles, book chapters, policy reports, blogs, op-eds, podcasts, and public events—the Center for Sustainable Development (CSD) at Brookings celebrated our first birthday this past week, on October 21.

CSD was launched with a vision of providing leading research, insights, and convenings to advance global sustainable development and implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within and across all countries—including advanced economies. In our public launch event last October, we were honored that so many extraordinary leaders from around the world conveyed encouragement and support. We were especially grateful that Ms. Amina Mohammed, U.N. deputy secretary-general, and Dr. Rajiv Shah, president of The Rockefeller Foundation, joined to discuss so many of the world’s frontier challenges of sustainable development. We took to heart the deputy secretary-general’s reminder that “None of us can achieve the SDGs alone,” and her challenge to the center “to strive to be a beacon of inspiration for the pursuit of sustainable development in all countries and communities around the world.”
Some highlights
One year later, as this stock-taking file shows, CSD scholar teams have taken up the challenge with vigor, making contributions across a wide range of sustainable development topics, including:

The SDGs & global sustainable development.
Climate change.
Cities and local leadership.
Workforce of the future.
Global debt crisis.
Ending extreme poverty and deprivation.
Global development cooperation.
U.S. domestic sustainable development policy.
U.S. global sustainable development policy.
Gender equality.
The global middle class.

However impressive the volume of CSD outputs might be, our team cares vastly more about the quality and results of its efforts. In the world of research and ideas, it is generally unwise for any single actor to try to claim too much credit, but we are fortunate to have a unique roster of scholars who are contributing in so many exceptional ways.  To share a few examples:

Amar Bhattacharya co-chaired the U.N. Secretary General’s Independent Expert Group on Climate Finance,  which published its seminal report last December on “Delivering on the $100 Billion Climate Finance Commitment and Transforming Climate Finance.” More recently, Amar has been named a member of the World Bank-IMF High-Level Advisory Group (HLAG) on Sustainable and Inclusive Recovery and Growth, co-chaired by Mari Pangestu of the World Bank, Ceyla Pazarbasioglu of the IMF, and Lord Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics. Amar is deeply involved in global climate deliberations in the lead-up to the forthcoming COP 26 U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, U.K., including as adviser to the Coalition of Finance Ministers for Climate Action and adviser to the COP 26 presidency. He and Lord Stern recently co-authored an important op-ed on “Our Last, Best Chance on Climate.”
Marcela Escobari has continued to pioneer the Workforce of the Future initiative at Brookings, bringing extraordinary data richness and rigor to advance opportunities for place- and job-specific worker mobility in geographies across the United States. Her mobility pathway tool, a multiyear team project summarized in a blog with Natalie Geismar, generated important public interest, including high-profile coverage in the New York Times. More recently, Marcela published, along with Ian Seyal and Carlos Daboin Contreras, a Moving Up report that reveals multidimensional hurdles to labor mobility across America, especially for people in low-income occupations. We are very proud that, earlier this year, President Biden nominated Marcela to serve as USAID Assistant Administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean, a position she previously held under the Obama Administration. While awaiting Senate confirmation for the appointment, Marcela is continuing to press forward her research on the role companies can play in improving job quality.
George Ingram drew from his extensive policy experience to publish a series of important papers following the 2020 presidential election, including a prescription for renewing U.S. global partnership in a post-COVID-19 world. George also celebrated a victory for good data in a recent post co-authored with Sally Paxton of Publish What You Fund (PWYF). They noted the fruits of a multiyear collaborative research effort to address conflicting official U.S. aid data, which previously could vary by up to billions of dollars per year across different government websites. USAID and the Department of State recently agreed to consolidate competing aid data dashboards into a single data collection and reporting channel. In July, George partnered with PWYF to convene a public event on transparency in development assistance for gender equality, which generated several new commitments to improve donor reporting on aid for gender equality. He also issued a call for a U.S. initiative to help bridge the global digital divide among low- and middle-income countries.
Homi Kharas has been prolific in contributing to global economic debates during the COVID-19 crisis, with special emphasis on steps to avoid a developing country debt crisis amid the deepest and most widespread global recession in modern history. The U.N. Secretary-General recognized Homi’s paper with Meagan Dooley on “Debt Distress and Development Distress: Twin crises of 2021” as  foundational to his March 2021 U.N. report on “Liquidity and Debt Solutions to Invest in the SDGs: The Time to Act is Now.” Concurrently, Homi and co-authors generated world-leading empirical assessments of extreme deprivation (e.g., here and here), including extreme poverty in the context of COVID-19. He also published, with Raj Desai and Selen Özdoğan, important research on the spatial dimensions of global poverty reduction.  Impressively, Homi was recently named alongside Amar Bhattacharya to serve on the HLAG on Sustainable and Inclusive Recovery and Growth.
Tony Pipa has been advancing a remarkable range of efforts on localized leadership for sustainable development. This includes a City Playbook for Advancing the SDGs, co-edited with Max Bouchet, which captures an inspiring array of insights from across the global SDG Leadership Cities community of practice that Tony launched and facilitates. In parallel, last November, Tony and Natalie Geismar released a key report with recommendations to reimagine U.S. federal policy for U.S. rural development, informed by lessons and changes in U.S. policy and practice for sustainable development overseas. The report’s insights have been influential with Congress and the Biden administration as they develop new approaches to invest directly in rural America, including the proposed $4 billion Rural Partnership Program currently being considered as part of the budget reconciliation process. Meanwhile, Tony has also spearheaded CSD’s partnership with the UN Foundation to expand and connect American Leadership on the SDGs in communities across the United States.

We are also extremely proud of our collaboration with leaders of the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at Brookings, who amount to the “education team” for CSD. I never go anywhere on SDG 4 (Ensure quality education) without talking with CUE co-directors Emiliana Vegas and Rebecca Winthrop, who have both made enormous public contributions over the past year.  Emiliana, for example, co-authored a seminal study on the global cost of COVID-19 school closures in earnings and income, while also publishing an important series of reports on the implementation of computer science education in geographies around the globe. Rebecca has meanwhile led a major initiative on family-school engagement and collaboration to transform and improve education systems. She has also been a driving force in the global movement to advance education for tackling climate change.
For my own part, I have been privileged to co-chair the 17 Rooms initiative in collaboration with Zia Khan and our partners at The Rockefeller Foundation. Within the past year, we have made great progress in describing key design principles for this new approach to problem-solving across all 17 SDGs. This has largely been made possible by CSD’s small but mighty new 17 Rooms secretariat team, comprised of Alexandra Bracken, Jacob Taylor, and Shrijana Khanal. All of them have been central to the progress of both the annual 17 Rooms global flagship process and the growing 17 Rooms-X community of practice. We were honored that U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed joined the 2021 flagship summit as keynote listener for the second year in a row, commenting on the Room (working group) report-outs that will be published next month in a next wave of action plans and insights. Meanwhile, the 17 Rooms-X efforts are helping universities, communities, regions, and now countries to advance localized action, insight, and collaboration processes for the SDGs. The growing interest in 17 Rooms has helped inform an evolving vision of how the initiative could help fuel a new approach to multilateral cooperation, and even an annual global “17 Rooms Day” for communities around the world.

Related Content

Looking forward
As much as we take pride in CSD’s accomplishments over the past year, we know we are only a small node in a vastly larger global network of contributors to the broader challenges of sustainable development. Over the coming year, we plan to continue our existing core workstreams while ramping up efforts on key priorities, in line with a spirit of networked leadership. We look forward to the culmination of some major research products, including a book on breakthrough technologies for the SDGs, and to launching a major new effort on gender equality and sustainable development. In parallel, we aim to ramp up work on aligning the private sector with the SDGs—in other words, bridging ESG to SDG. We are keen for our center to serve as a neutral platform that helps bring diverse constituencies together. In that spirit, we are also excited soon to be announcing CSD’s first-ever cohort of nonresident scholars. We are enthusiastic to tap into an ever-larger network of experts and allies who can share insights on both the substance of the center’s work and the opportunities for broader stakeholder engagement.
A center takes a village
Whatever the center has accomplished to date, all of it is only possible thanks to an extensive network of external colleagues, collaborators, contributors, champions, and even constructive critics around the globe. I often say that the center has nearly 8 billion clients, i.e., the full composition of humanity. But there are also countless people whose direct insights, queries, suggestions, and convenings all play a pivotal role in our work. Perhaps most importantly, there are huge numbers of people across the Global Economy and Development program and the broader Brookings Institution who have made each of the center’s first 365 days possible. I convey special personal thanks to Brookings leadership for so strongly backing the CSD enterprise from day one, and every single day thereafter. It’s our privilege to be part of such an extraordinary undertaking. It’s our responsibility to ensure we contribute even more over the year to come.

Enlightened climate policy for Africa

Enlightened climate policy for Africa | Speevr

As the world convenes in Glasgow for the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP26), it is time to recognize Africa’s role in averting a climate disaster without compromising the continent’s growth and poverty reduction. The world needs to transition away from fossil fuels. But access to electricity is a human right as enshrined in sustainable development goal 7. Electric power is vital for any economy to advance, and relegating African countries to greater poverty is not the solution to the global climate crisis.

The world must transition away from the fuels that powered industrialization in Europe, the U.S., and Asia. Today, coal still accounts for up to 38 percent of electricity generation worldwide, with China, India, the U.S., and the EU remaining the world’s largest consumers of coal. At the same time, international financing institutions are restricting investment in electric power projects in Africa to wind and solar on grounds of environmental concerns. Africa’s current energy demand is estimated at 700 TW, which is 4,000 times the 175 GW of wind and solar capacity the entire world added in 2020. Africa cannot industrialize on wind and solar energy alone.
In sub-Saharan Africa, 12 million new people enter the workforce every year. They cannot run successful businesses in the dark. Today, nearly 600 million Africans lack access to electric power, a number that the International Energy Agency (IEA) projects will actually increase by 30 million due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To create jobs for Africa’s burgeoning youth population, we need to find ways to power the continent’s industrialization.
The world is facing an existential climate crisis and must come together in solidarity to stave off the potentially devastating impacts, but leaving 600 million Africans in the dark is not an option.
Importantly, Africa bears the least responsibility for the world’s climate crisis but faces its most severe consequences. Forty-eight sub-Saharan African countries outside of South Africa are responsible for just 0.55 percent of cumulative CO2 emissions. Yet, 7 of the 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change are in Africa.
Still, Africa will play a major role in solving the global crisis. The Congo Basin is the world’s second-largest rainforest and vital to stabilizing the world’s climate, absorbing 1.2 billion tons of CO2 each year. Without the Congo Basin and the Amazon, the world would be warming much more quickly.

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The global transition to renewable energy will mean exponentially scaling up the production of batteries, electric vehicles (EVs), and other renewable energy systems, which require Africa’s mineral resources. For example, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), accounts for 70 percent of the world’s cobalt, the mineral vital to battery production. Cobalt demand is expected to double by 2030. Conversely, 84 million people (80 percent of the total population) in the DRC could still lack access to electric power in 2030.
We believe that we can achieve the global emission reduction targets without constraining Africa’s development. To power Africa’s economic growth and prevent the worst consequences of climate change, we propose a four-point agenda for action:

Utilize the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA). The AfCFTA will create the world’s largest free trade zone by integrating 54 African countries with a combined population of more than 1 billion people and a gross domestic product of more than $3.4 trillion. Africa’s commitment to lowering intra-African trade barriers can attract more private sector investment with larger, connected market opportunities.
Leverage green economic opportunities. Increased demand for electric vehicles, critical minerals, and renewable energy systems is an opportunity for Africa to capture larger portions of supply chains in the new green economy. Nations and firms can collaborate across borders to create a pipeline of bankable power projects to attract investment. Increasing local manufacturing and production capacity for resources, materials, and value-added products vital to green technology will create jobs locally.
Adopt just development finance. The large-scale power projects needed to industrialize economies are capital-intensive and often require investments from development finance institutions. Development finance institution funding should catalyze private sector resources. While we agree on the environmental and economic justification for not financing new coal-fired plants, they should not limit support for natural gas, hydro, and geothermal power generation projects. This policy creates an unjust burden on those economies that require a variety of sources to increase access and build resilience into their power infrastructure. It is hypocritical of the EU, the U.S., and China to utilize fossil fuels while effectively denying others the means to lift themselves out of poverty.
Embrace proportionate responsibility. China, the EU, and the U.S. emit over 40 percent of total global greenhouse gases, while all of Africa emits 7 percent. Prioritizing the transition to renewables and imposing higher emission reduction requirements in the EU, U.S., and China will ease the burden on those nations that still need a variety of power generation methods to increase energy access.

The world is facing an existential climate crisis and must come together in solidarity to stave off the potentially devastating impacts, but leaving 600 million Africans in the dark is not an option. We must avert a climate disaster and expand energy access in Africa at the same time.