In light of the ongoing controversy over Benghazi, the New York Times’ Room for Debate asked contributors to weigh in on Hillary Clinton’s record as secretary of state. Read more »

With its recently released Water and Development Strategy, USAID highlights some practical and potentially powerful initiatives both to improve health by expanding access to clean water and sanitation and to improve food security through better water management in agriculture. With respect to food security, the report singles out two areas for action: Read more »

American food aid to countries in need is one of those broken policies that seem like such a no-brainer to fix. Yet despite well-intentioned efforts to do so, vested interests insist on maintaining the status quo, with ill effects. The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration before it, is again trying to bring some sense to food aid, but prospects for reform are low. Read more »

The announcement last week by the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa to launch a new international development bank has raised many questions. At their annual summit, hosted in Durban, South Africa, the leaders of these dynamic economies gushed that this was the beginning of increased cooperation and “a structural shift in the global economy.” In a piece published today on ForeignPolicy.com, I ask ten questions about the structure and purpose of a potential BRICS development bank and its implications for international development and the global economy. I write: Read more »

With the ten year mark of the 2003 Iraq war on the horizon, a new report from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) is a must-read. Learning from Iraq: A Final Report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction expands on the organization’s mandate to figure out, in the words of the inspector general, “what happened to the billions of dollars expended to rebuild that country?” Read more »

This week, I had the pleasure of hosting courageous Fawzia Koofi at the Council on Foreign Relations. Koofi is one of sixty-nine female members of Afghanistan’s 249-seat lower house of parliament. As she likes to note, she was elected to her seat by beating out a male candidate–above and beyond the quota system that preserves 25 percent of parliament for women. Elected as parliament’s first female deputy speaker, she plans to run for president in the 2014 elections. Read more »

Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation is a surprisingly bold move from someone not known as a modernizer. But his recognition that he was no longer up to the challenges of the Catholic Church was a thoroughly modern leadership move—and one that other aging leaders would do well to emulate. The fact that he’s the first pope in nearly 600 years to avail himself of retirement (the last one to resign, Pope Gregory XII, did so in 1415 to end a schism in the Church) is—to say the least—historic. Read more »

As 2015 approaches, debate among global development scholars and practitioners is turning to what should succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a topic explored on CFR’s Development Channel earlier this fall. Among the contributions to the debate so far is a thoughtful report recently released by Canada’s Centre for International Governance Innovation and the Korea Development Institute. Several members of the team behind this effort visited the Council on Foreign Relations this week, where they discussed their report at an event hosted by my colleague Stewart Patrick, director of CFR’s International Institutions and Global Governance program. (Stewart also wrote a blog post about the report yesterday.) Read more »

The countries of the Sahel, a semi-arid region of Africa that stretches across the continent below the Sahara desert, rank among the lowest on the Human Development Index and measures of GDP per capita. For more than a year, experts have been warning about mass starvation in the region as an enduring drought and various wars take their toll. But now, finally, some good news: a large humanitarian response to the crisis has helped avoid a disaster. Factors contributing to this success include affected countries’ openness about their food insecurity and effective early interventions to avert the impending crisis. Moreover, greater-than-expected rainfall has mitigated the drought and prevented the worst predictions about crop failure from coming true. Crop yields in some areas should be strong in coming months. Read more »

• Commitment to Development: The Center for Global Development last week released its 2012 Commitment to Development Index. The index measures wealthy countries “on their dedication to policies that benefit the 5.5 billion people living in poorer nations.” These include the quantity and quality of foreign aid, openness to trade and migration, promotion of investment in developing countries, environmental policies, contributions to peacekeeping and other security efforts, and more. Read more »