Our interviews and the evidence make clear that though Georgia has made real progress in tackling lead poisoning in children, work is not finished. About 15 percent of children still have BLLs above 5...

The World Bank has yet to pin down a working definition for what it labels as private sector development (PSD). At different times during the past half-century, some of that work might reasonably be d...

In the current international aid environment, where bilateral funding for education has been significantly cut, multilateral financing mechanisms are likely to play an increasingly important role in enabling low- and middle-income countries to access th...

This briefing examines the scale of lead exposure among children in the UK and makes the case for a national screening programme.

Clark and Nielsen (2026) assemble a large dataset of quasi-experimental studies and argue that the causal return to an extra year of schooling is close to zero once one corrects for the selective publ...

A new paper by Gregory Clark and Christian Nielsen makes the bold claim that the true average increase in earnings for each extra year of school is somewhere between 0 and 3 percent. Not the 9 percent...

Screening for lead needs to become the norm. We cannot afford to continue to wait, for the children’s sake.

Writing and analysis by C. Kirabo Jackson on education, human capital, public policy, and the economy.

If I worked at a frontier AI lab and just became an overnight billionaire, my first thought would be to do something simple and give it all to GiveDirectly or GiveWell. But organisations in the busine...

Here we present a new analysis of national government education sector plans from 134 countries spanning nearly three decades (2000–2025), which we refer to throughout as “education plans”. We see cle...

A report reveals that urban India's private schools are at risk due to proximity to toxic lead sites, impacting children's health.

Our recent paper in Environmental Pollution estimates that lead battery recycling might account for a third of global lead exposure, significantly larger than previous estimates (open access CGD worki...

- #1 English news source in Indonesia. Still bold, fiercely independent

Hundreds of thousands could be impacted. New mapping highlights the parts of the country most at risk

How used lead-acid batteries move through Malawi’s economy, why so much processing happens unsafely, and the policy options that could change it.Unsafe lead-acid battery recycling is, at its core, a m...

Does raising test scores in primary school lead to better economic and health outcomes in adulthood? When we launched the first pilots for the Return to Learning Initiative—seeking to answer exactly t...

This article was originally published by the Center for Global Development. This spring in Washington, DC, World Bank president Ajay Banga announced a major new initiative, “Water Forward,” with [...]

Cambodia may be significantly underestimating the number of schoolchildren at risk from toxic pollutants, with new research warning that only a small fraction

Education institutions are fundamentally political. They mold political values, shape inequality, create opportunities for patronage through teaching jobs, and can even be used for political surveilla...

Global estimates suggest that one billion children have experienced physical, emotional, or sexual violence—and this number is likely an undercount. Most estimates rely on survey data in which respond...

This article was originally published by the Center for Global Development. This spring in Washington, DC, World Bank president Ajay Banga announced a major new initiative, “Water Forward,” with [...]

We provide evidence for the effectiveness of conferences in promoting academic impact by exploiting the cancellation—due to Hurricane Isaac—of the 2012 American Political Science Association Annual…

More than 8,800 schools in Bangladesh are located within five kilometres of a documented toxic site, and several sit less than 100 metres from informal battery-breaking yards.

A new map finds millions of Latin American children study near toxic sites, from Bogota to Lima, exposing how little most countries actually count.

Nigeria's solar expansion relies heavily on lead-acid batteries that typically fail within a few years. Yet nobody can say with confidence where most are recycled or disposed of. ETA Analysis…

91 million deaths once prevented, one chainsaw, and the toll many MAGA Republicans swear is zero

The World Bank lending portfolio currently includes over $3 billion for 81 active water supply projects across low- and middle-income countries. Not one project includes lead testing in drinking…