Aid and Development Archive

Last week, the International Monetary Fund agreed to a tentative deal with Egypt to loan it $12 billion over three years, in exchange for undertaking major economic reforms. The Arab world’s most populous country, Egypt has been cash-strapped and staggering from crisis to crisis in the five years since longtime President Hosni Mubarak was toppled in a popular uprising. President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, who ousted Mohammed Morsi in a coup in the summer of 2013, came to power with the promise of righting the economy, but that hasn’t happened. Instead, el-Sisi has taken after his predecessors and pursued grandiose development projects, […]

Geo-economics dominated the agenda of two critical meetings this week: a trilateral economic summit in Baku between Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev and Iran’s Hassan Rouhani, followed by a bilateral summit in St. Petersburg between Putin and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. While matters of war and peace were also on the agenda—the stalemated conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and the ongoing fighting in Syria—both summits’ main focus was on ensuring connectivity to the global economy. Let’s start with Iran. In the year since Iran acceded to the terms of the nuclear agreement it signed with the group of world […]

Climate-driven migration will likely affect millions of people in the coming decades, adding to the displacement of millions from war and instability. States and international organizations will need to dedicate additional resources to climate migrants, but they can already begin by integrating support into essential resilience and adaptation responses currently underway. Climate change policies are beginning to confront the complex dynamics of populations living in areas that are no longer habitable due to sea-level rise, desertification or other effects. Politics and policy choices are starting to play out at various levels. And the migrants themselves are grappling with decisions at […]