Center for global development — General support 2016

Abstract

The Center for Global Development (CGD) is a think tank that conducts research on and promotes improvements to rich-world policies that affect the global poor. We have generally been impressed with CGD’s work, and view the organization (which we have funded before) as being highly aligned with our values.

Following previous grants, CGD approached us about increasing our level of general operating support. CGD outlined its overall funding situation—including a gap between its current and desired level of unrestricted funding—and a set of activities that it would potentially use new unrestricted funding to support, which generally struck us as promising.

We reviewed CGD’s track record by examining several of its largest and most concrete claimed successes in somewhat more detail, and based on our review, we would guess that there have been multiple occasions in which CGD’s work had a causal impact on decisions involving billions of dollars aimed at helping the global poor. It is difficult to trace the impact of CGD’s involvement through to clear humanitarian outcomes, but we guess that it has had a positive impact many times its total spending.

We see a strong case for providing a high level of general operating support to a well-aligned group with a compelling track record and promising-seeming plans for what to do with further funding. Accordingly, the Open Philanthropy Project decided to recommend a $3 million grant to CGD in general operating support, paid out annually over the next three years.