In 2005 it was estimated that over 1.3 billion people were living on below $1.25 a day. This is our most recent estimate of global poverty. Since 2005 the economies of the developing world have expanded by 50 percent in real terms, despite the Great Recession. How many poor people are there in the world today? As people succeed in escaping poverty, how will the geography of global poverty be altered?

Laurence Chandy, Fellow of the Brookings Institution, will address these questions based on his recently published paper, ‘Poverty in Numbers’, and discuss the findings of his follow-up research.

If the intention of development efforts is to bring about results at scale, then aid interventions themselves should be designed and implemented with the aim of scaling them up. Why then is the global aid system dominated by small, fragmented interventions, few of which are sustained after the withdrawal of donor support, and whose impact is rarely sufficient to bring about transformational change?

Johannes Linn, Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution and Senior Resident Scholar of the Emerging Markets Forum, will provide an overview of his pioneering research on scaling-up, and provide a case for why incentives within aid agencies should be reconfigured to make scaling-up a more explicit objective.

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