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What we're reading.

The case for a foreign assistance system that is less bureaucratic, more focused on growth, and built to end — from a former USAID Foreign Service Officer.

Ken Opalo on why the World Bank's newfound enthusiasm for industrial policy will produce the same faddist failures as every previous orthodoxy — and why African governments should ignore the best-practice packaging.

Dean Karlan and co-authors reassess poverty traps: the theory is more often assumed than empirically demonstrated.

Even insiders concede the system is no longer fit for purpose.

State's Nick Checker on commercial diplomacy: deals over programs, results over disbursement.

A reference directory of pacesetting organizations across global health, food security, and nutrition.

Quico Toro on Pritchett's case against RCTs, and for growth-first development.

Paul Niehaus and co-authors price the end of extreme poverty: 0.3% of global GDP.

Karthik Tadepalli on the "missing middle" of development: not household interventions, not growth platitudes, but firm growth — the rigorous, ambitious lens that ties aid to prosperity.

The reform opportunity hiding in the aid-cuts moment.

Lant Pritchett on the case for growth: no country has reached high wellbeing without it.

Nearly half of sampled awards failed to achieve expected results — yet implementers were generally paid in full. An agency-wide failure of accountability, not a war-zone anomaly.

Steven Teles on why government complexity, not size, is the deeper problem.

Andrew Natsios on the paradox: the most measurable programs are the least transformational, and the most transformational the least measurable.

Michael Igoe on the emerging architecture of U.S. foreign aid — including The New Foreign Assistance and its role in shaping what comes next.

Michael Igoe on the interregnum in U.S. foreign aid — the old system dying, the new one still taking shape — and where The New Foreign Assistance fits the moment.

Daniel Handel on the launch of The New Foreign Assistance — and a candid accounting of what went wrong with the old system, and why the rebuild matters.