Concept
The Center for Global Development (CGD) is a nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C., and London that focuses on international development. It was founded in November 2001 by former senior U.S. official Edward W. Scott, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, C. Fred Bergsten, and Nancy Birdsall. Birdsall, the former vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank and former director of the Policy Research Department at the World Bank, became the center's first president. Lawrence Summers was unanimously elected in March 2014 by the CGD Board of Directors to succeed founding Board Chair Edward Scott Jr., on May 1, 2014. CGD was ranked the 13th most prominent think tank in the international development sphere by University of Pennsylvania's "2015 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report". In 2009, Foreign Policy magazine's Think-Tank Index listed CGD as one of the top 15 overall think-tanks in the US. CGD's stated mission is "to reduce global poverty and inequality by encouraging policy change in the United States and other rich countries through rigorous research and active engagement with the policy community. The center considers itself to be a "think and do" tank, with an emphasis on producing research that is channeled into practical policy proposals. CGD is well known for leading debt-relief programs, specifically in Nigeria and Liberia. CGD vice president Todd Moss first proposed the Nigerian debt buy-back, which resulted in the Paris Club of rich nations forgiving 60% of 1.5 billion to create a vaccine against strains of pneumonia. In cooperation with Foreign Policy, CGD has published the Commitment to Development Index since 2003.
Nicolas Henchoz, Tania Moreira
