In a post featured on Brookings’ Future Development blog, MSI President Emeritus and Senior Advisor Larry Cooley and Johannes F. Linn review innovative approaches that developing countries can employ to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic successfully and at scale.

The COVID-19 crisis presents the world with a huge challenge: Everyone and everything is affected, and the response has to be both quick and global. While it is first and foremost a health crisis, it is also an education crisis, an employment and economic crisis, a crisis of hunger and poverty, and, in some countries, a crisis of governance and political stability. According to World Bank estimates, the global impacts will be profound and long-lasting. For developing countries with much larger populations at risk, fewer resources, and less capacity, the pressure to develop innovative approaches, test them quickly, and deliver them at scale is especially great.

In mid-April 2020, we issued a call to participants of the Community of Practice on Scaling Up Development Outcomes (CoP) requesting contributions to a special newsletter dedicated to the challenges and implications for international development of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a cross-sectoral and diverse CoP with one objective: understanding the operational and policy requirements for effective scaling development impact in middle- and low-income countries. With over 600 participants from over 250 organizations, and with active working groups on agriculture and rural development, health, nutrition, education, youth employment, social enterprises, monitoring and evaluation, and scaling in fragile states, we thought it was especially well-positioned to help developing countries engineer an effective response to the health, economic, and social impacts of the coronavirus.

Continue reading the post here.