Eeshani Kandpal

@eeshani.bsky.social

She/her. Development economist. Gender, health, and nutrition. Currently at CGD. WB Research, Illinois, and Macalester alumna. Forever a Delhi girl. #econsky

Student protests over alleged corruption in India's medical entrance exam reflect deeper concerns about opportunity and accountability. @eeshani.bsky.social explores why the exams are one of India's few pathways to intergenerational mobility and why trust in that system matters. go.cgdev.org/4xaiAbU

Student Protests Over Corruption in India’s Rare Pathway to Intergenerational Mobility

For about six weeks now, thousands of young Indians have camped out in nonviolent protest and hunger strikes in New Delhi. This situation has now hardened into a serious political challenge for the go...

cgdev.org

The lack of diagnostics, vaccines and medicines for diseases that primarily affect low-income countries is basically a market failure Companies won't invest to develop new products, because there's no likely buyer for them Hence, Advance Market Commitments www.cgdev.org/publication/...

NeoTest: Accelerating Neonatal Sepsis Diagnostics

Neonatal sepsis kills one newborn every 45 seconds. Defined as a bloodstream infection in the first 60 days of life, it is responsible for 400,000–700,000 deaths per year—more young lives than malaria...

cgdev.org

Can periods of rapid growth and poverty reduction make governance challenges easier to ignore? A new CGD blog explores how denying issues like corruption and elite capture can erode trust, weaken reform efforts, and contribute to political and economic instability. https://go.cgdev.org/3QcM0Gk

The Costs of Denial

Rapid growth and poverty reduction can lead policymakers and the international community to deny the existence of governance problems such as corruption and elite capture. When this denial increases d...

cgdev.org

NEW: Tiny footprints. A blue blanket. The autopsy reports of babies who died after not receiving a vitamin K shot at birth included heartbreaking details about how small the babies were — and what items they had with them when they died.

What I Can’t Forget About the Babies Who Died After Not Receiving a Vitamin K Shot

Babies have died after not receiving the vitamin K shot at birth. Their autopsy records underscore how preventable their deaths could have been.

propublica.org

PEPFAR supports #HIV treatment for more than 20 million people worldwide. But new data shows testing fell from 21.9M to 17.2M, weakening the pipeline of new diagnoses and treatment. @eeshani.bsky.social and Brian Webster explain why “stable” numbers may be misleading. https://go.cgdev.org/3QGbStY

PEPFAR’s Stable Numbers are Hiding Lost Progress

Last week, the State Department released the first PEPFAR dataset on Spotlight since it picked up the program. The data cover the period July through September, 2025. PEPFAR provided antiretroviral th...

cgdev.org

If you were horrified watching elected leaders run & scramble because of gun violence, just imagine how my daughter Jaime felt in school running from an active shooter before she was killed. Now, become a part of the solution & only vote for people determined to address gun violence in America.

Intriguing: On April 7th, the World Bank publishes a report on Nigeria’s economy. One of the recommendations: open petrol imports to bring prices down. That would be bad news for the profits of Nigeria’s largest refinery, owned by Aliko Dangote.

Health taxes on sugar and ultra-processed foods are gaining traction worldwide. But in many low-income settings, diets are shaped less by price than by what’s available. @eeshani.bsky.social argues without access to nutritious food, taxes alone won’t fix malnutrition. https://go.cgdev.org/4tlZLQP

Why Health Taxes Alone Won't Fix Malnutrition in Poor Countries

Health taxes on sugar seem to have captured the zeitgeist: Mexico's soda tax, the UK's sugar levy, South Africa's Health Promotion Levy, a sugar tax in the Philippines, and so on. The evidence on thes...

cgdev.org

New blog with Eeshani Kandpal: The World Bank’s Self-Inflicted Crisis. The World Bank is undertaking some extremely odd internal reforms: ▪️ A centralization of expertise that appears to replicate Jim Kim’s “One World Bank Group” model that was widely considered a failure ...

In this short essay in BMJ Global Health, we draw attention to how standardised “global”measurement approaches obscure diversity, marginalise locally relevant insights needed for effective interventions, and create fragile measurement monocultures. gh.bmj.com/content/11/3...

The richness of urban health realities lost in measurement monocultures

The question seems simple enough: how can a rapidly growing African city improve the health and care of its pregnant women and their babies? But ask this question while navigating the humid, traffic-c...

gh.bmj.com