Admittedly, procurement reform isn’t the most exciting topic in development policy. But the implications of USAID’s move last week to reform its Source, Origin, and Nationality rule (S/O/N), one of the mother relics of procurement rules, are too important to pass relatively unnoticed through the news cycle.
With the development community back from Busan, it’s time to break down what went right and wrong at last week’s meetings. The consensus seems to be that the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF4) in Busan was a mixed bag – some promises, few commitments, little progress (see here for a good breakdown of the meetings from Nancy Birdsall).
Yesterday, I was happy to see the MCC finally publish aid data to the Foreign Assistance Dashboard, the government’s one-stop-shop for foreign assistance budget and appropriations information. But upon further examination of the website, I couldn’t help but feel a little cheated when I noticed the dearth of new data available in the tool. Nearly a year has passed since the Dashboard was launched in December 2010, and the U.S. government has yet to come up with the majority of its promised haul of agency data.
On October 17th, as part of USAID’s 50th Anniversary celebration, the agency kicked off Public-Private Partnerships Week to highlight the mutual benefit that development and business have in establishing public-private partnerships (PPP) and to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Global Development Alliance (GDA) program.
