Nancy Birdsall Encourages United States to Take Lead on Innovative Development Approaches in Her Debut DevTalk on COD Aid

Last month Nancy Birdsall gave a DevTalk (similar to a TedTalk, but development focused) at the impressive three-day USAID Frontiers in Development conference, which included speakers like Bill Gates, USAID administrator Rajiv Shah, and Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, among many more.  Between the keynote speeches and panel discussions (agenda here) were a handful of short DevTalks about specific solutions to development problems: no questions, no discussion, no panel— just a thought-provoking, to-the point 5-7 minute presentation.For her DevTalk Nancy presented Cash on Delivery Aid as a way to address problems of a broken foreign aid system by putting into practice a few key principles: results matter, country ownership matters, and transaction costs should not overwhelm the process. Applying the model to education, she showed how disbursing aid against a single specific outcome can lead to increased progress and improved accountability of donors and recipients. Nancy suggested that in a changing development landscape that calls for innovation, adaptation, and learning, COD Aid can be just the sort of approach that is needed and more importantly, one that U.S. should be leading.My favorite line: “It’s time to stop worrying about getting what we’re paying for, and start paying for what we get”.To watch Nancy and other speakers in action, go here. To learn more about COD Aid pilots being implemented or considered, see here.