Rethinking US Foreign Assistance Blog

It is now clear that donor coordination meetings are not the answer to making aid more effective, and donors such as USAID are becoming interested in a more decentralized ‘Google Maps’ approach to aid coordination, facilitating well-informed decisions by people on the ground. For this to work, donors need to publish detailed project level information in an open, reusable, internationally consistent data format. Some donors are not yet showing the necessary resolve.

We now know that the development system has met just one of the 13 targets it set in 2005 for making aid more effective. That is not surprising: the problems diagnosed in the Paris Declaration are real and important, but the solutions that have been pursued in its name have not been practical. There are better ways to achieve the aid effectiveness which the Paris Declaration envisages.

This is a joint post with Wren Elhai.

Everyone (John Kerry, Richard Lugar, Richard Holbrooke, and, yes, CGD’s own Nancy Birdsall) agrees our aid program in Pakistan needs to be more transparent. Transparent aid can help to counter the widespread mistrust and misinformation about U.S. practices, and could also allow Pakistani civil society to play a role in monitoring how governments and NGOs spend money. On the other hand, the status quo—a dearth of publicly accessible information on program objectives and spending -- “creates confusion and unnecessary speculation in Pakistan,” as Senator Kerry put it, “and limits the potential of the policy community and allies at home.”