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Rethinking US Foreign Assistance Blog

The Rethinking US Foreign Assistance Blog complements CGD's Rethinking U.S. Foreign Assistance initiative. Both are for professionals interested in tracking US Foreign Assistance and its impact on developing countries.

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It’s Not About the Grade: MCC’s First Five Impact Evaluations

10/22/12
Sarah Jane Staats

It’s not about the grade, it’s about the learning say Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) officials as they prepare to release the US government’s first five* independent development impact evaluations tomorrow. Results will be mixed. They should be. But if the MCC and other development policymakers pay attention to what the impact evaluations tell them—and the MCC keeps its commitment to independent, rigorous evaluation across the rest of its programs—it will be really good news.

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New Foreign Assistance Legislation Promotes Transparency and Accountability

10/14/11
Connie Veillette

This is a joint post with Will McKitterick.

In this season of budget battles and extreme partisanship, seeing eye to eye on the Hill is a rare commodity. Nevertheless, in an unusual moment of bipartisan agreement, Members of Congress introduced a bill that takes two big steps towards making U.S. foreign assistance more transparent, accountable, and effective.

Introduced by Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) and Howard Berman (D-CA), the Foreign Aid Transparency and Accountability Act of 2012 (H.R. 3159) achieved strong bipartisan backing from 30 cosponsors in the House. The bill follows in the footsteps of reform recommendations offered by the administration in the PPD and QDDR, and legislation introduced the 111th Congress.[1] Simply put, H.R. 3159 seeks to eliminate ineffective aid programs and bolster those that work by strengthening the government’s foreign assistance monitoring and evaluation regime. In doing so, it may also save the tax payer a pretty penny.

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The New USAID Evaluation Policy is Not Getting Nearly Enough Attention

2/1/11
Nancy Birdsall

This is a joint post with Rita Perakis.

USAID’s new evaluation policy, announced by Raj Shah at a CGD event on January 19, and written about by Bill Savedoff already on this site here, is not getting nearly enough attention. It not only outlines a new policy. It amounts to fostering a new culture, of transparency and learning.

In a presentation on the new policy hosted yesterday by Carol Lancaster, Dean of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, Ruth Levine of USAID said the new policy responds to the “need to learn” and to “generate accountability”, noting there can be tension between those two.

Here are things to like about it beyond what Bill already highlighted – with some notes of caution (the “buts” below):

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