Cash on Delivery Aid E-Update August 2009
Dear Colleagues,
Seen and Heard
Last month, the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party launched a policy green paper entitled One World Conservatism: a Conservative Agenda for International Development outlining the party’s agenda for international development. The paper sets forth policies and initiatives the party plans to adopt if elected to power in the upcoming UK elections, with a focus on increasing the value of aid, enhancing wealth creation, and addressing conflict, stabilization and peacekeeping. Among other policies and initiatives outlined in the paper, we were pleased to learn that the party has announced strong support for COD Aid. They explain the essence of the approach in the paper (although particular care would have to be taken in selecting an indicator to best measure desired outcomes and avoid perverse incentives). What is especially exciting about this endorsement is the signal it sends that ideas for increasing the effectiveness of development efforts are non-partisan (the current administration in the UK Department for International Development co-hosted a seminar on COD Aid at the United Nations Financing for Development conference in Doha last December). To learn more about the announcement and references to CGD initiatives, read here.
What about…?
In response to the Conservative Party’s support of COD Aid, some thinkers and practitioners in the development community are further exploring the approach. For example, Duncan Green, the Head of Research at Oxfam GB has posed questions about the approach in a blog post announcing the Conservative green policy paper and invited a discussion about it in another post comparing COD Aid with the European Commission’s budget support offered through MDG contracts. To read responses to his blog posts, please read our responses to the first and second set of questions he posed. The second one may be of particular interest to readers curious about the similarities and differences between COD Aid and forms of general budget support.
For answers to these and other questions, please visit the COD Aid page of our website, and stay tuned for the launch of our forthcoming book Cash on Delivery: a New Approach to Foreign Aid with an Application to Primary Schooling. It will be available in October 2009. And as always, your feedback is greatly appreciated. Please send any COD Aid-related thoughts or questions to me.
Best wishes,
Ayah Mahgoub
Program Coordinator to the President
Center for Global Development